James Phillip Welch Jr. (November 18, 1940 – August 4, 2003), who grew up within the Blackfeet and A'aninin cultures of his parents, was a Native American novelist and poet.

His mother, Rosella Marie (née O'Bryan) Welch (December 14, 1914 – July 3, 2003), a stenographer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was[4] a member of the Gros Ventre (A'aninin).

[1][5] Because Welch was raised in an American Indian setting, the traditions and religion, specifically from the Blackfoot history, were the sources of his writing.

[7] Post high school he worked as a firefighter for the U.S Forest Service, as a laborer and as an Upward Bound counselor.

[13] He wanted to explore Native American life in his writing, both its good and bad aspects as people struggled with modern United States culture.

"[15] In addition to his novels, Welch co-wrote with Paul Stekler the screenplay for Last Stand at Little Bighorn, the Emmy Award-winning documentary that was part of the American Experience, shown on PBS.

Shortened but expressive, the poems arrive in an instant of thought or experience that handles seasons, animals, and the stories that reservation Native Americans tell.

[22] After writing poetry "exclusively for seven or eight years," Welch turned his attention towards fiction and his first novel, Winter in the Blood,[8] a severe narrative about a nameless youth living on a reservation in northern Montana.

Winter in the Blood (1974) attracted immediate critical interest, and, in 1977, scholars discussed the novel at the annual Modern Language Association convention.

The notes from the session were released a year after the seminar in a special symposium issue of American Indian Quarterly, edited by Peter G Beidler.

(James Welch) Both his father and brother are dead; in the midst of the novel, his deeply loved grandmother also dies.

[21] Similarly, in The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Welch portrays a half-blood who is unable to find a place in either world[6] Unlike Welch's first two novels, Fools Crow (1986) is a historical novel set in the 1870s which depicts the character Fools Crow, striving to live a classic Blackfoot life in the background of the white settlement and the U.S. government's war against Plains Indians.

The truth is that Welch's work exceeds such categorization; he joins Native American traditions and concepts with Western literary conventions to form compelling narratives.