Hugo House celebrates life and work of Indian author James Welch

By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor

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When James Welch died last year, the career of one of the West's most admired authors was cut short in the summer of its fulfillment. Only 62, Welch was pondering a sequel to his masterful work of historical fiction, "The Heartsong of Charging Elk," the story of an Oglala Sioux's struggles to sustain his identity and spirit while stranded in a place (19th-century France) and a culture (the white man's, after the end of the Indian wars). It seemed as if Welch, known for his poetic, truth-telling prose and his deep understanding of Native Americans, had nowhere to go but up.

Frances McCue, artistic director of Seattle's Richard Hugo House, had dined with Welch and his wife four months before he passed away. "I was so torn up," she said.

No one can write the books Welch might yet have written, but McCue and the staff of Hugo House, the city's center for writing and writers, are about to ensure that local readers appreciate the ones he did. This Friday and Saturday, Hugo House presents "Legacy: A Celebration of James Welch," its seventh annual "inquiry" into a topic of literature and society, in this case Welch's life and work.

	MICHAEL GALLACHER / MISSOULIAN, 2000 Author James Welch grew up on Indian reservations in Montana and his books, including "Fools Crow," often focused on Indian life.

The impressive guest list includes authors Sherman Alexie, Ivan Doig, Jim Harrison, Gretel Ehrlich, William Kittredge, Leslie Marmon Silko, Debra Magpie Earling and James Tate. Advance tickets have sold out, but tickets to single events will be available at the door. "People are coming from around the world," says McCue. The gamut of Welch admirers ranges from the assistant curator of the American literature collection at the Beineke library at Yale, where Welch's papers are housed, to scores of students from Western Washington Indian tribes.

Hugo House is a fitting place to remember Welch, who credited Richard Hugo, Seattle's famous working-class poet, with giving him a needed shove along the path to becoming a writer. And Seattle itself, with its substantial Indian population (Welch, of Blackfeet and Gros Ventre heritage, preferred the term "Indian" to Native American), is a logical locale to discuss Welch's primary theme over three decades of work: the situation of Native Americans, both historical and contemporary, ripped from their culture, living in the margins of the white man's world.

The only bar in Dixon

	Sherman Alexie

Welch was born and raised mostly on Indian reservations in Montana. He remembered his childhood with fondness; the beauty of the landscape, the rhythms of physical labor and caring for ranch stock.

Doig, author of "This House of Sky," was raised in the same part of Montana and became friends with Welch when both were in their 40s. In Welch's first book, "Winter in the Blood," Doig recognized those rhythms: "There's such a rightness and accuracy of the soul in that book. I could recognize details and situations; piling bales of hay there on the Montana Hi-Line ... Jim captured the people exquisitely."

A mediocre student, Welch recalled later that he aimed for nothing higher than becoming a mid-level bureaucrat. But a high-school teacher put Welch and his classmates through a poetry memorization regime, and Welch found himself attracted to the form.

Coming Up Legacy: A Celebration of James Welch Richard Hugo House's annual inquiry into the life and work of James Welch takes place Friday and Saturday at Hugo House, 1634 Eleventh Ave., Seattle. Advance tickets have sold out, but tickets to individual events will be available at the door. Information: 206-322-7030 or www.hugohouse.org).

He eventually found himself at the University of Montana, taking a graduate writing seminar led by Hugo. In 1994, Welch told Don Lee, editor of the Ploughshares literary journal, that his career was launched when he, Hugo and J.D. Reed challenged each other to a poetry-writing contest after several beers in a bar in the Montana town of Dixon. "The title of the poems was 'The Only Bar in Dixon,' " Welch told Lee. "Somehow we sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."

Welch published only one volume of poetry — "Riding the Earthboy 40" (Penguin Poets, 68 pp., $16), an allusion to the 40 acres his father leased on the Gros Ventre reservation. But its vital, poetic realism recalled themes in Welch's subsequent novels (he wrote one work of nonfiction, "Killing Custer," his view of the Indian wars). They include:

	Ivan Doig

• "Winter in the Blood" and "The Death of Jim Loney," which examine the dislocation of 20th century Native Americans in rural Montana.

• "Fools Crow," a historical work about an 1870 massacre of Blackfeet (mostly women and children) on Montana's Marias River. It was praised for its vivid recapitulation of the world view and spiritual life of the Blackfeet of that era.

• "The Indian Lawyer," a contemporary political novel about an up-and-coming young Indian politician who serves on the Montana state parole board and is blackmailed by a prisoner. (In real life, Welch served on the parole board for ten years.)

Welch's interest in Indian history and spiritual life reached its apotheosis in 2000's "The Heartsong of Charging Elk," a novel about an Oglala Sioux warrior who drops out of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in the late 1800s, is stranded in France and attempts to make a new life in Marseille. On Salon.com, Jonathan Miles cited the book's "expansiveness of heart and mind ... it isn't constructed with the kind of fevered language and punchy phrasings typical of what are considered 'poetic' novels. Instead, the effect is cumulative, like a voyage across the plains: You don't know the enormity of what you've seen until you've seen it all."

"Where do you come from?"

Welch was a courteous man with a wicked sense of humor — "my lasting impression was how wise and dry and funny he was," says Doig.

In 2000 Welch told this writer that he got the idea for "Charging Elk" when a Native American wannabe kept pestering him in a Marseille bar. Reluctant to brush the man off, Welch listened to his stories, eventually realizing that the story the man was telling, of a character similar to Charging Elk, was based on historical fact.

	Jim Harrison

"I adored him as a person," says McCue of Welch, whom she first met when Richard Hugo House was in its planning stages. Hugo's widow, the writer Ripley Hugo, lived down the street from Welch and his wife, Lois, then head of the English department at the University of Montana.

"He was a literary writer who was also commercially popular — funny, warm, and charming but not in a super-outgoing or impressive way," McCue says. "More in a one-to-one way — he would always seek out the person in the room who was getting the least attention."

Welch didn't wear his native origins on his sleeve. Bespectacled, with neatly trimmed hair, he wore khakis and polo shirts and resembled more the bureaucrat he might have been than the writer he had become. "He's one of the few artists I ever met who didn't have an edge of unkindness," McCue says.

Welch often told about a point in the 1960s when Richard Hugo gave him some key advice. He repeated this version of the story for the Colorado Springs Independent:

	Debra Magpie Earling

"... My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing ... [Hugo] said, 'Where do you come from?' And I said, 'Northern Montana; I was born up in Browning, and I lived there at Fort Belknap.' And he said, 'So you're Indian? Why don't you write about that?' "

Three decades later, in 2000, he could say that he had followed Hugo's advice. He told this writer that he was proudest of "the positive response from Indian audiences to all my books," despite their gritty vision of the Indian predicament. Welch noted that it had become something of a parlor game among Native Americans to guess at the identities of real people behind some of his characters, such as the politically ambitious Sylvester Yellow Calf in "The Indian Lawyer."

But finally, Welch said he didn't let himself be swayed by what his Native American readership — or anyone else — thought about his writing.

"I don't write to anybody when I'm writing," he said. Echoing his old writing teacher, Hugo, Welch said: "You really can't write to an audience — you have to write about what's in there," he said, pointing to his heart.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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