In the early 1970s James Welch enters American literature as an Indian postmodernist, a fractured classicist of the West, drawing fragments from both sides of the Buckskin Curtain. Reading the likes of Cesar Vallejo and early modernists from Ezra Pound to Theodore Roethke and decreationists such as Ray Carver (through Richard Hugo's tutelage at the University of Montana in the 1960s), Welch translates the nightmarish reality of a postwar Native Fall and a postholocaustal Wasteland into contemporary Blackfeet truth-telling. The working language of tribal experience is the subject of this study. The author's approach in writing this article is to touch the texts regeneratively as with petroglyphs or codices. He wants to be as close as possible to the translated classics of Native American literatures by parsing selected readings as set texts in contemporary crossings. In this article, the author gives his comments on the construction of James Welch's poetry. (Contains 22 notes.)