In his novel, Fools Crow, author James Welch undertakes to recreate in language and rhythm the thought patterns and lifestyle of a Blackfoot tribe circa 1870. The year he has chosen is on the cusp of change: between the traditional world of the Blackfeet and the abrupt changes in that world wrought by contact with the Napikwan, or white, society. Those changes are drastic, destructive and irreparable - but that is not the only interest of the storyteller. Rather, he is interested in viewing those changes through the eyes of his Blackfoot protagonist, Fools Crow.
Fools Crow sees the world as an always-harmonious whole. "Harmonious" in this sense does not mean the same as "happy" or "serene." "Integrated" might be the better synonym to describe Fools Crow's worldview. "Integrated," however, is a word that this analyst is reluctant to use: it is a word that bespeaks a technological orientation that is incompatible with the Native American conception of things as author Welch seeks to portray it. In the passage chosen here, from page 160 of the novel, virtually every sentence is harmoniously "integrated" into the Blackfoot way of thinking.
They had been in the mountains for eighteen sleeps, and now the moon was approaching the time of the first frost on the plains.
Time is considered in the most concrete of terms here: "eighteen sleeps" and "first frost." This spells out a very specific orientation. There is nothing abstract about Fools Crow's relationship with time. Time - sometimes called the "Fourth Dimension" in the civilization of Western Europe - is integrally related to the physical environment perceived by the Blackfeet. In that physicality, however, the concrete becomes the abstract: time is different in different places. Moon and plains are part of time calculations - a part of the Blackfoot world where the first frost is only "approaching"; meanwhile, "In the mountains, the quaking-leaf trees were alr...