Appreciation …

… Joy Harjo on the Poetic Lyricism and Subversive Native Storytelling of James Welch. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

It was a different world in 1974 when James Welch’s first novel, Winter in the Blood, was published. Native rights movements followed in the wake of the civil rights movement. We asserted ourselves nationally as tribal nations, as cultural peoples, as individuals: all for sovereign human rights. The Wounded Knee siege—an occupation by American Indians of protest against a tribal government manipulation, and against the United States failure to honor treaties—had just ended. It would be four years before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act would be passed, an act that would essentially legalize our cultural ex­pressions. To get that far took fortitude, sweat, belief linked to the natural instinct of justice to rise to the surface to be dealt with.