Montana

Riding the Earthboy 40, by James Welch

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Reading and rereading this sole collection of poetry by Native American novelist and poet James Welch has been an adventure. Welch is considered to be a founding author of the Native American Renaissance in literature. The book’s title refers to the land he grew up on: forty acres leased by his parents from a family named Earthboy on the Gros Ventre Reservation in Montana. It’s a prosaic explanation for a phrase that conjures so many associations.

Steeped in the Blackfeet and A’aninin cultures of his parents, he attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations before attending high school in Minneapolis. The tension between the Indigenous world and the White world can be found in these poems, but there is so much more.

I don’t pretend to understand all of them. Many of the poems seem like, as James Tate says in his introduction, a kaleidoscope of images. What comes through most clearly to me is the connection to the land, whether we’re talking about the stark power of a butte or the iron cold of winter in the far north. “Thanksgiving at Snake Butte” begins:

In time we rode that trail
up the butte as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top . . .

Welch moves around in time with the ease of a storyteller, conjuring a memory of three boys who barricaded themselves inside a grocery or finding the truth behind a photo in a hotel lobby. There is much about death and hardship and betrayal, much about violence done to and done by.

But there’s far more about the strength of tradition and community, even if sometimes that legacy must be questioned. He tells stories of individuals like Doris Horseman, Deafy, Eulynda, Bear Child, Lester Lame Bull. In “Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Hunters” he says “Comfortable we drink and string together stories” of the past, but insists

Let glory go the way of all sad things.
Children need a myth that tells them to be alive . . .

He writes of small moments that take on grandeur of “Such a moment, a life.” And there’s also much about the lonely road to yourself. From “Blue Like Death”

. . . Now you understand:
the way is not your going
but an end. That road awaits
the moon that falls between
the snow and you, your stalking home.

Moons slip through these poems and “stars/that fell into their dreams.” There are single phrases that haunt me, even when I cannot grasp the poem as a whole, such as “Man is afraid of his dark” and “No dreamer knows the rain.” “To stay alive this way, it’s hard . . .” and “goodbyes creaking in the pines” both conjure strong memories.

I will keep reading and rereading these poems, letting them sit within my consciousness, within my dreams.

Have you read the work of James Welch or of another poet of the Native American Renaissance?

Heart Earth, by Ivan Doig

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As children, we find it hard to imagine that our parents had lives before we were born. However, as we grow into the ages at which we knew them, it’s not uncommon for us to wonder what our parents’ lives were like, what they felt, what they dreamed. Perhaps we compare ourselves to them at the age we’ve now gained. Perhaps we use our own experiences and insights to illuminate what once seemed so mysterious.

Ivan Doig was hampered in doing this by his mother’s death from asthma when he was only six years old. His slim memories of her didn’t stretch very far. That changes when he inherits a collection of letters from his mother to her brother Wally while he was stationed in the Pacific during the last months of WWII. Doig was estranged from his uncle, something he regrets now that Wally is gone, so was unaware of the letters.

His mother’s words not only anchor his own memories, but give him a rare insight into her thoughts and feelings. This poignant and lyrical memoir, a prequel to his memoir This House of Sky, traces what he knows of Beneta Ringer Doig’s short life combined with his own recollections as they move from a ranch in Montana to a factory boomtown in Arizona and back again.

His evocation of the harsh reality of life in rural Montana combines love for the rugged beauty of the landscape with respect for the grit and determination of its people. The area is only just beginning to recover from the Great Depression, not yet sharing the wartime economy. They move to Arizona hoping the desert air will help Beneta’s asthma and the work improve their financial outlook.

I love the way Doig combines the larger picture of what is happening in the country with his own family’s experiences. His memories of playing war in the dusty factory town and drawing pictures of airplanes and Uncle Wally’s ship remind me of my own childhood a decade later. As writers we sometimes forget to include the social context of our stories, the political and cultural trends that help form our characters. This memoir is a good model for how to do that well.

I love, too, his description of his parents’ relationship, filtered as it is through his child’s eyes, family stories, and now his mother’s own words. They move back to Montana, hoping a higher altitude will help her asthma, and dreaming grand dreams of finally succeeding at making the land pay off. Their struggle reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilders’s family fifty years earlier each year looking ahead to finally getting a good wheat harvest to pay off their debts.

Part of why I enjoyed this audio book so much is that it is narrated by Tom Stechschulte, one of my favorite narrators, not only because of his laconic yet engaging voice, but also because his accent reminds me of my friend Frank. I relaxed into the rhythm of his speech, barely noticing the sometimes overwritten passages that might have bothered me if I’d been reading the book.

I think I’d still have enjoyed this portrait of family life in a particular time and place. I would also have loved the portrait of Beneta, a lively, determined and passionate woman whose steadfast spirit seems to capture all that is best in our image of the American West.

What memoir have you read that vividly captures a time period through the lives of ordinary people?