Sterling HolyWhiteMountain read James Welch's "Winter in the Blood" for the first time more than 10 years ago, but he remembers the impact it had on him so vividly that it's as though he finished the novel yesterday.
"It was incredible to me because I had never read fiction that was so imminently recognizable to me," said the Native writer and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
The 1974 novel follows a young Native American man living on a Montana reservation searching for a connection to his ancestors' lands while struggling with a haunting personal tragedy. The story moved him. But HolyWhiteMountain was surprised that there weren't larger conversations in the U.S. about Welch, considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance, and his work: Not when he was a student at the University of Montana, Welch's alma mater. Not when he was getting his master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa.
