James Welch

Background

James Phillip Welch Jr. was born on November 18, 1940, in Browning, Montana. He was an Indian poet and novelist, considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance. Welch Jr. was raised on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Indian reservations, leaving his state only to attend high school in Minneapolis, where his father used to work as a welder. Welch Jr. was far from being a good student and didn’t read much besides comic books and the occasional Western. In high school, things took a turn. A teacher required the class to memorize a poem every week, so Welch Jr. began to write his own.

Not knowing what else to do after transferring to the University of Montana, Welch Jr. decided to apply for an M.F.A. degree in creative writing. His grades were below average but he got accepted due to the low demand. One day, under the influence of a few drinks, he and his fellow poet friend Richard Hugo challenged one another to write a poem about the bar in Dixon where they were. They decided to set a deadline of two weeks and pledged that the poems had to be published simultaneously in a magazine. They sent them out to “The New Yorker” on a fluke, which would print all three poems in the same issue. Thus began Welch Jr.’s improbable career as a poet.

Welch Jr. was an internationally acclaimed writer. It was part of his day-to-day basis to illuminate the richness of his culture and the heartache of its dislocation. He translated Indian culture and made any Welch Jr. work a valuable resource for research in literary, American, and Native American studies. To celebrate Welch Jr. is to celebrate our own culture.