The 25th-anniversary edition of "a novel that in the sweep and inevitability of its events...is a major contribution to Native American literature." (Wallace Stegner)

In the Two Medicine Territory of Montana, the Lone Eaters, a small band of Blackfeet Indians, are living their immemorial life. The men hunt and mount the occasional horse-taking raid or war party against the enemy Crow. The women tan the hides, sew the beadwork, and raise the children. But the year is 1870, and the whites are moving into their land. Fools Crow, a young warrior and medicine man, has seen the future and knows that the newcomers will punish resistance with swift retribution. First published to broad acclaim in 1986, Fools Crow is James Welch's stunningly evocative portrait of his people's bygone way of life.

The author of Fool's Crow and Indian Lawyer presents an extraordinary, evocative novel about a young Native American coming to terms with his heritage--and his dreams. "A nearly flawless novel about human life".--Reynolds Price, New York Times Book Review.

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Custer's ill-fated attack on June 25, 1876, has gone down as the American military's most catastrophic defeat. This historic and personal work tells the Native American side, poignant revealing how disastrous the encounter was for the "victors," the last great gathering of Plains Indians under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Telling of the pride and desperation of a people systematically stripped of their treaty rights, hounded from their ancestral hunting grounds, and herded into wretched reservations, Killing Custer reveals how this defining moment in American history was no more a "Last Stand" than a final celebration of waning power and freedom.

For this Bison Books edition, James Welch, the acclaimed author of "Winter in the Blood" (1986) and other novels, introduces Mildred Walker's vivid heroine, Ellen Webb, who lives in the dryland wheat country of central Montana during the early 1940s. He writes, "It is a story about growing up, becoming a woman, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, within the space of a year and a half. But what a year and a half it is " Welch offers a brief biography of Walker, who wrote nine of her thirteen novels while living in Montana.

Harriet Ryegate, the proper daughter of Massachusetts Puritans, is the first white woman to go far into the wilderness beyond the upper Missouri. With her husband, a Baptist minister, she seeks to convert the Blackfoot Indians to Christianity. But it is the Ryegates who are changed by their "journey into strangeness." Marcus Ryegate returns to Massachusetts obsessed by a beautiful Indian woman. For sermonizing about her, he pays a heavy price. Harriet, one of Mildred Walker's most fully realized characters, writes in her journal about "the effect of the Wilderness on civilized persons who are accustomed to live in the world of words." "If a Lion Could Talk" reveals the tragic lack of communication that stretches from Massachusetts to Missouri and beyond in the years before the Civil War--and the appalling heart of darkness that is close to home.

Edited by Ripley S. Hugo, Lois Welch, and James Welch, with an Introduction by William Matthews

Of Richard Hugo's Making Certain It Goes On, David Wagoner has written: "Richard Hugo spared himself (and us) no pains or joys in making the wonderful, vigorous original poems brought together in this single collection. His was and is a very important voice in modern American poetry."

Hugo was also an editor of the Yale Younger Poets series and a distinguished teacher and master of the personal essay. Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and creative life to an interview just before his death in 1982. William Matthews, also a friend of Hugo's, has written an introduction.

"A rare glimpse into the poet's creative process." —Library Journal

Raised in poverty on a Blackfeet reservation, prominent lawyer Sylvester Yellow Calf is now secure in the knowledge that his business and political success seems limitless--until a disgruntled convict, denied parole, threatens to destroy his career. A gripping suspense thriller . . . a complex psychological portrait".--San Francisco Chronicle.

Now with an introduction from celebrated poet James Tate, "Riding the Earthboy 40" is the only volume of poetry written by acclaimed Native American novelist James Welch. The title of the book refers to the forty acres of Montana land Welchas father once leased from a Blackfeet family called Earthboy. This land and its surroundings shaped the writeras worldview as a youth, its rawness resonates in the vitality of his elegant poetry, and his verse shows a great awareness of a moment in time, of a place in nature, and of the human being in context. Deeply evoking the specific Native American experience in Montana, Welchas poems nonetheless speak profoundly to all readers. With its new introduction, this vital work that has influenced so many American writers is certain to capture a new generation of readers.