Winter in the Blood Author:James Welch While neither bitter nor angry, it manages anyway to portray a country that has little to show for itself but "greed and stupidity." The values it embraces are finally those available to every American, native or otherwise -- compassion and respect for life and the living. — The story concerns a few days in the life of a 32-year-old man... more », descendant of Indians and living in two worlds, his mother's home on the reservation and the dreary bars and hotels of nearby Havre and Malta, Montana. His days and nights blending together in an alcoholic haze, he meets a deranged white man, picks up women and gets punched in the nose. Meanwhile, he is haunted by a past that includes the death of an older brother and an injury to his knee that multiple operations have not remedied.
Out of these unpromising circumstances, Welch finds the beginnings of a kind of personal salvation. By reaching back through the memory of a blind old man's act of charity, he restores the younger man's vision of himself.« less
Excellent depiction of the result of the immoral Indian wars in contemporary Indian Country. What was done to Native Americans (no different from any place Westerners decided that they could 'own' a peoples and their resources) was an outrage, and this book shows its effect. For a fuller picture, read FOOLS CROW by the same author, James Welch, himself a Native American. This book is a predecessor to WINTER IN THE BLOOD; we all know highlights of history like Wounded Knee and Custer's Last Stand (though we don't know about pieces of history from the stealing of Indian lands to using Native Americans for target practice and an early use of 'germ warfare' (giving Native Americans the blankets of those soldiers who had died of smallpox...). Too many Americans don't recognize that 'they were here first'; many don't even realize that there are ANY Native Americans living east of the Mississippi!!!
For me this book was a two-sided sword. It was a story of a young man troubled by his own past and unsecure future. He is desperately searching for himself but looking in all the wrong places until he listens to an old blind man's wisdom. Once he realizes who he is and how his life is important he admits some respect for himself and his roots. This book was written/released in 1974 and is currently becoming a movie.