Fools Crow Literary Elements

Fiction, Native American Fiction

Montana, shortly after the Civil War

The point of view is that of White Man's Dog, who later becomes Fools Crow.

The tone is defensive and worried; the mood is threatening and also has the mood of things coming to an end.

White Man's Dog is the protagonist. The Crow are the antagonists, and at the end of the novel it becomes clear that white man is also the antagonist to the entire Native American way of life

There is constant conflict between the Blackfeet and the Crow. This manifests itself in violence. White Man's Dog kills the Crow Chief by pretending to be dead and then ambushing him. There is also conflict between white man and the tribe.

Fools Crow is told by the Feather Woman that white men are coming and that there is no way the tribe as he knows it can continue. Fools Crow comes to terms with this but vows to keep oral traditions alive and to continue to teach the ways of the ancestors.

The visions that the Feather Woman shows Fools Crow all foreshadow what is going to happen to the tribe and the village. These include a smallpox outbreak and the forced assimilation of children by the white settlers.

N/A

The story alludes to historical events such as the Civil War and the colonization of the indigenous people by white settlers. One of the Feather Woman's visions alludes to the Catholic missionaries' practice of cutting off the Native American children's hair and forcing them to live as white / "westernized" children.

The imagery shows the vast landscape of Montana, which is familiar to Welch as it is where he grew up. The imagery is also very magical in that it describes dreams in a way that makes them seem that they are real and so that characters such as the Raven are given a real existence instead of a dream-like one.

Fools Crow is rather fanciful and prone to exaggeration. He does not actually pretend to be asleep but falls asleep because he has drunk too much; however, the effect remains the same and he ends up a hero because he took an intoxicated nap in the middle of a raid.

There is a parallel between the coming of the white man and the end of tribal life as Fools Crow knows it.

The tribe is the way in which all the members of the Blackfeet are described.

The novel personifies inanimate objects to give them human or godlike power. One of these objects is a stone which appears next to Fools Crow in order to tell him that his father's third wife has taken part in a purification ritual.