Fools Crow should be an interesting read for you.  Remember to mark up your book on passages you find interesting.  Make connections.

There are some key themes that recur, and it’s important to note these.  When reading a big book, it’s important to pace yourself.  If someone says “I couldn’t put it down,” then it was probably not a book worth remembering.  We know that long reading sessions usually result in readers remembering only the beginning and the end of their reading for that time.  Break it up!   Be specific in your reactions.  It’s not going to be enough that you recall events generally.  You might not have the memory of people who lived in oral cultures!  I list especially good quotes in a notebook.  (If you do this, practice putting the page in after the quote.)

The novel is a form that allows you to immerse yourself in the action.  Welch does this here, but he also recreates Indian life in the 1800s.  The term for recreating life faithfully is “verisimilitude.”  In other words, he is capturing what was.  But, he’s also working against what other writers have said, so in this sense he really is recreating things.  I hope that you find the book an easy one to “get into.”  Remember the ideas we’ve mentioned about serious literature.  How does this piece fit those criteria?

• How might Fools Crow extend or challenge these criteria?
• Does it break any easy stereotypes that popular culture holds for Indians?
• Does it strengthen or entrench any stereotypes?

Finally, the novel is all about choices.  You may find the character surprisingly modern in the sense that he knows his choices.  I think that one of Welch’s goals was to complicate our ideas about the voice of Plains Peoples.  He enriches their voices and thought processes.  Welch is pushing and pulling, getting information down “as it might have happened” and expanding our concept of what was.  Do you see how these two goals are contradictory?  He is aware of the path his people must take.  Either decision has negative consequences.  Does this make him a tragic hero in the Western literary sense–and not merely in the pop culture sense of “something bad happening”?