- The Narrator: A self-destructive,[5] unnamed protagonist living with his mother and grandmother. He believes himself to be Blackfeet and Gros Ventre. The narrator is disconnected from his ancestry and is a “servant to a memory of death”[7] due to unresolved trauma from the death of his father and older brother.
- First Raise: The narrator's father, from whom the narrator gets his connection to Fort Belknap. He froze to death in a barrow pit.
- Teresa: The narrator's Blackfeet and Catholic mother. She is married to Lame Bull after being widowed by her first husband, John First Raise. She is described as never having been "beautiful, [but] a woman who had grown handsome”[7] with a stout body. A proprietor of good land, Teresa is financially stable and was wealthier partner from both her marriages. Her first marriage was an unhappy one, and she describes her former husband as a “foolish man.”[2] Teresa owns the ranch they live on and has a large expanse of good land and cattle.
- Airplane Man: A flighty, white man the narrator meets after leaving Fort Belknap.Together they spend time together drinking and loitering around the airport. The Airplane Man is representative of the “American” or “white” world that the narrator is a part of, but also alienated from.[2]
- Agnes: The narrator's girlfriend. She is a Cree woman from Havre who's “scorned by the reservation people,”[7] and is believed to be married to the narrator. The narrator's grandmother harbors negative feelings toward Agnes because she is Cree. She only makes brief appearances in the novel, but her theft of the narrator's gun and electric razor engenders his journey. She is later found accompanied by her brother, Dougie.
- Mose: The narrator's older brother. He died at the age of fourteen after being hit by a car while herding cattle.
- Yellow Calf: A member of the Blackfeet tribe whom the narrator meets after burying his grandmother. He is a blind and old. In his youth he helped the narrator's grandmother survive when her tribe ostracized her. The narrator discovers that Yellow Calf is his grandfather.
- The Grandmother: An old Blackfeet woman and the narrator's grandmother. She is blind and does not speak throughout the novel. Welch writes of her dislike of Agnes because she is Cree. Given that Agnes is Cree, the grandmother believes that she is a kind of bad luck charm and internally shames the narrator for having married her. She dies before the narrator returns from Havre.
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