By placing Fools Crow in the late nineteenth century, prior to the invasion of the white colonizers, it is in effect a pre-colonial text. Through the use of language and images Welch shows the reader something which they won’t have encountered before and as a result there is a feeling of dislocation. However, there is a paradox wherein Welch goes back to a pre-colonial time, yet he uses a language that was derived from colonizers. As a result Welch is forced to use a language that is not natural to the pre-colonial time in order to communicate to the modern world. This results in the reader becoming both a translator and reader, because there are still aspects to the text that a western reader cannot easily understand. It confronts the ideas of names, territories and culture so that Welch creates a world that is dually alien and similar, affecting a sense of déjà vu. The reader is forced to re-assess their position in respect to the text as it is presenting to them a foreign world and history that the western reader has not been taught to understand. In this respect Fools Crow then forces the reader to re-assess not just their position towards the text, but towards the world in which the text exists in comparison to the modern day world. Fools Crow therefore presents a pre-colonial world that affects everything the reader knows and accepts as the norm within their western world.
Within James Welch’s novel Fools Crow the names of people, animals and objects is very reflective of their position within the world. Everything is names figuratively: animals are “ears-far-apart”, guns “many-shots” and even people “Rides-at-the-door”. The argument then is whether Welch is creating this language as a way of forcing the reader deeper into Native American culture, or whether it is simply the case that the names for these things just do not translate into English and as a result they are short, descriptive and connected words. Personally, knowing that Welch does not speak the native language it is difficult to believe that all these names are true to the language. At points in the novel there is a sense of disjunction with the naming, it does not seem to totally fit. This shows the most with the “Napikwans” or “white men” who are referred to as both these names. It seems odd that for everything else only the native name applies, however the white man is referred to in both senses. It gives the idea that it is potentially a purposeful authorial slip-up that allows the reader to constantly readdress the issue of names within the text. It represents the people they know in dually a foreign sense and a similar sense. This gives the reader an idea as to where their loyalties lie within the text, it is genetically most likely with the western invaders, yet the native name allows them to distance themselves from their settler ancestors.
George Bird Grinnell wrote in 1892 that Blackfeet’s “are firm believers in dreams” and a powerful dream within Fools Crow by James Welch must be shared with the fellow tribe. From the outset the importance if dreams is shown through Fast Horse’s one on the horse raid, the failing of his dream mission leads to the failure of the horse raid and the loss of Yellow Kidney. Dreams are prophetic, seeing the fate of his people on the dress of Feather Woman; Fools Crow awakes knowing that his tribe is doomed to eventual forced assimilation. However, dreams are not just figurative images, they invade reality. This is shown through the joint dream of Fools Crow and Kill-close-to-the-lake; both are left with a perfect white stone with which to remember their dreams and the consequences had this have happened in the real world. All the events which Fools Crow sees on Feather Woman’s coat come to pass, however this can also be a result of the authors hindsight. It is this hindsight that leads many critics to argue that Fools Crow is magic realism, a text that can be both fiction and fantasy, because Welch presents the dreams as accurate through his storytelling and historical knowledge. However this has been denied on the basis of what Welch is presenting to us is not so much the story, but the insight into Native American, and specifically Blackfeet, culture. Although the story is integral to this insight, it is not what is most prominent within the book. As a result the dreams are as vital to both the story and the culture and this makes the argument of magic realism irrelevant when thinking about what Welch is trying to present to a western readership.
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