Winter in the Blood by James Welch 🔖🔖🔖

First published January 1, 1974

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Literary Awards: None, though Louise Erdrich has stated this needs to be given a Pulitzer Prize. " ... since no Pulitzer Prize was awarded in 1974, the year Winter in the Blood was published, I think it should be posthumously awarded to James Welch for that book." (source)

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The narrator of this beautiful, often disquieting novel is a young Native American man living on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana. Sensitive and self-destructive, he searches for something that will bind him to the lands of his ancestors but is haunted by personal tragedy, the dissolution of his once proud heritage, and Montana's vast emptiness. (source: goodreads)

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This is a beautiful telling of the listlessness created by society and racism, contrasted so clearly with still-living ancestors who had to fight to survive white man and starvation and being removed from ancestral lands. 

I was looking for more meaning in the narrator's searching, more about whether or not he became bound to the land or his ancestors. 

If this were popular today, it would be highly challenged due to violence, sexual behaviors, discussion of body parts, and some crude words describing such parts. Also because it's about Indigenous people, but that's another soap box.