Firewater Labels and Methodologies

Abstract

PLAIN JOHNSON HUNKERS over the wads of paper labels he peeled from seven bottles of cheap beer deep in cigarette smoke at the back of the bar. From a short distance he seems to be folded in the narrow booth, at the neck and stomach, a racial monad with swollen fingers. His bare elbows are thick, burnished from the tilt of his trunk, but there is nothing plain about this mixedblood tribal man who resisted social conversion in a foster home and saved his soul from the welfare state. Plain is a high altitude window washer in the afternoon, at night he drinks beer in a tribal bar, and in the morning he writes poems and studies literature at a small private college. Seventeen years earlier, when he was nine and known as Samuel American Horse, he was removed, like the tribes from their places on the earth to reservations, from his mother because she was accused of being an alcoholic. Samuel, and his two sisters, were separated and placed in foster homes for adoption. Samuel assumed a new surname and deserted the fosterage of seven white families in six years; be resisted the sentimental gestures of the new welfare missionaries; and he refused to reveal his tribal name in public. Plain declared his foster nickname in a racist culture; a name he claims he will bear until his mother returns and he locates his sisters, an unusual protest. Plain peels the label on one more bottle. The United States Corps of Engineers contracted for the construction of the Garrison Dam to hold back the Missouri River in