The Hermeneutics of Starvation: Alienation, Reading, and Fish in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood

Abstract: This essay proposes that James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974) considers what it might mean to perform interpretation in decrepit situations. To do this it traces various forms of lack in the novel and their conjunction with practices of reading or comprehension, but it especially focuses on the novel’s depiction of scarcity with regards to an important part of the Blackfeet/Gros Ventre diet: fish. The essay argues that the novel’s dearth of fish— among other destitute conditions—forces characters to interpret their situations through what I call the “hermeneutics of starvation.” I suggest that this form of reading, which I base on the statements of the book’s elder Yellow Calf, could characterize the literature of the Native American Renaissance more generally.