Education Quote by James Welch

You can hear the careful balancing act in Welch's phrasing: a blunt admission of material deprivation followed by a guarded insistence on cultural survival. "The economic piece is still missing" lands like a ledger entry, clinical and damning, and the next clause quietly assigns responsibility without naming culprits: "it's so hard to attract industry to reservations". That passive construction mirrors the way American policy often treats reservation poverty as an unfortunate weather system rather than the predictable result of jurisdictional tangles, underinvestment, and histories of dispossession.

Then Welch pivots to what can't be so easily quantified. "Spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine" risks sounding like consolation, but the intent is sharper: he refuses the colonial script that equates economic marginalization with cultural failure. The repetition in "they teach the language, they teach the traditions" is doing political work. Language and tradition aren't hobbies here; they're infrastructure, a form of sovereignty made visible in classrooms.

Context matters: Welch, a major Native novelist and essayist (Blackfeet and Gros Ventre), spent his career pushing back against romanticized narratives of the "vanishing Indian" and against pity as a substitute for justice. In pointing to tribal community colleges, he's highlighting a contemporary institution that functions as both counter-archive and future factory: preserving what was targeted for erasure while training people to remain on their own terms. The subtext is neither triumphal nor defeatist. It's a warning about what the economy still withholds, and a quiet report on what communities have rebuilt anyway.