Alan R. Velie

Winter in the Blood as Comic Novel

If my students are any indication, many white American readers expect any novel written by an Indian, about an Indian protagonist who meets hard times, to be a bitter protest about white oppression of noble red men. Although House Made of Dawn and Winter in the Blood are by Indians, about Indians who are pretty well buffeted by life, they are not protest novels, though they are often read that way.1 In my opinion to read them as protest novels is to reduce complex books into simplistic melodramas based on racial sterotypes of noble savage and white oppressor. It seems to me that there is something condescending and even bigoted about not allowing blacks and Indians to determine their own attitudes about life in America. Too often we expect, even demand, that they be furious with whites and concentrate their efforts on reviling them. Black poet Al Young ridicules this attitude: