SOURCE: Vangen, Kate. “Thirteen Lumpy Stones for Luck and Friendship: Influences on James Welch's Poetry.” Wooster Review, no. 8 (spring 1988): 157-67.

In the following essay, Vangen considers the methods by which Riding the Earthboy 40 emphasizes “the devastations that comprise much of Indian history.”

With the publication of James Welch's (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre) third novel, Fools Crow—a fictionalized account of the mid-nineteenth-century conflicts between Blackfeet people and Euroamericans, American Indian influences apparent in his earliest work become all the more evident.¹ Many readers, however, probably do not realize that Welch began his writing career as a poet. His first and only volume of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40, in fact, won awards when it was published by Harper and Row in 1974.² In many of those early poems, irony and satire are used to portray Indian life, and indicate the anxiety of influences Welch faced as an Indian writer. But what...