Missoulian file Born in Browning and raised on the Fort Belknap Reservation, James Welch writes about the American Indian experience in a refreshingly honest manner.

57. James Welch

"Sylvester glanced over at the white couples and his heart sank. Shelley had made a joke of it, but there was too much truth in what she said. Sylvester had been stared at enough to sort it out. There were the people who recognized him from his basketball days; then there were the ones who looked at him because he was an Indian, usually dressed up in a fancy suit, and they thought him a novelty; and finally there were the ones who stared at him and hated him because he was an Indian. Now he was an Indian free and easy with a lovely blond woman. Sylvester could recognize the ones who represented a threat and he was now looking right at them."

By MICHAEL MOORE of the Missoulian

James Welch speaks for 6.3 percent of Montanans. He tells stories too often ignored, about people too often sent to society's margins.

Following the writer's maxim, he writes what he knows. And what Welch knows, first and foremost, is Indians.

The son of a Blackfeet father and Gros Ventre mother, Welch was born in 1940 in Browning and reared primarily on the Fort Belknap Reservation. Even as a boy, Welch imagined himself a writer, without really knowing what that choice meant. When he came to the University of Montana to study creative writing under the poet Dick Hugo, his poetry, such as it was, was full of sweeping mountains and wheeling seagulls over an ocean he'd never seen.

After a number of weeks, during which Welch distinguished himself by being a "warm body," Hugo pulled him into his office for some private counsel. Here's Welch's description of the meeting: " 'You don't know anything about poems, do you?' I sat for a moment trying to think up a defense for my sorry attempts in class, but nothing came to me, so I said, 'No.' To my surprise, Hugo said, 'That's OK. What do you know about?' When I couldn't answer that question, he said, 'Where did you grow up?' I could at least answer that and I did. Hugo, in his infinite wisdom and generosity, said, 'Go ahead, write about the reservation, the landscape, the people.' "

That was more than 30 years ago, and Welch is still at it, answering the question that often spurs fine fiction: Where did I come from, and what does that mean?

Writing primarily about the Blackfeet, Welch has focused on an experience that redefines tragic. In his novels – "The Death of Jim Loney," "Winter in the Blood," "Fools Crow" and "The Indian Lawyer" – Welch has ushered the Indian experience into the mainstream without sentimentalizing it and, conversely, without taking too broad a brush to the depravities visited on Indians by whites.

As much as anything, Welch's books – "Fools Crow" and "Killing Custer" in particular – have scuttled the stereotypes that whites have erected around Indians.

Speaking of the Blackfeet in "Fools Crow," Welch said this: "They weren't particularly noble Indians. They weren't particularly bad Indians. They were human beings. That's really what I wanted to get across, the idea that historical Indians were human beings. They weren't cliches."

And neither is Welch's work. He has won awards from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Association and the Los Angeles Times, and in 1997 received the Native Writer's Circle's lifetime achievement award. Perhaps more importantly, he has given lasting voice to stories and traditions that passed by mouth for centuries, and now will never be lost.