Connie A. (jazzysmom) -
Helpful Score: 3
Fools Crow is a super read if you like anything to do with the Indian culture. This novel may be the closest we will ever come in literature to an understanding of what life was like for a western Indian. This was a wonderful and quite fast read for a book of 391 pages. It was like i had just sat down and immediately became engrossed and i was half way thru the book before i knew what time it was. Easy read with lots and lots of info on culture. The story is quite beautiful.
Carol F. (cactusflowerwomen) reviewed Fools Crow (Contemporary American Fiction) on + 628 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1
This is a great book to read to get a good look at Indian history, culture, spiritual beliefs, all told from he viewpoint of the indian. The tribes we\ere in the Montana Territory and most were blackfeet, in particular the Pikuni tribe. A good read.
James Welch was born in Browning, Mt, the headquarters of the Blackfeet Nation. His book gives us Napikwans an insight into the way the Blackfeet of the middle to late 1800's lived and thought. It uses their thoughts written in the English language to express their history and culture. Sticky mouths are black bears, long legs are elks, Blackhorns are buffalo, for examples. I found their religion as told by Mr Welch, a native Blackfoot, interesting and informative. If you want a true story of the Blackfeet, read this book. I enjoyed it and recommend it.
Lynda C. (Readnmachine) reviewed Fools Crow (Contemporary American Fiction) on + 1474 more book reviews
This leisurely-paced and character-driven novel tells the story of a young Blackfeet man coming of age at the time when his tribe's way of life is slipping away from them as white settlers steadily encroach on their Montana homelands. Though Welch does not take the timeline as far as the Little Big Horn battle, it looms on the horizon.
Although to overall sweep of the novel is tinged with the foreshadowing of the end of the great tribal plains society, the individual scenes are often sweet, quiet, domestic ones. Violence is also there, as matter-of-fact as the rising and setting of the sun. His characters follow the traditional ways, or depart from them to their grief, and each one works out his own destiny inside the circle of seasons.
Overall, it's a melancholy read, but a beautiful one.
Although to overall sweep of the novel is tinged with the foreshadowing of the end of the great tribal plains society, the individual scenes are often sweet, quiet, domestic ones. Violence is also there, as matter-of-fact as the rising and setting of the sun. His characters follow the traditional ways, or depart from them to their grief, and each one works out his own destiny inside the circle of seasons.
Overall, it's a melancholy read, but a beautiful one.
"A novel that in the sweep and inevitability of its events, in the human persuasiveness and variety of its characters, in the scrupulous authenticity of its cultural reconstruction, and in the sheer flow and strength of its prose, is a major contribution to Native American Literature." - Wallace Stegner
