.
CONTENTS
SPECIAL ISSUE: IN HONOR OF SIMON J. ORTIZ
3
Introduction: "A Spring Wind Rising . . . Listen. You Can Hear It"
SUSAN BERRY BRILL DE RAMÍREZ
9
Excerpt from "Children of Fire, Children of Water: Memory
and Trauma"
SIMON J. ORTIZ
12
An Interview with Simon Ortiz: July 14, 1988
DAVID DUNAWAY
20
Simon Ortiz and the Lyricism of Continuance: "For the Sake
of the People, For the Sake of the Land"
ROGER DUNSMORE
29
Maps of the Universe
SARAH ANN WIDER
34
"The story goes its own way": Ortiz, Nationalism, and the Oral
Poetics of Power
DAVID L. MOORE
47
Poetry Can Be All This: All of You, All of Me, All of Us
JOY HARJO
51
The Stories He Lives By
EVELINA ZUNI LUCERO
vi
54
SAIL • WINTER 2004 • VOL. 16, NO. 4
"It was that Indian": Simon Ortiz, Activist Poet
LAURA TOHE
57
The Challenge of Speaking First
JONI ADAMSON
61
"Story Speaks for Us": Centering the Voice of Simon Ortiz
P. JANE HAFEN
68
A "Touching Man" Brings Aacqu Close
KENNETH M. ROEMER
79
Resistance and Continuance through Cultural Connections
in Simon J. Ortiz's Out There Somewhere
PATRICE HOLLRAH
89
Morning Star Song
KIMBERLY ROPPOLO
93
The Work That Must Be Done
DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE
96
Revisiting the Regenerative Possibilities of Ortiz
MATTHEW E. DUQUÈS
99
Tribute to Simon J. Ortiz
ROBIN RILEY FAST
101
Prairie Songs and Poor Prayers
KATHRYN W. SHANLEY
103
Telling Our Daughters
ROBERT M. NELSON
108
Many Thanks, Simon, for a Wonderful Gift
CARTER REVARD
111
Contributor Biographies
Special Issue
In Honor of Simon J. Ortiz
Volume 16, Number 4
GUEST EDITOR, SUSAN BERRY BRILL DE RAMÍREZ
.
introduction
“A Spring Wind Rising . . . Listen. You
Can Hear It”
susan berry brill de ramírez
This special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures is devoted to
the work of Simon J. Ortiz. It is a gift and an honor to serve as this
issue’s guest editor. For me, since first hearing Native American literature over twenty years ago at a reading in Gallup and first studying native literatures in classes taught by Luci Tapahonso at the University of
New Mexico, Simon Ortiz’s work has been a constant focal point in my
experience with and understandings of Native American and, more
broadly, American and global literary traditions. I see Simon’s work
within a global literary tradition of writers who offer us their words and
lives as a lens or light by which we can better perceive and understand
what it means to be human during times when far too many have forgotten: writers such as Sophocles, Solomon in his Song, Shakespeare,
Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, William Carlos Williams, Wittgenstein, Lorine Niedecker, Edmund Jabés, Leslie Marmon Silko, Buchi
Emecheta, and Simon J. Ortiz. As Ortiz reminds us over and over again,
what we need to know is actually very simple and, thereby, profound in
that simplicity: “He thought about stone, water, fire, and air. / And he
had to believe it was possible—some men / didn’t know or had forgotten.”1
Three common elements pervade the work of each of these writers: a commitment to this world and the betterment of people’s lives,
a sense of the sonorous harmony and power of orality and storytelling, and a conscious respect of and engagement with the sacred in
its various manifestations. Each of these writers brings the wisdom
and history of their respective ancestral traditions interwoven with
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sail . winter 2004 . vol. 16, no. 4
the joy and beauty of creation. Whether it is Lorine working scrubbing floors while producing remarkable poetry in the traditions of
Dickinson and Williams; or Sophocles creating Oedipus at Colonnus
as an eighty-year-old man; Paul Laurence Dunbar and Buchi Emecheta, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, crossing lines of race and gender to cry their people’s hopes and suffering; or Solomon, Wittgenstein, and Jabés articulating their diverse Judaic traditions with humor
and pain; in the work of each of these souls, there is a magic here that
their readers can touch, that has oral texture, that in its deepest sense is
ennobling in its reminder of our humanity in this world of ours. This is
what Ortiz’s writing does, too. In his recent poetry collection Out There
Somewhere, there is an Acoma poem whose English language title is
“This Is the Way Still We Shall Go On” in which Ortiz tells us: “It is
necessary to look back to the past. / Gazing we will see how our
peoples in the past lived, / . . . / We who are living today, that is what
we are to be guided by”;2 and a few pages later in “It Is No Longer the
Same as It Was in the Olden Days”: “We must continue to be. / It is
necessary. / With courage [. . .] / That is the way still we must keep on
going.”3
This issue of SAIL begins with new work by Ortiz, an excerpt from
a larger manuscript. It is important to begin with Simon’s own words
and with his offering that speaks of the desecration and destruction
of “Three round kivas. Walls of stone. / . . . the uncovered homesite. /
Kaamah-tsaishruuh. A sacred place”4—a destruction that paved the
way for the very interstate highway that so many of us traveled on our
ways to Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico. An earlier
yet previously unpublished interview with Ortiz by University of
New Mexico Professor David Dunaway is next. Although this interview is from 1988, it is especially helpful in juxtaposition with the
essays and tribute pieces that follow. I decided to begin and end this
collection with two elders in the field of native literary study: Roger
Dunsmore and Carter Revard. The first three essays by Dunsmore,
Sarah Ann Wider, and David L. Moore were first presented, along
with a reading by Simon, at the MLA session devoted to Simon’s
work. This session initiated the work towards this issue, and it is fitting that these essays, too, come first.
Ramírez: Introduction
5
The next selections turn to the early years that led to what has
been called the Native American Literary Renaissance. Joy Harjo,
Evelina Zuni Lucero, and Laura Tohe share moving stories from those
times, powerfully articulating the crucial role Simon Ortiz played in
the development of the burgeoning field of native literatures and in
the lives of so many native writers. From Arizona, Joni Adamson
speaks directly to Simon’s role in his commitment to environmental
justice issues in the southwest. From these voices, the next set of
longer essays by literature scholars follows. P. Jane Hafen begins this
group with an essay that emphasizes the importance of “Centering
the Voice of Simon Ortiz” within his tribal and, more broadly, Pueblo
historical and cultural traditions. Kenneth M. Roemer turns specifically to Acoma Pueblo (Aacqu) in an essay that, like Dunsmore’s,
looks at the building of a wall, its care and deliberation (which contrasts sharply with the destruction of those walls and kivas in “Children of Fire, Children of Water”). This group of essays ends with
Patrice Hollrah’s piece that places Ortiz’s “resistance and continuance” within a cultural framework.
The next three pieces offer the voices of a younger generation of
writers and scholars. With her beautiful and poignant poem “Morning Star Song,” Kimberly Roppolo (one of the new generation of native writers and scholars) honors Ortiz’s past and continuing legacy.
Her poem is followed by a tribute from Daniel Heath Justice who
speaks as a young native colleague of Simon’s at the University of
Toronto. Dartmouth graduate student Matthew E. Duquès writes of
the regenerative power of Ortiz’s work and its vital importance for his
high school students on the Navajo reservation. The final grouping
begins with poetry scholar Robin Riley Fast who echoes Duquès in
her tribute to Simon’s commitment to “the restorative potential in
the human spirit and in the natural world.” This issue concludes with
three scholars who have given much to further the field of native literary study, Kathryn Shanley, Robert Nelson, and Carter Revard. Kate
Shanley reminds us that in Simon’s writing, we are offered stories that
move beyond indigenous survival and towards a sacred “space of
grace and forgiveness.” Both Nelson and Revard also show us the transforming power of Simon’s work that touches people’s lives, deeply
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and generationally: each turning to the origins of life in the formation and birth of a child.
In the pages that follow, each reader is invited as a listener-reader
to step into the worlds engendered by Simon Ortiz’s life and work. As
the centripetal force within this issue, each essay, story, and poem interweaves with the others as part of the larger, unfolding story of what
I see as a categorically radical shift in the present and future of written
literature, literary scholarship, and higher learning. Simon reminds
all of us over and over again of our crucial responsibilities to our
communities and to recognize that our communities include the
whole world, that our work must be integrally committed to the betterment of human lives, that we must be anxiously concerned with
our times and each other. Art for art’s sake has no place here. Ivory
towers are irrelevant. New paradigms are emerging. The scholarship
herein is important, not only because it helps us to understand
Simon’s work more fully, which it does, but also because it shows us
the future of an engaged and integrally conversive scholarship. Simon
reminds us of the importance of work that is transforming, and all of
the writers in this issue, too, do so through their respective poetic,
storied, and essayed insights into the life and work of Simon J. Ortiz.
Each piece is one story and part of the larger story that unfolds itself
throughout these pages and, more importantly, throughout the writing and life of Simon. This is scholarship that steps varyingly outside
the more staid and distanced critical theories of “the western tradition.” Each offering herein speaks with an intersubjective voice that
speaks from knowledge that is both reasoned and heartfelt and,
thereby, informed by the deep quality of Simon’s storytelling voice
that strengthens and encourages us all toward a creative writing and
scholarship that is integrally invested in the good of the world.
Ortiz speaks the realities of one Acoma man’s, of indigenous
people’s, and possibly all people’s lives and struggles in the face of
colonizing oppression and genocide that is horrifically relevant on a
global scale today. Simon’s writing is poetry for his Acoma and
Pueblo people. It is poetry for all native peoples. It is poetry for indigenous peoples worldwide. It is poetry for us all. Simon is remarkable as
a poet, a storyteller, an educator, and an activist. When I look at the
Ramírez: Introduction
7
range of his writing, I see the future of global literatures . . . and also
the glimmer of new directions for philosophy, history, psychology,
sociology, and folklore and language studies. It makes poignant sense
that, as Alexie points out, Simon has been understudied and underappreciated. Simon’s work, both ancient and new, opens up worlds
that few in academia today are prepared to understand and evaluate
clearly. In this issue of SAIL, nineteen scholars and writers help us to
understand the place of Simon J. Ortiz at the beginning of this
twenty-first century CE.
I would like to thank all those whose voices and persons and words
inform this issue: scholars and writers alike. I would also like to thank
all those whose support helped move this volume forward and whose
voices are in these pages in spirit if not in writing: Alex Kuo, Sherman
Alexie, Ellen Arnold, Dean Rader, Gwen Griffin, Kimberly Blaeser,
Gordon Henry, Philip Red Eagle, Robin Riley Fast, Bernard Hirsch,
Joyzelle Godfrey, Kate Winona Shanley, Deborah Miranda, Ginny
Carney, Susan Scarberry-García, Janice Gould, Jeff Berglund, Ron
Welburn, Andrew Wiget, as well as those at the SAIL helm and main
office, editor Malea Powell, L. Rain Cranford, Mark Wojcik, and Tina
Urbain, and Mary Johnson for her thorough copyediting. Evelina
Zuni Lucero provided additional editorial assistance with final changes
to the introduction. I thank you all. Finally, as a Bahá’i, it is important
that I thank God for being able to be of service in bringing this issue
of SAIL together. This introduction concludes with a selected bibliography of Simon Ortiz’s published volumes over the years.
notes
1. Ortiz, After and Before the Lightning, 38.
2. Ortiz, Out There Somewhere, 92.
3. Ortiz, Out There Somewhere, 98.
4. Ortiz, “Excerpt from ‘Children of Fire, Children of Water: Memory
and Trauma,’” SAIL 16.4 (Winter 2004): 9–11.
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simon j. ortiz: a selected bibliography
The Good Rainbow Road. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2004.
Out There Somewhere. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.
From Sand Creek. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000; New York: Thunder’s
Mouth, 1981.
Men On the Moon: Collected Short Stories. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.
Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1998.
Telling and Showing Her: The Earth, The Land. Buffalo, NY: Just Buffalo, 1995.
After and Before the Lightning. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1994.
Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People. Los Angeles: PBS Home
Video, 1992. Narrative by Simon Ortiz.
Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.
The People Shall Continue. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press,
1988.
A Good Journey. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1984, 1977.
Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. Tsaile, AZ:
Navajo Community College P, 1983.
Fightin’: New and Collected Stories. Chicago: Thunder’s Mouth, 1983.
Blue and Red. Acoma, NM: Pueblo of Acoma P, 1982.
A Poem is a Journey. Bourbonnais, IL: Pternandon P, 1981.
A Ceremony of Brotherhood, 1680-1980. Ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Simon J.
Ortiz. Albuquerque, NM: Academia, 1981.
Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land. Albuquerque:
INAD—Native American Studies, University of New Mexico, 1980.
Song, Poetry, Language: Expression and Perception. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College P, 1978.
Going for the Rain: Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Naked in the Wind. Pembroke, NC: Quetzal-Vihio P, 1971.
Excerpt from “Children of Fire, Children
of Water: Memory and Trauma”
simon j. ortiz
Three round kivas. Walls of stone.
Upright and perpendicular to sky.
And to the land sloping away
to the east where flood waters
from Kaweshtima flowed.
Dirt under our shoes.
Dirt on our hands.
We looked at the uncovered homesite.
Kaamah-tsaishruuh. A sacred place.
Holy homeplace. Stone walls.
I didn’t know what to say to Larry.
What could I say?
What could I explain?
Duwaa-sha-ah haatse.
This is our land.
He was four years old in 1960.
I was nineteen years old in 1960.
This is our land.
An uncle guide, advisor, counselor.
Protector and teacher.
What could I say?
What is the explanation then?
Is there any explanation possible?
A highway is to be built through here.
Our ancestors lived here long ago.
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Baabahtitra eh Naanahtitra.
Grandmothers and Grandfathers.
They built the kivas and the walls.
Now another people have come.
They have gained right of way.
Soon the kamaah-tsaishruuh will vanish.
What kind explanation is that?
In 1999 my lawyer son could have gone to prison upon conviction of
a felony charge he was facing. For assaulting another Indian lawyer
with a knife. There was alcohol involved. You’ve heard it before. It is
an old story. It has become a classic story. Yes, you’ve heard it before.
I’m sure you have. It is Indian fighting Indian. It is a colonized man
fighting another colonized man. Like I said, it’s an old story. When the
legal and judicial process was ended and things had settled down, my
son came “home” to speak with his mother and me. Afterward he
returned to his job in Washington, D.C., and tried to put the sundered pieces of his life together again. Soon I received a letter from
him, saying, “I want to come home.” It was a plaintive, simple statement: I want to come home. The plaintive and simple statement became a question for me: Where and what is home anymore? For a
Native American, where and what is “home” anymore? Before the reservation system was put into place by the federal government, Indigenous lands were homelands. That was where home was. It was easy
to know where home was. But after Indigenous lands were designated
reservations, the idea of home changed. The plaintive and simple
statement became an ambiguous question: Has the concept of
“home” changed so much for Indian people they do not know what
they are talking about? And further, it has become the question:
What’s home anymore?
My four-year-old nephew Larry stood by the open pit of the Indigenous “ruin,” looking into the circular kivas and staring at the upright stone walls that had been violated by the researchers who
preceded the construction engineers. And that would soon be obliterated by the interstate highway construction. Piles of sand, clay,
crumbled stone, and tiny bits of shattered pottery shards lay to the
Ortiz: Excerpt from “Children of Fire, Children of Water”
11
side in mounds. Archeological and anthropological researchers had
been there from the local university. The mounds were their debris.
As his teacher, adviser, counselor, protector, what could I say to my
beloved nephew Larry? What could I explain? This is the land of our
ancestor grandmothers and grandfathers. Therefore this land is our
land too. Could I say that? Should I have said that? Could I explain
and identify who tore open the kaamah-tsaishruh, the sacred place?
Who could I say gave the permission for the destruction to happen?
What was the authority cited when the walls of the ancient homesite
were destroyed? What kind of explanation would that have been?
note
“Children of Fire, Children of Water” is a collaborative, dialogic creative
nonfiction project currently being written by Simon J. Ortiz, University of
Toronto, and Gabriella Schwab, University of California Irvine.
An Interview with Simon Ortiz
July 14, 1988
david dunaway
simon ortiz: My family comes from the Acoma Pueblo reservation
west of Albuquerque and, specifically, at McCartys on the New Mexico
state maps, right off the Interstate 40.
david dunaway: Did you grow up in Acoma?
so: I grew up in the Acoma Pueblo community, at McCartys.
McCartys is one of the villages, the other village is Acomita, and other
additional small settlements at Anzac and some newer ones. I grew
up there for the first twenty years of my life.
dd: So what was McCartys and the Acoma community like in the
’40s and ’50s?
so: It was the war, World War II, of course, and the life there was
sort of on the edge of something new happening. The war was going
on, I remember that there were young men who were uniform, going
off somewhere, to California, wherever that was, and there were trains
passing on the railroad, which runs about a mile north of my mother’s house, and there were always these war things going up and
down, west and east, and things happening like that.
Acoma and McCartys, the little village, was very small at that time,
and it didn’t seem to be any more world out there except what was
passing through. It was a very small community and I grew up within
the community which was family, clan, grandparents, mother, and
father. Although, obviously, changes that had been taking place for
many, many decades and in the past two hundred or so years—three
hundred or so years—was very much impressioned upon me as a
Dunaway: An Interview with Simon Ortiz
13
child of the 1940s. There was something going on, mysterious, and, of
course, somewhat fearful.
I found that when I started school that this world that was outside
of Acoma and McCartys was so different, because most of that world
and the exposure that I had to it was through reading—what I read,
anyway, in the pages in the schoolbooks—was not really the Acoma
and the Indian world in general. It was always some white-picketfence in the West, or perhaps in California. When I was very young,
things were changing so fast. The atomic bomb was exploded right at
the beginning of my life. I was born in 1941, right at the beginning of
that war. And in 1945 and the changes that were wrought by the war,
and especially the bomb, you know, are a part of the history that I was
living. I didn’t really know it, of course, as a child, just that it was happening. I think that the changes were exemplified by school, by the
railroad, and the men, leaving. My father was a railroad worker. I didn’t
learn any English until I went to school at McCartys’s day school, which
was then a BIA federal school, when I was six, seven years old.
dd: Was it a rural environment?
so: Very much so. Pueblo Indian people traditionally are agricultural people, cultivating the land with the traditional crops of corn,
chile, pumpkin, beans, squash, those kinds of things. Bottom lands
along the Rio de San Jose, which originates in the Zuni Mountains,
were used for the growing of these crops, and then dry-farming in the
Acoma valley, which is twelve more miles to the south, which is the
traditional home—mother home site—of the Acoma people.
I was born actually at the old Albuquerque Indian Hospital, here,
in Albuquerque, and from there on I lived at home until I was about
nineteen, when I went away to school—college—for the first time. In
a couple of those years, because my father was a railroad worker for
the Santa Fe Railroad, we lived in California, I think, when I was very
young, when I was a baby. And then later on, when I was in the fifth
grade, I remember, we went to Skull Valley, to go to school for one
year. And then there were, I think, several occasions, briefly, when we
went to California again, to be with my father. A lot of the employment for wage income was for the railroad in the 1940s.
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So, after nineteen years of age, I’ve been away from the Acoma
homeland, until last year, in 1987, when I returned to live at McCartys.
Much of my work as a writer, as a teacher, takes me away from home,
obviously, but there is always, and has always been, I think, with all the
Acoma people, and, perhaps, with all the Indian people in the country,
a real connection and a real sense of home, and it’s always with the
community, as a society and the community as a people, and land, the
environment, cultural, spiritual, political, social, economic, and so forth.
dd: Do you recall any groups of artists that you particularly enjoyed listening to when you were young?
so: My father was a singer, in the Acoma tradition. He made songs
and he sang songs that were from the ageless tradition. My mother
also was a singer; she sang, also Acoma songs that are part of stories,
hunting songs with my father—hunting prayer songs when my father
would go hunting in the fall time. And she also sang church music.
The Catholic church, of course, is very prominent in the pueblo communities, and I learned church songs, the Catholic ritual, the Gregorian chants back when. And, over the radio, I remember songs—
early Elvis, you know, of course that was later on in the mid-fifties or
so. But songs, popular music. Jimmy Dorsey, you know. Tommy
Dorsey, those kinds. And, of course, since my sisters were teenagers,
you know, they sang songs that they learned from the radio. He would
sing railroad songs, folk songs from Jimmy Rogers or older folk songs,
set into the context of the Acoma cultural life.
dd: Could you tell us a little bit about Acoma storytelling?
so: The tradition of storytelling is part of the whole general oral
tradition. The oral tradition is not necessarily only stories, but stories
of say, the olden times, or another time before us, or the generation
before our present ones. . . . The oral tradition also includes advice
and counsel, that is, those items told to you by your elders to ensure
that you are living responsibly, that the relationships among family
members are correct and according to Acoma ways of life. There’s
also, of course, stories told to children to make sure that they’re attentive to the principles or philosophies of the Acoma, and historical
stories that include a look at the Spanish civilization or settlement or
colonization that occurred.
Dunaway: An Interview with Simon Ortiz
15
Essentially I think everything is story—in the sense that the tradition out of which poetry comes, and song comes, is like the story of
the life of a people. That is, the culture survives because of the story of
its birth, and goes on into its development and goes on to the end of
a cycle. One’s personal life, for example, begins with birth, although
his personal story is only a continuation of a larger story; joined in
with that, it becomes a part of it and helps to continue it. The sense of
a story for me is important at least in two respects. One is that it’s a
kind of a lifeline that connects the individual, me, back to that larger
story. Two, it also expresses for American Indian people something
very distinct, in terms of culture, language, kind of social structure,
traditions, and so forth.
Stories in terms of what is written down—printed literature—is
usually seen as very authoritative and defined and scripted according
to certain rules. The oral tradition, which is the source of myth, of
mythology, is a sense of the spiritual reality that all life is quite different. The oral tradition, in a sense, insists upon that affirmation of life.
The Western culture’s written literature is a kind of definition of life
rather than the essence of life, which the oral tradition is, so that the
mythology is more than just, say, legends or tales or stories that have
limited definition. Rather, it’s literature—I’ll go ahead and use literature to refer to these oral traditional texts—rather, this kind of literature has a spiritual dimension that doesn’t necessarily, say, only evoke
a creative source, but rather includes that creative source with what
one’s endeavors are as a human being.
Poetry is a part of that story as a form of the oral tradition. I think
that the oral tradition lends itself very well to the narrative form of
story, or the narratives that stories are. And poetry is certainly included within prayer and song, a sense of spirituality, a sense of being
connected so inexplicably and forever to that whole general story of
life as we live and know it and practice it. I think poetry is essentially
story or language, language being an energy that forms us and also at
the same time is the essence of how we come into being. Poetry being
a part of language, then, is a part of this story of how we come into
being.
In other words, the stories of this literature, of the mythic propor-
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tion, verify my existence right now. If I know the story and accept the
story of the creation as told, as spoken, in that creative act of many
millions and millions, trillions of years ago when life began as atomic
activity. . . . They’re true. And, if I accept them as true—when I accept
them as true, then my existence is true. The literature, even the great
masterworks of Western literature, has an entirely different purpose.
It’s more to define and even to limit it. Yet I think the oral tradition
out of which the present-day texts, ceremonial texts, come from, really lets us realize ourselves, absolutely and completely.
Language has a kind of neutrality at its very essence. There are different Indian languages in New Mexico: Navajo, and several pueblo languages spoken. These are the languages that were here when the
Spanish conquest settlement introduced European language and then
later English and then others. Obviously people’s language changes as
they learn it, but I think that values and perspectives continue as long
as there’s not, say, political force and domination that begins to limit
it.
The use of English as a political colonizing tool—weapon—was
very useful to the settlement after the 1800s, in this part of the Southwest. This of course has changed the native, indigenous cultures of
the United States Indian America. There are many Indian people out
there who are multilingual. People that are at Acoma, at Santo Domingo, at Taos, at Jemez, who are, say, ceremonial, spiritual elders,
leaders, who speak English very well—maybe better than me—who
speak Spanish also, certainly better than me, who may speak other
Indian languages, and yet they’re still within their traditional selves
that they’ve always been. So it’s a contradiction perhaps, but I think
that you have to recognize that the political nature of language can
be—is—really what limits us.
Southwestern writers have a kind of consciousness that leads us to
share identifiable images, metaphors that could only be Southwestern
geographically. This, in terms of an identifiable place, makes us Southwestern writers. If there is a kind of interface [among Southwestern
writers], it is struggle. I mean, the Southwest is essentially still a territory, colonized territory, colonial territory, so to speak. And I know
that John Nichols with his own work tries to bring this out: the idea
Dunaway: An Interview with Simon Ortiz
17
that the land here and the lifestyle culturally that has been lived by for
centuries and thousands of years must resist the more destructive
changes brought by Western expansionism, including even by the
railroads, by land developers, by uranium exploitation, by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and the lack of planning and
purely for economic profit, affecting people’s long-term lives and cultures.
For me, the landscape is just one vast, engulfing, enclosing place.
The far mountains, blue in the distance, the canyon lands, red, brown,
orange, yellow. The plateau or semi-arid vistas, something so much
forever and yet outlined in stark relief, giving it a sense of immediacy—so that that sense of vista is not only one of distance—out
there—but also inside. And then, the landscape has given obvious
inspiration to the art forms that have evolved, the architecture of the
Pueblo people in an earlier, earlier tradition and epochs, you know,
the cliff dwellings, the working with stone so that it’s part of the landscape. The music, obviously, and the songs, using the drum and the
songs which are muted, evoking a sense of that same cooperation or
adjustment and inspiration by the landscape to have a certain style
and form and content.
I think that literature that refers to definite place names in the
landscape, certain colors, the browns, and the dryness of the land—
which I use: the images of blue skies that wait, like me, for rain to
come from the west, and seeing the desert or our homeland transformed when the rain does fall—those kinds of environmental influences bring about inspiration. And more than that, the sense of how
we have to live in a relationship with the land. The land is severe in
some respects. It’s hot, and it’s pretty cold in the winter, and people
faced with these forces can only be wise to respond appropriately, and
to utilize those forces of nature. I think this lends a certain kind of
linguistic outlook that also has that sense of economy—breathing in
only a certain way, a sense of rhythm that evokes not grandiosity as a
response, but certainly taking very great care with what you do, with
what you have in this sparse, arid land.
When I first began to see myself as a writer, there were really no
Native American writers. I’ve been writing for a long time. When I
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first became conscious of this specific use of words in writing, I was a
writer; and maybe even before that I was a writer. By the time I was,
say, twelve or thirteen, I had started to make up songs—folk, country,
and western songs—singing along with the radio, you know, improvising, singing little things. I think by the time I was that age I also had
published my first Mother’s Day poem . . .
I would romanticize myself as a beginning writer, had an ambition. That’s when I fashioned myself that I would have a kind of grandiose stature, I don’t know, an Acoma Hemingway or something.
[laughs] You know how impressionable young people are. But there
were really no models at all that were Native American. The models
that were there were the popular American ones, at least that we were
taught in school: Hemingway, Faulkner, the poets Whitman, Carl
Sandberg, Robert Frost. But Sandberg, obviously, and Whitman, who
I felt spoke of a real America. I think that socially conscious and socially committed writers—Theodore Dreiser, realists like Hammond
Garland, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis—these people were my models.
Later on, in the 1960s, when I became aware of Native American writers, and I looked for them, we were all more or less contemporaries.
N. Scott Momaday, the Kiowa novelist and poet, was a student here at
the University of New Mexico back in the late 1950s, early 1960s. He
was a model eventually, but then we’re at the same time, contemporaries. Jim Welch, Leslie Silko, actually we all came along about the
same time. We were interdependent models for each other. Inspirations, anyway.
dd: Why weren’t we hearing those voices in the 1950s?
so: Repression, mainly. Subtle repression and maybe not-sosubtle repression through the schools, the public school policy being
that indeed there are no Native Americans: “they’re all a vanishing
race, right?” “There are no Native Americans east of the Mississippi.”
In fact, the Native Americans in the United States are not real “Indians,” they’re Indians who aren’t “Indians” anymore because, well, they
don’t ride the painted ponies and live in teepees.
That was a method of repression: a nonacceptance, nonrecognition, much less respect, nonsensitivity to Native American people and
culture and ways of life. Obviously, within the communities, there were
Dunaway: An Interview with Simon Ortiz
19
Indian people who kept telling the stories, who kept the ceremonies,
who kept advising and counsel to the young, who kept the prayers.
Even under the most severe of repressive activities by state law, by
church law or dictum, by federal law. And so this resulted in a real
dark age for Native American literature. There was no encouragement of Indian expressiveness in writing; there was some in painting
and sculpture.
Culture and self-government are necessarily one thing. I think
people would prefer to see culture as something separate and selfgovernment as another thing that’s a political entity. But the fact is
that Indian people as self-sufficient peoples can only be so when their
interests and concerns with sovereignty are regarded as a concern
with culture as well. The fact of an integral culture means an integral
sovereignty. That’s one of my concerns.
Simon Ortiz and the Lyricism of
Continuance
“For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land”
roger dunsmore
I started out to write this piece honoring Simon’s work by taking a
close look at his widely anthologized, much loved, early poem, “My
Father’s Song.” I wanted to show how such a deeply personal short
poem expressed that preeminent value, continuance, which he invokes to focus native tradition and resistance beyond mere survival.
But along the way I got ambushed. I got ambushed by his father, by
poems and statements about his father and his father’s influence on
his work. I was easy to ambush because in an eighteen-month time
period a year and a half ago, I lost four fathers: First, my wife’s father,
then, thirty-seven days later, my father, eight months later, my mentor, the philosopher Henry Bugbee who brought me to Montana, and
six months later, Buster Yellow Kidney, the Blackfeet elder and my
friend. So Simon’s statements about his father would not leave me
alone. And the continuance (a word I initially resisted due to its abstract quality) that he invokes so eloquently probably has no more
direct and forceful path than through the parents and grandparents,
in this case, through the father.
I want to look at his father as a stone-worker, as a carver, as a
singer, and at the influence of these on Simon as a writer. There is an
early poem, “A Story of How a Wall Stands,” in which his father explains the care, the mystery, and the mastery of weaving stone into a
wall for a graveyard at Aacqu. The picture we are offered of this stoneworking craft is created by his father’s hands as he shows Simon the
motions these hands must make in the making of stone walls.
Dunsmore: The Lyricism of Continuance
At Aacqu there is a wall
almost 400 years old
which supports hundreds
of tons of dirt and bones—
it’s a graveyard built on a
steep incline—and it looks
like it’s about to fall down
the incline but will not for
a long time.
My father, who works with stone,
says, “That’s just the part you see,
the stones which seem to be
just packed in on the outside,”
and with his hands puts the stone and mud
in place. “Underneath what looks like loose stone,
there is stone woven together.”
He ties one hand over the other,
fitting like the bones of his hands
and fingers. “That’s what is
holding it together.”
“It is built that carefully,”
he says, “The mud mixed
to a certain texture,” patiently
“with the fingers,” worked
in the palm of his hand. So that
placed between the stones, they hold
together for a long, long time.
He tells me these things,
the story of them worked
with his fingers, in the palm
of his hands, working the stone
and the mud until they become
the wall that stands a long, long time. (Woven Stone 145)
21
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What’s crucial about this particular wall is its support of hundreds of
tons of dirt and bones on a steep incline—for 400 years—its being
the wall for containing the bones of the ancestors at Aacqu. The craft
skills, the understanding, the qualities of patience and carefulness,
reside in his father’s hand-bones as their movements tell the story of
the wall—stones woven together with mud. The story of how a wall
stands might also be the story of how a people stand, on the steep
incline of history. For any wall, especially one on an incline, is a balancing act, stones standing amidst the forces of time and gravity and
shifts in the ground that might bring them down. The bones inside
his father’s hands know this story and these forces; and they know the
supreme value of a certain texture of mud that must be mixed if the
stones are to hold together, in time and space, and with the people,
the ancestors, the unborn. The title of Simon’s volume collecting his
first four books of poetry, Woven Stone, is taken directly from this
poem, and from the sense that his own written work must contain the
craft of weaving stones and mud, hand bones and emotion, only with
words, weaving tradition into the present, as others have done in
stone, cloth, mud, song for countless generations.
Simon makes this point clearly in his biographical essay, “The
Language We Know,” in I Tell You Now:
Our family lived in a two-room home (built by my grandfather
shortly after he and my grandmother moved with their daughters from Old Acoma), which my father added rooms to later. I
remember my father’s work at enlarging our home for our growing family. He was a skilled stoneworker, like many other men
of an older Pueblo generation who worked with sandstone and
mud motar [sic] to build their homes and pueblos. It takes
time, persistence, patience, and the belief that the walls that
come to stand will do so for a long, long time, perhaps even
forever. I like to think that by helping to mix mud and carry
stone for my father and other elders I managed to bring that
influence into my consciousness as a writer. (188–89)
The awareness that his consciousness as a writer has been influenced by helping to mix mud and carry stone as a child who takes
Dunsmore: The Lyricism of Continuance
23
part in something enduring in the life of the people, is at the heart of
Simon’s strength as a writer, is itself an act of continuance. The act of
writing must contain the act of stone-working, just as the wall standing at Aacqu contains the bones of the ancestors. One thinks of the
well-known story of the Navajo students who were given video cameras and asked to make their own documentary on the craft of weaving, how they filmed the grasses, the plants, the sheep, the mesas and
the clouds, all that the weaving contained.
A further look at the influence of his father’s craft skills on his
writing comes from Simon’s essay “Song/Poetry and Language—(Expression and Perception)” in Symposium of the Whole:
My father carves, dancers usually. What he does is find the motion of Deer, Buffalo, Eagle dancing in the form and substance
of the wood [. . .] and his sinewed hands touch the wood very
carefully, searching and knowing.
His movements are very deliberate. He holds the Buffalo
Dancer in the piece of cottonwood poised on the edge of his
knee, and he traces—almost caresses—the motion of the Dancer’s crook of the right elbow, the way it is held just below
midchest, and flicks a cut with the razor-edged carving knife.
And he does it again. He knows exactly where it is at that point
in a Buffalo Dance Song, the motion of elbow, arm, body and
mind.
He clears his throat a bit and he sings, and the song comes from
that motion of his carving, his sitting, the sinews in his hands
and face and the song itself. His voice is full-toned and wealthy,
all the variety and nuance of motion in the sounds and phrases
of the words are active in it; there is just a bit of tremble from
his thin chest. (399–400)
In this memory of his father carving, Simon shows us the wholeness of the act—that wholeness involves knowledge of the exact motion of the dancer’s body and mind, of the motion in the body of the
piece of wood being held in his hands, the motion of the Buffalo itself
being sung/danced, in and by his hands, mind, knife, even by his sit-
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ting. It is no surprise, then, that later on in the essay when Simon asks
his father about a particular word he has used in speech or song,
“What does it break down to? I mean, breaking it down to the
syllables of sound or phrases of sound, what do each of these
parts mean?” And he has looked at me with an exasperated—
slightly pained—expression on his face, wondering what I
mean. And he tells me, “It doesn’t break down into anything.”
For him, the word does not break down into any of the separate elements that I expect. The word he has said is complete.
(400)
The father’s act of language is complete, just as the act of carving.
It is this older sense of completeness in word, in song, or in carving
that Simon strives to bring over into his writing, and this is not something learned at school.
Later in this same essay he elaborates this sense of completeness in
reference to song, to his father’s singing, which we saw as a part of his
carving. But first he tells a funny story about an older man named
Page who went along with a hunting party as the camp cook because
his eyesight wasn’t so good. At one point Page thinks he is tracking a
big deer when he is actually tracking a pig, which he goes ahead and
shoots. For the rest of his life his nephews ask him, “Uncle, tell us
about that time the pig was your deer.” This story is to remind us, I
suspect, that humor, too, is as much a part of a hunt, or of a poetics, as
anything else. He goes on to say about song:
The song as expression is an opening from inside of yourself to
outside and outside of yourself to inside, but not in the sense
that there are separate states of yourself. Instead, it is a joining
and an opening together. Song is the experience of that opening [. . .]
When my father sings a song, he tries to instill a sense of awareness about us. Although he may remark upon the progressive
steps in a song, he does not separate the steps or components of
the song. The completeness of the song is the important thing.
Dunsmore: The Lyricism of Continuance
25
He makes me aware of these things because it is important, not
only for the song itself but because it is coming from the core of
who my father is, and he is talking about how it is for him in
relationship with all things.
A song, a poem, becomes real in that manner. You learn its
completeness. [. . .] You learn a song in the way that you are
supposed to learn a language, as expression and as experience.
(404–05)
And finally,
My father tells me, “This song is a hunting song: listen.” He
sings and I listen. He may sing it again, and I hear it again. The
feeling that I perceive is not only contained in the words; there
is something surrounding the song, and it includes us. It is the
relationship that we share with each other and with everything
else. And that’s the feeling that makes the song real and meaningful and which makes his singing and my listening more than
just a teaching and learning situation. (406–07)
When Simon was in Montana last April for a lecture and reading I
asked him, naively, why he used the word song in the title of the
poem, “My Father’s Song,” since it was a story. As answer, he directed
me to another short poem, “My Father Singing,” from late in his second book, A Good Journey. The poem goes like this:
My father says,
“This song, I like it
for this one old man.”
And my father moves
his shoulders, arms
and hands when he sings
the song.
My father says,
“When the old man
danced this song,
I liked it for him.” (Woven Stone 264)
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Simon then said, “It isn’t so much his song as the way he moved his
body when he talked, his body gestures,” and he got up from where
we were sitting outside, and moved his shoulders, arms and hands,
moved his whole body in gestures like his father’s, and said, “It was
like this that he moved when he spoke, that’s why I call it his song.”
His father’s body danced its affection in him, the son, remembering
his father’s life as motion and sound and emotion together, the
father’s life continuing in these gestures of affection “for this one old
man who used to like to sing—and he danced like this” (“Song/
Poetry” 407). This connection between sound and motion, and emotion, between singing and dancing and telling an affectionate story, is
inherent in Ortiz’s way of receiving and giving experience. It lends to
his poems an active silence that we feel in and with the words.
My existence has been determined by language, [he says], not
only the spoken, but the unspoken, the language of speech and
the language of motion. [. . .] Memory, immediate and far away
in the past, something in the sinew, blood, ageless cell. Although
I don’t recall the exact moment I spoke or tried to speak, I know
the feeling of something tugging at the core of the mind, something unutterable uttered into existence. (I Tell You Now, 187)
In these descriptions of his father carving, singing, talking about
language or explaining how a stone wall stands, Simon Ortiz has suggested a Pueblo Poetics—and reveals his father as a primary inspiration for his work as a writer. We see the completeness of voice and self
that is at the core of what Simon’s work continues, how such voice
embodies the language of movement—the muscles and sinews, the
way the skin is wrinkled, even how one sits being a part of it, the way
a person is moved by the whole of the heritage he or she carries, as
well as by their own individual nature and experience. This language
of motion that he says has shaped him reminds us of a comment by
Gary Witherspoon, in Language And Art In the Navajo Universe, that
the Navajos have over 350,000 conjugations of the verb “to go,” so
important a part of their world is the experience of motion.
Dunsmore: The Lyricism of Continuance
27
In closing, I want to quote a note to my students that I scribbled
on the inside cover of my almost decade old copy of Woven Stone and
dated December 11, 1995:
When I say Simon Ortiz is the most important poet writing in
America today, I mean (to borrow a phrase from Jason, a wilderness student who went on to receive Rabbinical training)—
I mean that Simon’s poetry is thoroughly prayerful—full of
prayers and praising. And prayerful in a way that works today
because that isn’t the result of any doctrine or creed or religion.
It is an extension of thousands of years of dry land farming
culture in what is now called the Southwest, and the pain of five
centuries of colonialism. He knows the loss because he has
lived it—he also knows the life, the renewal, the fertile power in
everything, including us. And he just tells it, sings it, moves it in
language so that all the time it is praying, praising, respecting,
alive, living. Always, even in anger, Simon Ortiz has “gone for
the rain.”
I want to add a couple of points to this statement. First, what
makes this prayerful or sacramental quality so powerful in his work
is that it does not call attention to itself as such, is left unstated and
takes place almost casually in the course of writing about seemingly
ordinary events—like the standing of a stone wall or moving mice
out of a cornfield or bringing home a skinny dog. Second, these poems also are an extension of the “ferociousness” with which the
Acoma Pueblo people have “held to their history, culture, language
and land despite [. . .] the forces surrounding them since [. . .] the
advent of Euro-American colonization” (“The Language We Know”
187). We must learn to listen for that “something that surrounds the
song”; to listen for that “something more than memory or remembering that is at stake,” we must catch the language of motion/emotion, and, if we are to have a regard for “the sacredness of language,”
we must, like old man Page, know when to let a pig become our
deer.
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works cited
Ortiz, Simon. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992. 145, 264.
———. “Song/Poetry and Language—(Expression and Perception).” Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Ed.
Jerome Rothenberg and Dianne Rothenberg. Berkeley: U of California P,
1983. 399–407.
———. “The Language We Know.” I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays
by Native American Writers. Ed. Brian Swan and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P, 1987. 185–94.
Witherspoon, Gary. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: U
of Michigan P, 1977.
Maps of the Universe
sarah ann wider
At age four, my daughter colored motion. She swept circles around
the page, starting with yellow or blue; first this color, then that, adding
in others as desired. That year Simon Ortiz came “back East” to the
school where I teach, to meet with my classes, to give a reading, to
enjoy a few days of spring in upstate New York. We held a dinner at
our house, and my daughter, not known for her enjoyment of large
gatherings, came into the room with a picture she had just finished
and handed it to Simon. Looking at its swirls of color and motion, he
said, “A map of the cosmos.”
In his poem “Across the Prairie Hills” from After and Before the
Lightning, Simon recalls his father’s words:
You make one
when you prepare to travel.
So you will always know
where you are, to where to return.
Haitsee, a map of the universe. (21–22)
In celebration of Simon’s work, I look closely at the maps he creates in
and through his writing. They describe where the characters, the
speakers, the readers are; they suggest where those individuals might
need to return (as for example in the stories “Woman Singing” and
“Crossing”). They are maps, not itineraries, and yet they are filled
with motion, with travel, with the energy that language is.
These maps arise from and belong to a particular location; they
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are of and from the margin. While the word has often been associated
with loss or silence, Simon delineates a different landscape, one in
which the margin is the open space or opens the space between divisive borders. In the margins people meet and talk and walk and plan.
The place is vital, rife with the life of those who have stepped—or
been pushed—out of bounds.1
Such space is rarely easy or comfortable. More often than not, it is
dead difficult, filled with the voices of raging women and wailing men.
Where does a person go when the mainstream washes them out? World
trade centers collapse. Government officials talk war—and mean it; all
their imaginations yield. Words spoken loudly in September echo brutally off the realities of the United States’ divided history. They march
into March with no end in sight. My now-eight-year-old daughter
reads a Scholastic news article about the State of the Union address and
asks me why the president is declaring war yet again. Retaliation. Vengeance. Words spoken by men who know nothing—or refuse to know
nothing—of Sand Creek or the Navajo Long Walk or the men at
Acoma mutilated because they sought back their way of life.
Where does a person go when borders are closed, and they have
become military and defensible, when the guns are trained on any
one who crosses? In the American Southwest that is no new reality.
Where does one go? Unbelievably and essentially into the margin, the
space between the borders. You head closer to the sky as the Pueblo
peoples did facing Spanish retaliation after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.
You go underground. You go, however you can, into print and try to
keep your good words there—out there in No Man’s Land for those
readers who know there is power in language, power to describe and
connect and unite people in a shared vision.
That’s where Simon has been, has taken his readers for the last
thirty years. His poetics are inseparable from an ethical commitment
that heightens awareness into action. That action is fundamentally
considerate. It brooks no man-made hierarchy. When you listen,
there is another reality, as Simon’s readers are given to know, and as
those individuals held in life by Simon’s words are given to know. In
the poem “Crazy Gook Indians,” Emmett is laughed at by the foreman
Wider: Maps of the Universe
31
for his reaction in the mines but the reader knows why Emmett responds as he does. Emmett’s friend Danny explains,
in Section 30
one afternoon, we blasted
and my partner, Emmett, thought
we were back in Vietnam,
back in the tunnels,
after the enemy, you know.
He picked up that drill like it was an M-60
and tried to defend us against
the shift boss who’d been in the Marines too. (Woven Stone 304)
While Danny holds Emmett in his arms, comforting him mother
to child, brother to brother, the boss laughs, enjoying the joke so
much he repeats it for the superintendent. With Danny, the reader
concludes, “I guess I should have let my partner / defend us against
that Marine” (Woven Stone 304).
In “Howbah Indians,” Eagle, with his Indian-operated, maybe
even owned, gas station, is remembered for his “bright red and yellow
sign on the horizon,” his statement to his community and to those
beyond—“Welcome Howbah Indians.” Despite his brutal death, that
fact does not become the center of his story. Rather it is Eagle’s voice
that marks his continued existence in men’s memory, those words on
that sign taking up “practically the whole horizon,” overriding in that
moment the white man’s control (Men on the Moon 23, 20).
“Shall”—that single, simple and potent syllable—rises as the operative and transformative verb in this world of margin-centered existence. It acts in good company. It is song, words lifted by the sound
of the human voice, a voice that is not alone but one with many. The
margins are not empty. They are moving with life. You can hear it in
“It Will Come; It Will Come”:
With compassion.
With courage.
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With unity.
With understanding.
With love.
We shall endure.
We shall go on.
We shall have victory.
We shall know living.
We shall know living. (Woven Stone 334)
Shall: the word speaks continuance. It sustains meaning when individual lives are fragmented. It becomes their margin of existence,
and through its slow, steady power, it supports the fundamental pulse
of being. In “A Birthday Kid Poem,” we listen as “shall” becomes “be”:
It shall end well.
It shall continue well
It shall be. (Woven Stone 213)
That statement of future existence in turn speaks for the most
powerful response to the present. The poem ends with a phrase that
both describes and commands: “Be enduring. / BE ENDURING”
(Woven Stone 213).
Simon’s words are maps for endurance, maps for continuance. They
take us into the margin, that ever-potent space between, that space beyond. Here is a place where time opens. In that opening is possibility:
connections appear where there was once emptiness; silence ceases and
conversation begins. Those margins are physical—“Bitter cold margins
of wind flowing / from hill to hill.” They are often beautiful: “Snow
rivers, sinuous / veins of vital organs” (After and Before the Lightning
7). They hold memory that would otherwise be lost. They are tenuous
but tough, made tough by story. As Simon has told us again and again,
“Story helps.” In these margins, speakers pool voices. That is our sinuous river. And so I will end my words of thanks with words from
Simon’s poem “Vital Margins.”
The courage it takes is sometimes marginal.
yet our lives are durable, as tough
Wider: Maps of the Universe
33
as sinewy wind, up then down, love and hope
more vital than anything else.
Story helps. We live the margins we’ve seen. (After and Before
the Lightning 7–8)
notes
1. The words I write here began in conversation. On an April day, after class,
Simon and I were talking about where Native literature is now, who teaches it,
why, who reads, what keeps courses in contemporary Native American literature from becoming just another example of that “temporary tourism of the
soul,” to use Wendy Rose’s phrase. That day we talked about margins, the inbetween spaces, about Gloria Anzaldúa’s words on borderlands and the promise held by El Mundo Zurdo. That conversation is only part of a larger one,
continuing to this day.
works cited
Ortiz, Simon J. After and Before the Lightning. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1994.
———. Men the Moon. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.
———. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.
“The story goes its own way”
Ortiz, Nationalism, and the Oral Poetics of Power
david l. moore
In the four “Lightning” poems that frame Simon Ortiz’s 1994 collection
After and Before the Lightning, he charts the internal agonies of the
winter of history. By the finale, an emergence with all the labor pains of
spring, there is not only survival, but an affirmation of power. And
power, for Ortiz, pulses in the land.
We do finally know why we don’t turn
from danger or beauty or sadness or joy.
How completely we feel the tremoring
and shuddering pulse of the land now
as we welcome the rain-heart-lightning
into our trembling yearning selves. (133–134)
Those feelings, that yearning, the give and take of that power of the
land, remain a constant affirmation throughout his work. In an earlier
1980 collection, Fight Back, he writes,
This land yearns
for us.
The people yearn
for the land.
Loss and separation
are hard to bear. (62)
His work is dedicated not only to bearing that loss and separation,
but somehow to reversing it, reuniting the people, and as he says, “not
Moore: “The story goes its own way”
35
just Indian people,” with the land (Fight Back 73). He maps that process in the historical and political spheres and increasingly in the inner territories of the mind and heart as well. Ortiz is generous in showing his readers how to overcome fear of that “danger or beauty or
sadness or joy,” and even how we “finally know why we don’t turn”
from that danger. He writes,
Choosing words is a waste of time. Let the words choose you,
let them choose their own place, time, identity, meaning. [. . .]
They have their own power, their own magic, wonder, brilliance. Where and how they fit, that has nothing to do with us.
The only thing we can do is recognize, admit, and accept that.
Let words choose us. Let language empower us, give us beauty
and awe. We cannot do anything about it. When we think we
can, when we choose words, it is a waste of time. (After and
Before the Lightning 51)
His assertion of the “power [. . .] magic, wonder, and brilliance” in
words celebrates the multiplicities of language and human discourse
as the creator of our expressions of experience and ourselves. This
view is in direct contrast with romantic literary nostalgia over the socalled “death of the author.” The life or death of the author is not the
core issue as long as the stories continue. Instead of some “prison of
language,” he sees a celebratory source of life in language, with the
author dancing along.
If what makes a poet is openness to that power in language, one of
the particularly magnetic qualities in his writing is the fearless way
that Ortiz maintains such openness in the midst of a devastating history. This warrior courage is based on love of land and community
and on faith in life itself. Faith is always elusive and can be misread as
optimism. In a remarkable, reciprocal logic of encouragement, we can
read this faith in simply “life and its continuance” through this passage
from Fight Back:
We must have passionate concern for what is at stake. We must
understand the experience of the oppressed, especially the ra-
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cial and ethnic minorities, of this nation, by this nation and the
economic interests, because only when we truly understand
and accept the responsibilities of that understanding will we be
able to make the necessary decisions for change. Only then will
we truly understand what it is to love the land and people and
to have compassion. Only when we are not afraid to fight against
the destroyers, thieves, liars, exploiters who profit handsomely
off the land and people will we know what love and compassion
are. Only when the people of this nation, not just Indian people,
fight for what is just and good for all life, will we know life and its
continuance. And when we fight, and fight back those who are
bent on destruction of land and people, we will win. We will win.
(73)
Those fighting words are filled with the courage of passionate certitude. In the heart of the storm of colonialism, which he names—
“This America / has been a burden / of steel and mad / death . . .”—his
aesthetic of openness merges with the ethics of power in native nationalism and authenticity (From Sand Creek 9). “[T]he indigenous
peoples of the Americas have taken the languages of the colonialists
and used them for their own purposes” (“Towards a National Indian
Literature” 10). This ability to transform oppressive discourses into
“their own purposes” derives from a returning and returning affirmation of dynamic cultural authenticity. “It is by the affirmation of knowledge of source and place and spiritual return that resistance is realized” (“Towards a National Indian Literature” 11). In Ortiz’s definition,
this is a dynamic, not static, authenticity which moves through that
very act of resistance by which the people use colonial languages “for
their own purposes.” Inside that historical burden of America, he
thus can go on to write,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek. (From Sand Creek 9)
Moore: “The story goes its own way”
37
But how does this work? On the one hand, Ortiz writes, “Let the
words choose you”; and on the other, he affirms that those words
must be used by native artists “for their own purposes.” How can the
words “choose” you when you “use” them for particular purposes?
His negotiations of this complex dynamic run parallel to ancient Western questions of free will and predestination, to ancient Eastern mystical tensions between visualization and acceptance, to postmodern
tensions between individual agency and social construction, to critical linguistic tensions between personal expression and social language. Ortiz has addressed many of these binary questions in his
work. His essays such as, “Song/Poetry and Language—Expression
and Perception” and “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural
Authenticity in Nationalism,” written more than twenty years ago,
contribute to these ancient discussions in many ways that are beyond
the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that he provides not only the
conceptual spark but also the practical example of how to make the
leap that transcends or deconstructs these binaries basically of spirit
and matter. Ortiz shows us how the way out of or through a paradox—out of a binary lock such as openness to language versus reinvention of language—is the courage of dynamic focused energy, a
leap of faith across or around the abyss of that divide. For now, we can
watch that leap of faith as we discuss how these two tendencies in his
work, to “let the words choose you” and to take “the language[s] of
the colonialists and [use] them for their own purposes” as a native
nationalist.
Are these two tendencies, with their various aesthetic and ethical
dimensions, a contradiction or a mystification? Is he being co-opted
by the romance of language? For many native writers, this challenge is
added to the other tough questions about how Indian voices reinvent
their stories in the enemy’s language. Through Ortiz’s oral aesthetic
of resistive and regenerative cultural authenticity, we find a single
root in that certainty which knows that “The story goes its own way”
(After and Before the Lightning 20). In his description of the power of
the oral tradition, there is little room for powerlessness. For instance,
this affirmation of an oral aesthetics of power is from his introduction to his edited volume, Earth Power Coming:
38
sail . winter 2004 . vol. 16, no. 4
There have always been the songs, the prayers, the stories.
There have always been the voices. There have always been the
people. There have always been those words which evoked
meaning and the meaning’s magical wonder. There has always
been the spirit which inspired the desire for life to go on. And it
has been through the words of the songs, the prayers, the stories that the people have found a way to continue, for life to go
on.
It is the very experience of life that engenders life. It is the
act of perception that insures knowledge. For Indian people, it
has been the evolvement of a system of life which insists on
one’s full awareness of his relationship to all life. Through
words derived from one’s thoughts, beliefs, acts, experiences, it
is possible to share this awareness with all mankind. (vii)
Because of this root of certitude in his aesthetic, and its ethics, he
can give himself, his writing, and even history over to an affirmation.
For example, in a remarkable moment in After and Before the Lightning,
Ortiz inserts an internal, contemplative voice into a communal story:
“In those days, people would go on top of Horace Mesa to gather
piñon nuts. Once in October, they went for two days. On the
second day it started to snow. It snowed all afternoon and into
the night. [. . .]” No, it’s not that way. The story goes its own way.
In my mind the words go their way, following the basic story plus
the imagination and memory, plus the way I have experienced
things. It is how the story goes, my mother’s and father’s words,
their experiences in my mind, and my mind’s own knowledge.
Imagination is a harking back to the source but it is also
more than source.
[...]
Snow that October, the language of experience, sensation,
history, imagination are all in the story and how it carries forth.
Story has its own life, its very own, and we are the voice carried
with it. (After and Before the Lightning 20)
Moore: “The story goes its own way”
39
By his explanation such letting go so that the story may go “its own
way” is only a loss of illusion. Control gives way to that reciprocal
certitude. We become empowered as we let ourselves be “the voice
carried with” the story, “as we welcome the rain-heart-lightning / into
our trembling yearning selves.” This empowerment becomes a writer’s
balanced embrace of the power of craft and the power of language,
and that embrace functions on fundamental faith in those powers.
Throughout his work Ortiz marks many expressions of this reciprocal certitude in references to “Existence” or “continuance” or to
“the creative forces of life” (Fight Back 1). The affirmation often remains submerged as the a priori, the foundational dynamic of his
language and perception. He rarely lands directly on faith in these
forces as its own focus, perhaps because of a difference between optimism and faith: where optimism is vague and passive and faith is specific and active, like the focused energy of reciprocal certitude which
turns in Ortiz’s words. His prose can be explicit about that cycle, “my
own writing comes from a similar dynamic of reciprocity shared by
the land, water, and human culture” (Speaking for the Generations xv).
Often this dynamic affirmation of faith focuses the process that
drives his politics. For instance, he writes, “There is a revolution going on; it is very spiritual and its manifestation is economic, political,
and social. Look to the horizon and listen” (From Sand Creek 54). By
mapping those manifestations of spirit, his works direct the active
reader to the full spectrum of grim history both as it is written and as
he would rewrite it to revise a future.
As Robin Riley Fast suggests, “Having given his testimony, Ortiz
can finally rely only on hope, but the terms in which he imagines
hope, in the context of this history, must be limited unless his witness
compels his listeners to faith and action” (59). In that momentum of
action, Ortiz gives many phrases to this ineffable “Existence.” Again in
dynamic relation, he invokes “the creative ability of Indian people to
gather in many forms of the socio-political-colonizing force which
beset them and to make those forms meaningful in their own terms”
(“Towards a National Indian Literature” 8). That “creative ability of
Indian people” is linked in turn to the center of “Existence,” a term
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sail . winter 2004 . vol. 16, no. 4
which he frequently capitalizes. In his introduction to Speaking for
the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, Ortiz writes,
Acoma Pueblo people believe they came into Existence as a
human culture and community at Shipapu, which they know is
a sacred mythic place of origin. Shipapu and a belief in
Shipapu, therefore and thereafter, is the mythic source of their
Existence. Coming into Existence from a source like Shipapu is
indisputably an assertion of their direct relationship with the
creative spirit-force-dynamic of the earth. (xiii–xiv)
His connections to this “spirit-force-dynamic of the earth” take
many forms of expression, which we might approach through Ortiz’s
own general categories of manifestation—economic, political, and
social—and he maps those categories onto a ground which we might
call ecological. Thus there emerge in his writing four foci of his
“spirit-energy-dynamic of the earth”: first the ecological “for the sake
of the land”; second the social “for the sake of the people”; third the
political, how “Warriors will keep alive in the blood;” and fourth the
economic, how he addresses “this heart which is our America” (From
Sand Creek 33). Of course any one of these bears the weight of any of
the other categories, as the economic is ecological, the political is social, and so forth. What is key here is his originary faith in the “spiritenergy-dynamic” which can envision active human choice in each of
these realms.
For the sake of time, I would like to discuss briefly only the last two
of these areas in conclusion, and leave “for the sake of the land” and “for
the sake of the people” to our other speakers who, I am sure, will treat
them abundantly. I am intrigued by the warrior anger which Ortiz
wields with such skill, a warrior ethos not “frightened by emotion, / the
sheer joy of being men, / of being children” (From Sand Creek 59).
There is a fascinating link from that warrior ethic in his work to the
particular ways that his redefinitions of “America” offer the enemies of
that warrior a vision of compassion. The warrior who is open to anger
is also open to compassion. Thus, speaking of the settlers, he writes,
Moore: “The story goes its own way”
41
They should have eaten
whole buffalo.
They should have,
like the People wanted for them. (From Sand Creek 51)
If they had taken more than just the tongues and hides, if the hunters
had had compassion for the buffalo, the invaders might even have
discovered how “Warriors could have passed / into their young
blood” (From Sand Creek 35). By openness to feelings, they would be
open to the warrior spirit that survives. Ortiz is generous in battle.
I think this generosity rises up because his work is courageous
enough to imagine balance in a crazy world, in a crazy psyche. In a
passage on shell-shocked warriors in the Ft. Lyons veterans hospital,
he writes, “There is an honest and healthy anger which will raze these
walls, and it is the rising of our blood and breath which will free our
muscles, minds, spirits” (From Sand Creek 84). Having also written, “I
am so mad / with love for these derelicts,” he personalizes that proclamation about anger in the lines that conclude the accompanying
poem:
I could only cry,
mangled
like his anger,
amazed
and dismayed. (From Sand Creek 85)
When that anger cannot find an outlet, it injures the self. “Repression,” he writes, “works like a shadow, clouding memory and sometimes even to blind, and when it is on a national scale, it is just not
good” (From Sand Creek 14). But as we saw in Fight Back, the courage
to resist is linked to the passion for life, and that passion is linked to
compassion even for disappointed settlers. “Even the farmer has become a loser,” he writes (From Sand Creek 30). That compassion is
aimed even toward deluded soldiers at Sand Creek,
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[. . .] and breathing
self-righteously they deemed
themselves blessed and pure
so that not even breath
became life—
life strangled
in their throats. (From Sand Creek 75)
Yet that warrior spirit survives even the assault of self-righteous
massacres, enough to convey a tone of tenderness that is the only way
to catch the attention of despair:
Don’t fret now.
Songs are useless
to exculpate sorrow.
That’s not their intent anyway.
Strive
for significance.
Cull seeds from grass.
Develop another strain of corn.
Whisper for rain.
Don’t fret.
Warriors will keep alive in the blood. (From Sand Creek 33)
A faith in the warrior spirit is a faith in life, in corn, as the prose
statement accompanying this poem declares: “In this hemisphere,
corn is ancient and young; it is the seed, food, and symbol of a constantly developing and revolutionary people” (From Sand Creek 32).
The energy of revolution is the biological cycle of sunlight in corn as
food for human bodies.
In the next category where his pragmatic faith in “the spirit-forcedynamic of the earth” addresses “this heart which is our America,” his
alternate vision of history evokes a cross-cultural nation where
whites unlearn Puritanism and relearn from Indians that death is not
Moore: “The story goes its own way”
43
sin, that suffering is not evil, that they did not have to mask their fear
and guilt in a myth of Manifest Destiny, that “We do finally know why
we don’t turn / from danger or beauty or sadness or joy.” In From
Sand Creek he writes, “Pain and death did not have to be propagated
as darkness and wrong and coldness; they could have listened and
listened and learned to sing in Arapaho” (34). Such a fantasy does not
ring hollow, because Ortiz hooks that alternate history onto internal,
psychological losses that are real. He even counsels the white warriors:
They should have seen
the thieves stealing
their most precious treasure:
their compassion, their anger. (From Sand Creek 59)
Again, his faith in that spirit-force-dynamic categorizes compassion and anger together as a warrior energy. Ortiz not only suggests
how a white military was out of touch with its compassion because it
was out of touch with the roots of its anger, he speaks to the white
culture in a voice like a matter-of-fact mother earth, suggesting what
could have been history:
There was no paradise,
but it would have gently and willingly
and longingly given them food and air
and substance for every comfort.
If they had only acknowledged
Even their smallest conceit. (From Sand Creek 79)
Presumably there is still a future in that yearning and longing of
the land for the people. Ortiz even articulates for them their arrogance and their acquisitive assumptions: “There is probably no way
to verify if people become self-righteous and arrogant because they
are dissatisfied or failures, but they certainly do” (From Sand Creek
76). Through his own clarity about that spirit-energy-dynamic, Ortiz
is able to diagnose the problem:
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And onward,
westward
they marched,
sweeping aside the potential
of dreams which could have been
generous and magnificent
and genius for them.
It is
no wonder
they deny regret
for the slaughter
of their future.
Denying eternity, it is no wonder
they became so selflessly
righteous. (From Sand Creek 77)
In a collection which takes the Sand Creek Massacre as its central
metaphor, it is a remarkable twist for Ortiz to point to the “slaughter /
of their future,” referring to the destruction of America’s own compassionate heart in the violent extremes of that self-righteous mentality. And in that same context, we can see further his point that “Denying eternity” is the consequence of denying humanity in America’s
“others” by that tragic militarism which slaughtered and mutilated
Black Kettle’s peaceful camp.
From Sand Creek begins not only with America as “a burden / of
steel and mad / death,” but astonishingly frames the intimate, angry,
celebratory poems with this affirmation at the end:
That dream
shall have a name
after all,
and it will not be vengeful
but wealthy with love
and compassion
and knowledge.
Moore: “The story goes its own way”
45
And it will rise
in this heart
which is our America. (95)
In the first poem of From Sand Creek, which begins “Grief /
memorizes this grass” of Ft. Lyons, Colorado, the staging ground for
the 1864 massacre, Ortiz provokes his readers to the act of believing in
that primary energy which survives such grief. In this instance, he
calls that spirit-force-dynamic “raw courage”:
Raw
courage,
believe it,
red-eyed and urgent,
stalking Denver.
Like stone,
like steel,
the hone and sheer gone,
just the brute
and perceptive angle left.
Like courage,
believe it,
left still;
the words from then
talk like that.
Believe it. (11)
He can deliver this imperative to believe in the timelessness of
words spoken with raw courage because that is what he does. Here
again Ortiz gives us not only the urgency but the example of how to
see and what to do with the history of our America, which he loves as
“something precious in the memory in blood and cells which insists
on story, poetry, song, life, life” (From Sand Creek 92). By faith in that
life, he writes, “Women and men may be broken and scattered, but
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they remember and think about the reasons why. They answer their
own questions and always the truth and love will make them decide”
(From Sand Creek 56). His readers and his nation, Acoma and
America, owe him real thanks on these questions.
works cited
Fast, Robin Riley. “‘It is ours to know’: Simon J. Ortiz’s From Sand Creek.”
Studies in American Indian Literatures 12.3 (Fall 2000): 52–63.
Ortiz, Simon J. After and Before the Lightning. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1994.
———. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land. Albuquerque: Institute for Native American Development—Native American
Studies, U of New Mexico, 1980.
———. From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which Is Our America. New
York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1981.
———. Introduction. Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American
Literature. Ed. Simon J. Ortiz. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College
Press, 1983. vii–ix.
———. “Introduction: Wah nuhtyuh-yuu dyu neetah tyahstih (Now It Is
My Turn To Stand).” Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing. Ed. Simon J. Ortiz. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1997. xi–xix.
———. “Song/Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception.” Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics. Ed.
Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg. Berkeley: U of California P,
1983. 399–407.
———. “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism.” MELUS 8.2 (Summer 1981): 7–12.
Poetry Can Be All This
All of You, All of Me, All of Us
joy harjo
The smoke of student riots still lingered in the air the fall I arrived at
the University of New Mexico with my three-year-old son to begin
my studies in pre-med and dance in the early seventies. The Kiva
Club, (the Indian student club), was my community, my center of
gravity. We were dedicated to defining, securing, defending and protecting Native rights. We didn’t just talk; we acted. After classes and
meetings we’d often gather later to continue discussions, or to party.
We were a pivotal generation and urgently understood the need for
cultural regeneration, political and social renovation; we did everything passionately, hard.
One night that first fall at UNM, I met Simon Ortiz. It was at a gathering of native students and activists. Simon started the conversation.
He was working for the National Indian Youth Council with Gerald
Wilkinson up on Central Avenue, and had been sleeping on the floor
of the offices. I don’t know what I said or if I said much of anything at
all beyond my tribal affiliation and school major. I was shy, self-contained. He was a poet, he said. What do you say to a poet? Sure I knew
about Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the
Beats, but there was no such thing in our circle, though we did respect
the power of words. I’d admired eloquent native speeching at press
conferences and in circles of meaning and consequence, from my
own quiet distance. And many students at Indian school wrote poetry. Mostly, I’d always imagined poets as pale men (and the rare
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spinster) declaiming in long aristocratic coats, haling from wet, cold
lands. I had never met an Indian person before who introduced himself as “a poet.”
Simon Ortiz invited me to a reading he was going to do the next
morning over live radio. I don’t think I went the next morning to the
radio show, but eventually we became a couple. He obsessively wrote
poems and journals, labored hours at his typewriter at the kitchen
table or on some other improvised desk. He had meetings, associations, even at times, an entourage of followers. I painted. He was the
one with words. I was wordlessness. I had always preferred the silence
and space of painting and drawing, after taking care of a child, then
children. As I watched Simon work I had to admit that I was amazed
at the creation of a poem, how a kernel of meaning and sound condensed to one page could stagger the world with meaning. There was
Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Gabrielle Minstral, and I held their poems in my hands. And not just their words, but in these words lived
souls, lands, and peoples. What blew me open next was the realization
that poetry lived within our native lands, our communities. And that
poetry could be about the everyday of washing dishes, sunrise, crows
carrying on, and that crickets in the corner of the room making a
huge racket as well could be honoring songs for those we loved, for
those who were working with us for justice. Poetry became a refuge in
those times of gathering together, standing up, and reconfiguring.
Poetry was Simon’s gift to me, and it was here that my poetry began.
3 AM1
in the Albuquerque airport
trying to find a flight
to Old Oraibi, Third Mesa
TWA
is the only desk open
bright lights outline New York
Chicago
and the attendant doesn’t know
that Third Mesa
Harjo: Poetry Can Be All This
is a part of the center
of the world
and who are we
just two indians
at three in the morning
trying to find a way back
and then I remembered
that time Simon
took a Yellow Cab
out to Acoma from Albuquerque
a twenty five dollar ride
to the center of himself
3 AM is not too late
to find the way back
Are You St
il
he
Stil
illl T
The
herre?
there are sixty-five miles
of telephone wire
between acoma
and albuquerque
i dial the number
and listen for the sound
of his low voice
on the other side
hello
is a gentle motion of a western wind
cradling tiny purple flowers
that grow near the road
towards laguna
i smell them
as i near the rio puerco bridge
my voice stumbles
returning over sandstone
as it passes the canoncito exit
49
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i have missed you he says
the rhythm circles the curve
of mesita cliffs
to meet me
but my voice is caught
shredded on a barbed wire fence
at the side of the road
and flutters soundless
in the wind
note
1. The following poems appear in Joy Harjo, How We Became Human
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), and were originally published in What
Moon Drove Me To This? (Berkeley: I.Reed Books, 1979).
The Stories He Lives By
evelina zuni lucero
Summer 1978. I was a young journalist, in love with words, thriving on
deadlines and adrenaline rushes, disbelieving that I actually got paid to
meet and interview Indian leaders and newsmakers, movers and shakers, like poet Simon Ortiz. Simon and I sat on the grass, under the thick
shade of cottonwood trees that dominated the then-existing campus of
the Albuquerque Indian School. The All Indian Pueblo Council was in
the process of taking over the school from BIA control. The aging
buildings were being condemned one by one, and AIPC was looking
into how they could provide a better education for Pueblo youth. It was
a fitting place for an interview with this poet, what with the political
implications in a boarding school setting, and Simon’s confrontation
of issues facing America and Native America in his writing.
I was only vaguely aware of his writing, though by this point he
already had four books to his name. His book Howbah Indians had
just been published, his reputation growing. It was an amazing discovery for me that Indians could be authors. There had been none as I
grew up, no one I recognized in all the books I had read. I listened hard
as Simon spoke, not only because that comes with journalistic training,
but because his words resonated within me: “As Indian persons, each of
us has different roles and tasks, and I decided I would write to carry out
the responsibility of teaching Indian and non-Indian people” (Zuni).
Even if it had only started as an adolescent dream, I still harbored
the thought in the back of my mind that someday I could write a
book. And here before me was an Indian author, a Pueblo no less, who
wrote of people and places with which I was familiar, who showed in
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his poems and stories that our lives were as important and worthy as
any. Like coyote, he had been all over the country, working all kinds of
jobs, meeting all kinds of people, and then writing about those experiences. His hands gestured as he spoke passionately about writing,
about themes in his work, about responsibilities, about the value of
language.
The ’60s were a defining moment for Simon:
[He told me,] I think a lot of us went through quite a change. We
came to a point in time where we had to make a decision either
to keep on being treated as a stereotype image of the quiet Indian
or to speak out and to demand respect. Not just quietly ask, but
to act, to confront the non-Indian power structure. I think this
happened within the communities, Indian and non-Indian, and
within ourselves. We gained a more firm idea of ourselves, what
our human capabilities were, and could become.
Most of my writing is part of a story of Indian people, life,
land, America. Most Indian people grow up with the thought
of being useful for the sake of the land, the people. This kind of
philosophy is really what I want to make my writing be. (Zuni)
It amazed me that an author was down to earth, a “regular” guy not
caught up in arrogance, but was interested in community and in
speaking to community. Looking back, I see so clearly that he, who
had also been without Indian models, was paving the way for all the
native writers who followed, including me.
Eight years later I was in the graduate program at UNM in the
creative writing program, studying Native American literature, not
knowing then the Native American Renaissance was beginning to
roll, with Simon as one of the major writers at its forefront. Since then
I have become well familiar with Simon’s work and have heard him
read and speak many times and have had many conversations with
him. Returning to this interview twenty-six years later, I am struck
with how Simon’s message has remained constant over the years as
only a message that comes with conviction can. What he said then is
what he always has said and is what literary scholars have written
about as a common theme of resistance in his work and in native lit-
Lucero: The Stories He Lives By
53
erature in general: “Indian people are really energetic and enthused
about how we can work, not only with organizations just on specific
levels, but throughout all things. There’s a lot of inspiration by looking at the long history of resistance. If our ancestors hadn’t fought, we
wouldn’t be here” (Zuni).
He told me in 1978 that in his writing, he strives for an in-depth
insight into people, not just their personalities, but also the events
which surround people and in which they grow, sometimes even destructively: “People’s lives aren’t always successful. I have always tried
to find, even in defeat, inspiration for others” (Zuni). I think it is this
quality in his writing of providing hope and inspiration that resounds with readers.
He is an important writer, well regarded, revered even, by some.
He has contributed much to native literature with his essays, poetry,
and short stories, always with that seeming simplicity that overlays
complexity. His native language, the stories of his people, his traditional upbringing permeate his thought, his writing, his voice, his
presence. He speaks forth the Indian experience in a way people,
white and Indian, urban and reservation, recognize and embrace. Always he opens with a greeting in the Acoma language. His voice is
resonant. He speaks slowly. His words are deceptively simple but hit
with a twang to the heart like an arrow to the bull’s eye. He writes out
of a tender compassion for the harsh political and social realities of
native life. He writes and speaks from his heart.
In addition to his writing, his significant contribution to native
literatures is his constant support of emerging writers and support of
Native American studies at the University of New Mexico and the
Institute of American Indian Arts. I admire this community consciousness. No matter where he is, he always comes home to reconnect, to contribute, to participate. His writing, his life, truly is for the
land, the community, the next generation.
work cited
Zuni, Evelina. “Writer Ortiz Tells Indian Joys, Struggles, Victories and Sorrows.” Pueblo News Aug. 1978.
“It was that Indian”
Simon Ortiz, Activist Poet
laura tohe
“It was that Indian [. . .]”(3). The first time I heard Simon Ortiz read
this line from his poem with the same title was in the 1970s at the
University of New Mexico. He was reading from his recent work,
Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land. These
poems spoke powerfully of the uranium mining that was taking place
on Laguna land in New Mexico. Simon’s poetry was a reflection of
not only his experience as a former mine worker, but of the Southwestern native people’s experience in the mining industry.
“It was that Indian. [. . .]” A little revolution exploded in my mind.
It’s been twenty-four years since he wrote this line, but it continues to
stick with me. Few native writers were getting their work published in
those days. At this poetry reading, Simon named places I knew and
people who worked for the mines near Laguna and Grants, New
Mexico. With each poem he read, I became more immersed in his
words. As we used to say in the 70s, “he blew me away” with his words.
I grew up on the Diné reservation in New Mexico and Arizona in a
remote place and mostly disconnected from the outside world. At the
elementary Day School I learned to read from the Dick and Jane reading series. When we got to see television once a week, it reflected a white
America: Our Miss Brooks, The Real McCoys, The Three Stooges, The
Man From U.N.C.L.E. Here was one of the first native writers speaking
of border towns, capitalism, exploitation, environmental pollution,
and racism. Though they were his words, he spoke powerfully for those
of us who were silent. Simon’s reading made us feel the power of language, the power of speaking for The People and for the land.
Tohe: “It was that Indian”
55
Further on he read, “and never mind also / that the city had a jail
full of Indians” (Fight Back 3). Simon voiced a silent truth that we
Indians had been living under for nearly five hundred years of colonialism. No one was writing of border towns, those little havens of
racism and exploitation hubs that simmered near the reservations in
those days, except for Simon. My childhood memories are still
clouded by the times when my family parked in the JCPenney’s parking lot and saw Indian men and women shout greetings to their family below from behind the shadowy windows of the upper floor of the
Gallup city jail. His words continue to explode in my mind as they do
today when I’m at his readings or reading his work. My earliest writing, stirred with Simon’s activism, influenced my work as I tentatively
put words on paper. His work as an activist poet has helped raise our
social and political consciousness and, I believe, influenced the
present generation of native poets and writers. Simon, as informal
mentor, has generously given his time and editorial skills to beginning native writers. I am especially grateful for his editorial help on
my manuscript, No Parole Today. With Simon’s early encouragement
and support I published some of my earliest work as a fledgling poet.
It was during this time I sorely needed a mentor to give me the kind
of encouragement that he provided.
“We have been told many things, / but we know this to be true: /
the land and the people,” Simon wrote from the same work (Fight
Back 36). In each new book Simon has taken us on his journeys,
sometimes as trickster Coyote, sometimes as father, as husband, as
lover, as son, as urban derelict, as teacher in his comments on the
Indian in America, and on America. He once said, “My education
comes from experiencing all of America.” While some of his revelations are hard to take, he avoids descending into cynicism and bitterness. Instead he reaches for hope, for the continued struggle to survive. His activist poetry converges with the spiritual values of his
Aacqu/Acoma upbringing and his compassion. Simon, like Ella
Deloria, Vine Deloria, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Leslie Marmon
Silko, speaks from The People’s consciousness for the sake of the land
and The People. These word warriors’ past and present have helped
defend the sovereign status of native nations and the struggles of na-
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tive peoples on their terms. Simon is also one of the few native writers
who use the Acoma language in his work.
Simon defined colonialism in his work when no one else spoke of
it. Before there was such a thing as the Native American literary renaissance, Simon affirmed the spirit and values of The People when
many of us were struggling with the residual effects of boarding
schools. Simon’s body of work consistently responds with the deeply
rooted values and beliefs of indigenous peoples toward the earth, toward each other, and for continuance as native peoples. Perhaps for
this reason his work has been often glossed over by critics.
While it would be easy to simply slot Simon into Native American
poet or Acoma poet, his work speaks of issues that confront our national consciousness, issues such as the U.S. military presence in the
Middle East and Iraq. Closer to home, he has written of American
genocide in From Sand Creek and U.S. policies that impact native lands
and native peoples that bear parallels to the U.S. presence in the Middle
East. At his readings he exhorts us to challenge national issues that face
us as American citizens and, most particularly, as tribal nations.
Simon Ortiz’s body of work spans across four decades. He gives us
a rich and enduring legacy of poetry, stories, including children’s stories, essays, and film work. He is a nationally and internationally recognized poet. Locally he has been acclaimed many times over and
was awarded the Lifetime Achievement by the Word Craft Circle of
Native Writers and Storytellers. His recognition as one of America’s
foremost poets and writers is long overdue. He once said that to
demystify language is to use language as clearly and succinctly as possible. For that I say, ahé’hee’, thank you for bringing forth our history
and our stories for survival, for continuance.
works cited
Ortiz, Simon J. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land.
Albuquerque: Institute for Native American Development—Native
American Studies, U of New Mexico, 1980.
———. From Sand Creek. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000. New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1981.
The Challenge of Speaking First
joni adamson
In 2000 I invited Simon Ortiz and Teresa Leal, co-chair of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, to the North
American Conference on Environment and Community in Reno,
Nevada. I had asked Simon to participate, with Teresa, on a roundtable that would focus on how artists, activists, scholars, and teachers
can work together to achieve the goals of the environmental justice
movement, which advocates for the right of all people to benefit
equally from a safe and clean environment. Waiting for a delayed
flight, Simon, Teresa, and I found ourselves in the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, drinking coffee and eating bagels. Simon and Teresa had
never met before and they were clearly enjoying the opportunity to
talk about who they knew in common, what places they had both
visited, and what civil rights and environmental actions they had
each participated in.
I remember feeling privileged to be sitting with these two. Each
had contributed so much, to use Simon’s words, “for the sake of the
land and all people.” Teresa (Opata/Mayo) had been on the front
lines, fighting against the contamination of workers and their environments since her days working in the fields with Cesar Chavez in
the 1960s. Simon had been writing about his own people, the Acoma,
and other Native American peoples since the 1960s, drawing connections between such events as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and modern
day corporate colonization of American Indian labor and resources
and the consequent social breakdown in native communities and
toxic degradation of the surrounding environment. “When I write,”
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he would say at the roundtable discussion that took place the next
day, “I write as an Indian, or native person, concerned with his environmental circumstances and what we have to do to fight for a good
kind of life” (Adamson 16).
“Fighting for a good kind of life” is one of the most powerful
themes running through Simon’s writings and certainly one of the
most urgent goals of the environmental justice movement. In the
preamble to the seventeen “Principles of Environmental Justice” created at the 1991 First National People of Color Summit in Washington, D.C., delegates declared their right to “secure our political, economic, and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years
of colonization and oppression resulting in the poisoning of our
communities and land and the genocide of our peoples” (qtd. in Di
Chiro 307). In interviews and readings throughout the 1990s, Simon
was talking about the right of indigenous peoples to fight for their
own liberation in terms very similar to those in the preamble. In
Winged Words, he told interviewer Laura Coltelli,
[this] process of colonization, that is, usurping the indigenous
power of the people, taking their land and resources and language and heritage away—that has to be struggled against. [. . .]
You have to fight it, to keep what you have, what you are, because they are trying to steal your soul, your spirit, as well as
your land. (111)
The fight against colonization, he said when I first met him during
the 1992 “Poetics and Politics: Reading by Native American Writers
Series” in Tucson, Arizona, has to begin with “responsibility” and “advocacy.” “Native American writers,” he explained, “have to be responsible to their source, it’s an advocacy position in a way, to be able to
continue as who we are, to sustain ourselves and to be nourished by
our cultural source, then you have to be an advocate, but an advocate
that is responsible” (“Poetics and Politics”).
Simon’s observation that there is a fine line to walk in advocacy
and that advocacy must begin with a “responsibility to the source,”
resonates strongly with many of the discussions I have had with
Adamson: The Challenge of Speaking First
59
Teresa Leal over the past several years. Just the other day, we were
speaking of Simon, reminiscing about our pleasant conversation with
him at Sky Harbor, and thinking about the challenges of being a person willing to speak first. She told me,
It is hard, Joni, to be the first one to speak. Especially if you are
Indian. Indians must always be aware of how much of their
culture has been lost and how careful they must be not to speak
a word that would contribute to more loss. There are often consequences for speaking, for being the first. It is hard to be the
first to speak on any issue that runs contrary to the opinions of
the dominant culture, but it is hard, too, to be the first to speak
in American Indian communities. Simon is a strong voice, a
strong writer who has spoken first in his poetry and prose on
many issues, including the consequences of colonization and
the reasons why we must see people at the center of our concern for the environment.
Teresa’s words were a tribute to Simon, who has remained true to
his Acoma source, while at the same time daring to speak first on important issues and standing as a strong advocate for greater social and
environmental responsibility. In poems such as “That’s the Place the
Indians Talk About,” Ortiz makes clear the explicit connection between speaking and advocating for justice. In the poem, an old Paiute
man listens to a sacred hot springs through a fence which has been
put up by the naval personnel who have built a base around the
springs and who now use this base to test weapons of destruction.
The Paiute man says, “We don’t like to talk to the fence and the Navy
/ but for a while we will and pretty soon / we will talk to the hot
springs power again” (Fight Back 34). The old man listens to the
“stones down there moving around each other” and hears them “talking”; this “moving power” is “the moving power of the voice, / the
moving power of the earth, / the moving power of the People” (Fight
Back 33, 35). By speaking through the fence, the Paiute man and the
group of people who travel with him illustrate the “moving power of
the voice” or the power of people who dare to speak. These people are
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demanding an end to five hundred years of injustices and their right
to social, cultural, spiritual, political, and ecological self-determination.
In his writing and speaking, Ortiz continually celebrates the power
of the voice, the power of speaking, to “change things in a good way.”
For facing the challenge of speaking first on so many interrelated social and environmental issues, I offer my most deeply felt tribute to an
artist who is demonstrating the powerful role that poets and writers
are playing in the environmental justice movement.
works cited
Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental
Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.
Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1990.
Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environmental and Social Justice.” UnCommon Ground: Rethinking the Human
Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 298–
320.
Leal, Teresa. Personal conversation. Tucson, AZ. May 16, 2004.
Ortiz, Simon. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land.
Albuquerque: Institute of Native American Development—Native American Studies, University of New Mexico, 1980. 33–35.
———. Seminar for “Poetics and Politics: A Series of Readings by Native
American Writers.” U of Arizona, Tucson, February 3, 1992. Unpublished
manuscript.
“Story Speaks for Us”
Centering the Voice of Simon Ortiz
p. jane hafen
Too many years ago to mention, I gave my first professional conference paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.
The topic of the paper was Simon Ortiz’s short story “Kaiser and the
War.” I was drawn to the story because Ortiz is a Pueblo Indian, like
myself, and the story is about a place and people I know. However, I
took a very structural approach, as I had been academically trained to
do. Mercifully, the text of the paper has disappeared along with the
obsolete 5 1/4-inch floppy disk where it was stored. Had I known
more about Ortiz and his writings at the time, had I followed his example of Pueblo resistance and trusted my own tribal voice to be also
an academic voice, the paper would have been much different.
To summarize briefly, the argument was that Kaiser is marked as a
victim because his appearance and behavior disrupt the community.
Utilizing the methodology of René Girard from Violence and the Sacred, I argued that Kaiser represents a sacred victim whose sacrifice
restores order to the community. One reason he threatens the community is because he functions as a trickster. As a “safety valve” his
behaviors represent disorder to the authorities who try to make him
submit. Rather than tolerate him as a traditional community would,
the police and draft board throw Kaiser in jail. His punishment creates a sense of communitas.
The flaw of this analysis (as I remember it) is the general flaw of
structuralism; the analysis becomes an end in and of itself. However,
at the time I was starting graduate school, that was an approach I was
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taught, and it worked with the story. It was the kind of analysis that
was accepted as a refereed submission and contained sufficient jargon
to suggest that I knew what I was positing.
I realize that this summary sounds like a mea culpa for a youthful
presentation. However, I think it raises another interesting dilemma
in American Indian studies, the matters of where and how one learns
the discipline of the field when many mentors are well intentioned
but ill informed and when institutions, conferences, journals, and
publishers reward traditional and colonial literary approaches. I was
fortunate enough to come under the tutelage and influence of indigenous academics who pioneered a place for native studies. Ortiz’s
writings and interviews became part of my education even though I
did not meet him personally until 1996.
Despite the inroads of indigenous theorists, the recognition of
Simon Ortiz and his writings at the Modern Language Association,
the publication of definitive works by Robert Allen Warrior (Osage),
Craig Womack (Muskogee Creek), and LeAnne Howe (Choctaw),
just to name a few, colonial criticism still rules. Oddly enough, even
early critics of Ortiz recognized that his writing and Native American
literature requires a critical approach apart from traditional methodologies. In Simon Ortiz (1986) Andrew Wiget suggests that considering Ortiz’s writings as part of the “West” as “a concept rooted in the
peculiar history and mythos of Judeo-Christian Europe [. . .] is fundamentally alien and antagonistic to the many distinctive culture and
mythic perspectives unique to Native America” (5). Additionally,
Dean Rader observes the challenges of discussing American Indian
literatures: “Perhaps Anglos find Native American literature elusive
or inaccessible primarily because it reveals metaphors of expression
of revelation or participation regarding memory and history, while
the dominant Anglo cultural narrative employs metaphors of occlusion, deception and deferral” (76). Rader goes on to note the challenges of finding critical literature about Native American poetry, but
he does encounter an abundance of interviews. He reiterates:
“[M]odern critical discourse does not know how to engage Native
American poetry the same way it addresses and critiques modern and
postmodern Anglo poetry” (77). Rader’s essay offers ways of talking
Hafen: “Story Speaks for Us”
63
about Ortiz and Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso with symbol and allegory. Nevertheless, the academy rules with various articles about
Ortiz that use traditional, mainstream critical theories.
Ortiz himself has noted the limitations of critical approaches to
his writings. In an interview with Laura Coltelli he states:
The [critical] works that I have read, have, unfortunately—I
would say 90 percent—a limited perspective, a limited view of
my poetry. By that I mean that too often their understanding of
my poetry is based on their acceptance and judgment of what a
Native American should write about. He should write about
Native American settings, he should use images that are Native
American, and should use the language and values of that; otherwise he is not acceptable. It is very stereotypical as well as
racist, unfortunately, which is perhaps the main concern that I
have: critics who don’t want to really understand Native
American people, that the Native America writer comes from
his people. If a critic doesn’t understand that people and that
land, then he’s not going to be able to discuss seriously or with
any comprehension what the writer is writing about. (115)
Ortiz not only identifies the restrictions of many critical approaches, but he names them what they are: racist. These critical
methods are not racist in the sense that they overtly demean or belittle American Indian writing; their racism lies in their presumption
to define standards for native writers and to impose ideals that have
nothing to do with native peoples and points of view.
Perhaps a lesson could be learned from current trends in religious
history studies. In a recent speech, “On Secular Bias in the Study of
Religion,” Brad Gregory posited that to understand history of the
Reformation, historians had to allow for the sincere beliefs and points
of view of the objects of the history (Forum). He was particularly
critical of the so-called objectivity of social anthropologists who attempt to intellectually distance themselves from their subjects. Additionally James D. Tracy in “Believers, Non-Believers, and the Historian’s Unspoken Assumptions” states
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graduate students of my generation took in as if through our
pores the idea that historical writing is scholarly only when it is
intended for a public domain governed by the canons of critical reason, a domain in which, by definition, no particular religious and philosophical stance should have any privileges.
(403)
Simply put, they argue that to understand Catholic history, historians
must account for the Catholic beliefs and Catholic culture’s points of
view in order to interpret events. The positionality of these two Catholic historians is grounded in both deconstructionist and Foucauldian
theories.
Therefore, academicians have to take only a short leap to enhance
understanding of the otherness of American Indian literatures. Native cultures, nations, languages, and theories must be centered to be
understood and interpreted. Learned theories can become extensions
of subordination and colonization when hearts of indigenousness are
ignored. Simon Ortiz clearly states how and where American Indian
literatures are foregrounded in a 1989 interview.
Native American literature is based on ritual and oral tradition.
[. . .] In terms of literary theme, land is a material reality as well
as a philosophical, metaphysical idea or concept; land is who
we are, land is our identity, land is home place, land is sacred.
[. . .] The spiritual aspect of literature is [. . .] responsibility and
the insistence on that common shared responsibility [. . .] Another distinction would be [. . .] “resistance literature” [. . .]
decolonization and liberation literature. (364–65)
Further in his essay “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” Ortiz argues for a singing, dancing, “community fulfilled in its most complete sense of giving and
receiving,” and, again, “resistance—political, armed, spiritual—
which has been carried out by the oral tradition” (7, 10). In this interview and essay, along with other sources, Ortiz is consistent and clear
about what he sees as vital in native literatures.
Hafen: “Story Speaks for Us”
65
Simon Ortiz’s graceful voice and my own years of experience presented a new way of reading “Kaiser and the War” when I recently
taught it. With more confidence, I no longer tried to apply an interesting but ultimately irrelevant theory to the story. The narrative begins in first person, a youthful narrator who was in the fourth grade
when Kaiser was released from jail. The anecdotal tone of the first
person underscores the idea of orality.1 Readers learn about Kaiser by
what and how the narrator tells in the story. The tradition of orality
becomes an issue of resistance when the narrator reveals that Kaiser
could neither read nor write prior to his incarceration nor could he
completely understand the proceedings that were conducted in English. Kaiser is subjected to the power of the colonizers, their judicial
system, and their language.
Additionally, the narrator tells of his grandfather who “would tell
us stories about the olden times.” The grandfather, “a healer and kiva
elder” is steeped in the ritual of storytelling. Kaiser begins to tell the
stories himself (26).
Kaiser seeks refuge on Black Mesa. This detail centers the story in a
place of indigenousness and refuge. The law enforcement officials,
the sheriff, another police officer, and a Bureau of Indian Affairs
agent, could not negotiate “the country around Black Mesa. It’s
rougher than hell up there” (27). Kaiser, who knows the land and is
the land, outlasts the attempts to find him. The tribal members are
deputized and make half-hearted efforts to assist the law, but spend
much of their time laughing and ridiculing the futile search.
Surprisingly, Kaiser decides to volunteer for the army. Grandfather Faustin (a recurring character in Ortiz’s short stories) tries to
dissuade him and directly forbids him. Kaiser resists, though, acknowledging that Faustin does not have the matrilineal authority to
order his staying home. Matrineal authority is established through
clan descendancy in many Pueblo cultures. Nevertheless, Faustin and
the narrator’s grandfather ritually bless Kaiser before he leaves. The
communal sanctification also emphasizes spiritual aspects of the
story.
The story jumps to Kaiser’s incarceration in the state pen. Even
though Grandfather Faustin passes away, the tribal members con-
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tinue to check on Kaiser, and eventually retrieve him. Kaiser seems
demoralized and dispirited by his experience. He wears a gray suit
everywhere, for every occasion. Despite his unusual behaviors, Kaiser
is tolerated and cared for by the community. Kaiser dies, without the
suit, on tribal lands. He tells his sister to return the suit to the government. The last line of the story concludes, “And then [someone] figured, well, maybe that’s the way it was when you went into the state
pen or the army and became an American” (38). Although Kaiser succumbs to his circumstances in terms established and defined by the
colonizers, the tribal community accepts him. They cannot liberate
him from the mental and physical incarceration and its consequences, but they still embrace him. The communal acceptance and
protection are a story of liberation over the law.
Kaiser’s story of resistance resonates with Ortiz’s Acoma Pueblo
heritage. The historical legacy of Acoma reveals that Ortiz is a descendant of survival. His ancestors survived the Acoma massacre of 1599
where more than fifteen hundred men, women, and children were
slaughtered by the Spanish conquistadores (Francis 39). In 1680 the
Rio Grande pueblos of what is now New Mexico revolted against the
Spanish and drove them from the area. For twelve years the Pueblos
kept the Spanish at bay, yet in 1692 the colonizers returned with vengeance and violence, which our Pueblo ancestors again survived.
Even in the twentieth century the Pueblos united in a formal organization, the All Indian Pueblo Council, to resist and defeat the landgrabbing Bursum Bill of 1922. That organization continues today and
is where Simon’s father and my father (Taos Pueblo) worked together
for the good of the Pueblo peoples.
Simon Ortiz gives readers the keys to understanding his writing.
His works are centered in indigenousness—land, language, and survival. His heritage is the cultural and historical context of Pueblo resistance that manifests not only in Kaiser’s story but also in the body
of Ortiz’s work. There is no better way to celebrate the grace of his
voice and to honor his works than to place his own voice at the center
of understanding his writings.
Hafen: “Story Speaks for Us”
67
note
1. For an excellent discussion of how oral traditions work in modern native literatures see Wilson, “Speaking of Home.” Wilson discusses Ortiz in
particular and refutes Arnold Krupat’s dismissal of orality.
works cited
Francis, Lee (Laguna Pueblo). Native Time: A Historical Time Line of Native
America. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Gregory, Brad. “On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion.” Forum Address.
Brigham Young University. Provo, UT, 23 March 2004.
Howe, LeAnne (Choctaw). “The Story of America: A Tribalography.” Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. Ed. Nancy
Shoemaker. New York: Routledge, 2002. 29–50.
Ortiz, Simon (Acoma Pueblo). “Interview.” Winged Words: American Indian
Writers Speak. Ed. Laura Coltelli. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990. 102–19.
———. “Interview.” Journal of the Southwest 31.3 (Autumn 1989): 362–77.
———. “Kaiser and the War.” Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories. Ed.
Ofelia Zepeda. Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series 37. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999. 23–38.
———. “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism.” MELUS 8.2 (Summer 1981): 7–12.
Rader, Dean. “Luci Tapahonso and Simon Ortiz: Allegory, Symbol, Language, Poetry.” Southwestern American Literature 22.2 (Spring 1997): 75–
92.
Tracy, James D. “Believers, Non-Believers, and the Historian’s Unspoken Assumptions.” The Catholic Historical Review 86.3 (2000): 403–19.
Warrior, Robert Allen (Osage). Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian
Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.
Wiget, Andrew. Simon Ortiz. Ed. Wayne Chatterton and James H. Maguire.
Western Writers Series 74. Boise, ID: Boise State UP, 1986.
Wilson, Michael (Choctaw). “Speaking of Home: The Idea of Center in
Some Contemporary American Indian Writing.” Wicazo Sa Review 12.1
(Spring 1997): 129–147.
Womack, Craig (Muscogee Creek). Red on Red: Native American Literary
Separatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
A “Touching Man” Brings Aacqu Close
kenneth m. roemer
You have to not only see color but you must touch it, in a sense become
that color, know it, let it become part of you. I think that old man
knows. I like to watch him. He pushed his steel rim glasses with bony
knuckles back up the bridge of his nose. I call him Touching Man.
Simon Ortiz, “Two Old Men”
I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to
steal a big bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would
crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with
my head in and feet out. My feet have been so cracked with the frost,
that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gnashes.
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Great distances of time, culture, place, and race separate Frederick
Douglass from Simon J. Ortiz, but they are close enough to touch.
Both know that they have life-giving stories to tell about the beauties
and injustices of their times and places—times and places that are so
far removed from most of their readers that they have to find powerful rhetorical strategies that invite those readers to allow the distant
to “become part of [them].” Ortiz is especially conscious of this challenge. In the opening pages of Woven Stone (1992) he defines his literary calling as “[m]aking language familiar and accessible to others,
bringing it within their grasp and comprehension, [this] is what a
writer, teacher, and storyteller does or tries to do. I’ve been trying for
Roemer: A “Touching Man” Brings Aacqu Close
69
over thirty years” (3–4).1 “Grasp” is indeed a strong component of his
mission. Like Douglass, Ortiz is a master of tactile imagery, and he
uses this mastery to transform topics as remote and small as a dry
root in a wash and as hidden and apocalyptic as the Jackpile uranium
mine into living parts of us. In this informal appreciation—a small
catalogue of poem excerpts with brief discussion—I can only skim
the richness of this grasping. But my skimming at least suggests the
diversity and sophistication of Ortiz’s tactile imagery that makes
graspable the death and destruction of people and land; the complexity of place and time; celebrations of creation and re-creation; and
moving insights into a hope that mingles with loss, a hidden beauty
and faith in survival in places of death, and a sense of loneliness that
proclaims a deep sense of wonder.
Ortiz is known for his condemnation of technological and governmental forces that wreak havoc in Indian Country. Three of his
poems indicate the variety of ways he uses tactile images to voice his
protests. In the “Electrical Lines” section of “The state’s claim . . . ,” he
personifies a machine (“it pointed”) that tears up the earth:
When they were putting up the lines,
there was this machine.
The machine had a long shiny drill
which it pointed at the ground
and drove it turning into the earth
and almost suddenly there was a hole (A Good Journey 256)
In “For Our Brothers: Blue Jay, Gold Finch, Flicker, and Squirrel,” the
impact of highway construction and cars is brought as close as a
touch of fur, mutilated fur:
I touch it [a squirrel corpse] gently and then try
to lift it, to toss it
into some high grass,
but its fur comes loose.
It is glued heavily
to the ground with its rot
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and I put my foot
against it and push it
into the grass, being careful
that it remains upright
and is facing the rainwater
that will wash it downstream. (A Good Journey 253–54)
The use of the tactile imagery in this poem is typical; Ortiz often saves
powerful tactile images for climactic sections of his poems (in this
case squirrel is the last of four road-kill victims) and images of touch
are frequently enhanced by synesthesia (here the “smell” of “disintegration” immediately follows the above quoted lines).
Possibly the most potent example of touching the core of technological and governmental impact appears in “Ray’s Story,” a poem
from the “Too Many Sacrifices” section of Fight Back (1980). Despite
the humor of the opening—the focus of the poem is “Lacey, from
Muskogee,” who is known for his enormous member—“Gawd, the
Okies would say, / that Indian is big”—the foreman’s (Ray’s) story is
one of impending doom (299). Lacey’s job is the most dangerous in
the uranium mine. He has to stand by the “vibrating chute” to watch
for debris (drill bits, cables, timbers) mixed with the ore that could
plug up the “Primary Crusher.” When spotted, the debris has to be
extracted by reaching, or even crawling, in to get it after signaling to
stop the movement. According to the “official report,” Lacy tried to
grab for a moving cable, became tangled, and was sucked in, “right
down into the jaws” of the crusher (301). Instead of the up-close view
Ortiz offered in “For Our Brothers,” we get indirect touches: the Forman became aware of the tragedy when he noticed that the crushed
ore “was wetter than usual” and when he spotted the “only thing / that
had been noticeable about Lacy before” (302). This instance of distancing from the actual process of crushing by concentrating on the
“results” implies both the horror of the event—a death and dismembering beyond words—and the ways technology and destructive
policies can distort the very meaning of life and death. Lacey’s fate is
a sickening tale of from dust to dust.
Many of Ortiz’s poems, especially in Good Journey and Fight Back,
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71
imply or describe the destructive effects of technology and governmental policies on the land of the Southwest. But as reviewers and
scholars have noticed ever since the publication of his first collection,
Going for the Rain (1976), Ortiz celebrates the restorative powers of
the land that offer healing counter forces in a technological world.
Again tactile imagery plays a key role in making healing landscapes
seem close at hand. After the dislocations of the second (“Leaving”)
and most of the third (“Returning”) sections of Going for the Rain,
one of the hopeful signs of change occurs near the conclusion of the
third section in “East of Tucumcari.” A man on a bus surprises the bus
driver by asking to get off “sixteen miles east of Tucumcari”; he is
“coming home,” a home signaled by the “brown water / falling from a
rock” but most of all by a literal act of feeling: “It felt so good / to
touch the green moss” (116). This feeling of home is immediately
linked by juxtaposition to images of fecundity, femininity, and origins of regeneration:
It felt so good
to touch the green moss.
A woman between
the mountain ridges
of herself—
it is overwhelming. (116)
To the eye, the setting of “Dry Root in a Wash” expresses a striking
contrast to the moisture of home’s “green moss.” But as in this poem
from the fourth section of Going for the Rain (“The Rain Falls”), there
is almost always more than meets the eye in Ortiz’s poetry. In a subtle
process of synesthesia, the visual images of the juniper root and the
Shiwana “upstream” are framed by stated and implied tactile experiences. “The sand is fine grit / and warm to the touch,” opens the
poem; “Underneath the fine sand / it is cool / with crystalline moisture, / the forming rain” closes it (140). The speaker of this poem invites readers to permeate the dry wash visual images with tactile feelings of fineness and warm moisture and then fulfills those feelings
with the promise of a dazzling (“crystalline”) regeneration.
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There is more than the mixing of sight and touch in “East of
Tucumcari” and “Dry Root in a Wash.” As in most of his landscape
images, there is the mixing of place and time: a touch of green moss
becomes an emblem of the timeless forces of Earth Mother’s creativity; a dry root reminds impatient humans to feel the promise of renewal in the warmth and hidden moisture of Her skin. Other poems
strong in tactile imagery address more directly the continuity of the
ages made manifest in the present. “Old Hills,” one of the early poems
in the second section of Going for the Rain, opens with a humorously
provocative progression of understatement to hyperbole:
West of Ocotillo Wells,
the hills are pretty old.
In fact, they’re older than any signs
telling the tourists where they’re at,
older than all of millennium’s signpainters. (69)
The storytelling voice in this poem contrasts this depth of time with
the shortsighted way a group of students measure their experience in
these hills. They are making a film “worth six credit hours” (69).
Again a tactile image heightens the contrast in the climactic lines that
echo the opening and blend sight and touch to evoke memories of
the ancient ocean that covered the Southwest:
These hills are pretty old.
Some have worn down to flat desert valley.
Some stones remember being underwater
and the cool fresh green winds. (69)
Ortiz can also capture the touch of the past in images of humans
as old as the hills. “Curly Mustache, 101-Year-Old Navajo Man” follows “Dry Root in a Wash” in Going for the Rain. “Curly Mustache”
imaginatively gathers central regenerative images from this collection: hands, roots, hills, mountains, water, wind, and the poet as ancient trickster-cricket/cicada. The climactic stanza once again invites
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closeness (in this case to great antiquity) with a tactile image charged
with sight and sound:
A thousands of years
old cicada
here one moment,
one place
in millennia.
Tell me about the glaciers.
Tell me if this is correct
what I have heard: the scrape
of a glacier sounds
like a touching wind
on stone, wood,
in someplace mountain dream. (141–42)
New life poems express some of Ortiz’s most moving expressions
of the time depths of the present and of regenerative forces operating
in the timeless present. It is significant, though certainly not surprising, that the first personalized signs of new life in the opening section
of Going for the Rain (“The Preparation”) come in the form of tactile
images:
O child’s tremble
against your mother’s innerwall,
is a true movement
without waste or hesitation,
a beating of wings
following ancient trails
to help us return. (42)
The miraculous flutter of the human fetus energizes this and other
poems (for instance, “The Expectant Father”), but Ortiz doesn’t limit
himself to the touch of new human life. An especially poignant poem
expressing the spontaneous and profound interconnections between
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the old and the young and among plant, animal, and human new life
hinges upon a tactile image of new (mice) life. In “My Father’s Song”
a recollected child’s voice recalls a rather ordinary interruption to the
ritual of corn planting that a father’s insight and love transformed
into an extraordinary learning experience:
We planted corn one Spring at Aacqu—
we planted several times
but this one particular time
I remember the soft damp sand
in my hand.
My father had stopped at one point
to show me an overturned furrow,
the plowshare had unearthed
the burrow nest of a mouse
in the soft moist sand.
Very gently, he scooped tiny pink animals
into the palm of his hand
and told me to touch them.
We took them to the edge
of the field and put them in the shade
of a sand moist clod.
I remember the very softness
of cool and warm sand and tiny alive
mice and my father saying things. (57–58)
“My Father’s Song” highlights an unstated motif running through
my comments about Ortiz’s ability to evoke closeness with tactile
imagery: the central role of hands. Hence it is appropriate that I conclude this brief appreciation essay by concentrating on two of his best
hands poems: “A Story of How a Wall Stands” from Going for the Rain
and the “Two Old Men” section of “Poems from the Veterans Hospital” from A Good Journey. Both echo themes of death and destruction. As readers of Fighting Back know, the setting of the former—the
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75
wall of the ancient graveyard at Aacqu—is a stone-hard reminder of
many deaths going back to and before the successful Pueblo revolt of
1680 and the retaliatory massacre against Acoma in 1692. The latter
more directly images the results of modern wars: a relevant “Indian”
topic since in the twentieth century a higher percentage of American
Indians have volunteered for the armed services than any other ethnic group in the United States. Both poems acknowledge by implication the dark sides of mortality, but the hands-on tactile imagery
helps to balance the darkness with solid foundations of love and
wonder.
As in “My Father’s Song,” the father in one of Ortiz’s most frequently
anthologized and discussed poems “A Story of How a Wall Stands”
turns an everyday (though extraordinary) sight at Aacqu into a powerful teaching experience. An ancient stone wall somehow restrains the
weight of “tons of earth and bones”—“a graveyard built on a steep incline;” the father explains that the surface of the wall, which “looks like
loose stone,” is underpinned by stones carefully “woven together” and
secured by mud expertly mixed “to a certain texture” (Going for the
Rain 145). This sensible engineering lesson helps to explain the longevity of the wall (and graveyard) and helps readers to understand the
origin of the title of Ortiz’s collection Woven Stone. But the real power
of the “lesson” is in the father’s hands. In each of the three stanzas, the
hands demonstrate, dramatize, and personalize, making the unseen
foundation familiar to the young man and an unfamiliar, remote structure as accessible as the memories of a parent’s touch and gestures to a
willing reader. The repetition of the words constitutes auditory and visual reinforcement of the repeated hand motions:
and with his hands he puts the stone and mud
in place.
[. . .]
He ties one hand over the other,
fitting like the bones of his hands
and fingers
[. . .]
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he says, “the mud mixed
to a certain texture,” patiently
“with the fingers,” worked
in the palm of his hand.
[. . .]
He tells me those things,
the story of them worked
with his fingers, in the palm
of his hands, working the stone
and the mud until they become
the wall that stands a long, long time. (Going for the Rain 145)
By the end of the poem Ortiz has woven the wall, hands, and story
into one graspable mystery.
“Two Old Men” has attracted less attention than “A Story of How a
Wall Stands,” but it expresses a touch as powerful as the lessons gestured by Ortiz’s father. The “Poems from the Veterans Hospital” focus
on “men broken / from three American wars” (A Good Journey 270), a
topic and place distant from many readers and a topic that could easily invite depressing stereotypes of Indian victimization and alcoholism. The particular subject of “Two Old Men” is a silent old man—
“He has never said a word that I have heard” (A Good Journey 271).
wandering at the edge of a marsh. Instead of pitying this lonely, weakeyed veteran, the observant voice of the poem is captivated, even
awed, at the joy this nameless veteran’s hands see in the colors of a
common “tangle” of “autumn rushes”:
He believes that colors
have shape, texture, substance,
depth, life he can touch.
I know they do.
I believe him.
When he is reaching
his long bony fingers
to a lettered sign
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77
or a dark spot in the sidewalk,
there are the frankest features
of delight, surprise, wonder
in his face.
I believe him.
[. . . ]
Form is not all
nor hearing
for the tensile mass
vibrates against
my tendrils
the mind that sprouts
and reaches into depths
of the tips of my fingers.
He touches me with spider tendrils.
[. . .]
Touching Man, you know things only
a very few know, and that is your strength
your aloneness.(A Good Journey 272–73)
As in his best poetry, Ortiz does not hide the suffering and loneliness
of this “Touching Man,” a torment that often reflects five hundred
years of suffering at the hands of European and American wars and
ways. But he also infuses this story with senses of survival, wonder,
and delight that are made accessible to readers far from Acoma
Pueblo by Ortiz’s powerful sense of touch.
Certainly Ortiz’s other poetic senses—his conversational tone, his
narrative skills, his creative use of explanatory prose, and his use of
visual and auditory imagery—can bring readers close to his landscapes and concerns. And certainly there are many other significant
examples of his power of touch (recall, for instance, in From Sand
Creek [1981, 1999], the frightening image of blood spurting on the
plains so forcefully that hands were as helpless as sieves at containing
the outpouring). But I hope this rather old-fashioned bit of New
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Critical image hunting and informal admiration offers insights into
the intricate layers of Ortiz’s craft and politics. One of the most important types of cultural and political “work” that American Indian
authors can do is the creation of works that, to borrow words from the
prose of “Two Old Men,” invite readers, “not only to see,” but to “touch”
and “in a sense become” part of the realities of oppression and destruction, senses of place, time, and balance, and the gift of love and delight
in the midst of graveyards and loneliness. Ortiz’s grasp of the power of
touch makes him one of the revered workers in these fields:
It doesn’t end.
In all growing
from all earths
to all skies.
in all touching
all things,
in all soothing
the aches of all years,
it doesn’t end. (Going for the Rain 147)
note
1. All the quoted poems in this essay appear in Woven Stone (1992), which
gathers together three of Ortiz’s previous collections: Going for the Rain
(1976), A Good Journey (1977), and an updated version of Fight Back: For the
Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980). Citations include the appropriate collection title and page number from Woven Stone. I would like to
thank Simon Ortiz for permission to quote from Woven Stone.
work cited
Ortiz, Simon J. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.
Resistance and Continuance through
Cultural Connections in Simon J. Ortiz’s
Out There Somewhere
patrice hollrah
Simon J. Ortiz explains that the title of his 2002 collection of poetry,
Out There Somewhere, is intended to mean “out there somewhere in
everyday experience somewhere in America” (ix). He adds, “But
while I have physically been away from my home area, I have never
been away in any absolute way” (ix). The poems in Out There Somewhere attest to the cultural connections that Ortiz maintains even
though he might be in some location other than the Acoma Pueblo.
The resistance one finds in the poems—against mainstream political,
social, and economic forces—results in continuance of Ortiz’s
Acoma heritage. That natives can still be natives when they are away
from their tribal homelands speaks to those who are urban natives,
which is over two-thirds of the native population in the United
States: those natives who have left the reservation for economic reasons; those native tribes who have no land base; those natives who
have no federal recognition as official native tribes; and those natives
who for reasons of patrilineal or matrilineal descent have no tribal
affiliation. Although they are “out there somewhere,” they continue to
be native, as Ortiz so deftly demonstrates. A political thread runs
through Ortiz’s earlier poetry collections, and this essay looks at a few
of the poems in Out There Somewhere to see how this literature of
resistance continues through cultural connections.
In the preface to Out There Somewhere Ortiz writes, “Yet at the
same time that we are away, we also continue to be absolutely connected socially and culturally to our Native identity. We insist that we
as human cultural beings must always have this connection because it
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is the way we maintain a Native sense of Existence” (ix). In the first
section of the book, “Margins,” the opening poem, “Headlands Journal,” speaks to the issues for which Ortiz is so well known. Ortiz was
an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (HCA) in
Sausalito, California, in 1994. The HCA “seeks to explore and interpret the relationship between place and the creative process, and to
extend appreciation for the role of artists in society” (Headlands).
The poem has ten entries, dated from June 14 through July 14, and
Ortiz reports on the conversations with his fellow-artists, the food,
the weather, his health, alcoholism, memories, family, and a strong
political attack on the U.S. government. The first entry is framed with
romanticized descriptions of the moon: “The moon, the moon, the
best kind of sky is the sunset light of the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly I’m
too lonesome again” (3). In contrast, the central part of the first entry
critically comments on the disproportionate number of natives in the
Alaska state prisons: “When I say Alaska has a 17 percent Native population in the state and 70 percent Native inmate population in its state
prisons, Victor shakes his head. Tanure nods yes, yes” (3). Both artists
are from other countries, Victor from Mexico and Tanure from Nigeria,
but they understand the injustice in the legal and penal systems that
oppress dark-skinned people and those on the “margins.”
In the second entry, dated June 16, Ortiz has an exchange at dinner
with three artists from China. One of the two interpreters with them
is white, and when Ortiz asks him how he learned to speak Chinese,
he says, “Because of the diplomatic corps”; Ortiz thinks to himself,
“[O]h shit the fucking CIA” (4). The progression from the opening
romanticized description of the moon to critiquing state prisons and
federal organizations, which deal in foreign intelligence and national
security, leads to the final verbal assault on the U.S. government in
the ninth entry. The progression symbolizes romanticized notions of
American Indians that are demythologized by the reality of oppressive institutions of authority.
Ortiz contemplates the idea of “risk” in art that takes place at the
HCA on land managed by the U.S. Park Service, and eventually concludes, “There is nothing at risk in this fucked up nation and epoch. /
THEY got it all. And they don’t have to risk. / THEY want us to risk.
Hollrah: Resistance and Continuance
81
But for THEM, there is no risk” (8, 9). The resentment toward “white
people especially” builds to hypothetical resistance in imagining the
kind of “risk” they could take (10):
What would happen if we put up signs saying NO ENTRY.
PRIVATE PROPERTY.
VERNMENT ST
AY OUT
STA
OUT..
Signs which stated U.S. GO
GOVERNMENT
Signs which state:
AT TENTION LIARS, THIE
VES, AND KILLERS
THIEVES,
ole
n eenoug
noug
h land and lif
e.
You ha
stole
olen
nough
life.
havve st
lo
wed aacccess.
From he
n ou
t, yyou
ou ar
ng
herre o
on
out,
aree no lo
long
ngeer al
allo
low
laim ba
e.
We cclaim
bacck our land and lif
life.
Go aawa
wa
y
.
way (9)
The entry goes on to consider the nature of “risk,” noting that it
must be more than personal: “It has to concern itself with ethical,
moral, political, social, historical, spiritual, material issues and questions. Personal risk is the least at stake” (10). In accusing the U.S. government of stealing land and life, Ortiz relies completely on his
Acoma Pueblo cultural connections for the history of colonization, a
history that is never separated from him no matter where he travels.
By examining the “relationship between place and the creative process,” the mission of the HCA, Ortiz engages in an artistic act of resistance and decolonization, imagining the possibilities for a different
relationship between the U.S. government and native peoples, one in
which the natives are in control.
Ortiz ponders a different kind of relationship—social interaction—in “Essentialism,” also from the opening section, “Margins.”
After insisting that he knows “more about being Indian than [the
reader],” he vents his frustrations in an unpunctuated stream of consciousness about inane questions that challenge his identity:
man sometimes i feel like punching someone out or even killing
it’s so crazy you know you just feel like when you get those stupid
ass questions like some kind of test not that they’re even serious
queries but feel more like deliberate harassing and demeaning
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ones that get you so riled you squirm and fidget and think insane
twisted thoughts your emotions tangling and twisting your face
and making you swallow hard (15)
Ortiz asks, “Is essentialism untenable? Or is essentialism tenable?”
(15). He has always answered this kind of question by referring back
to his Acoma Pueblo culture:
There is hope. It is in what past generations of our people have
always said. As long as we keep believing in and living by the
ways of our people, we will continue. As long as the story of our
struggles, which is like the story of all people who deeply love
and respect themselves and their culture, community, and
land, is told, we the people will continue. (Surviving Columbus)
Ortiz frequently speaks about continuance through his cultural connections even when he is “out there somewhere” and people ask racist
questions about his identity.
Ortiz repeats the familiar theme of continuance and communal
worldview as the supplicant prays in the first-person plural in “In the
Moment Before,” another poem from the opening section:
As he prayed, he thought:
the land, the way of life, the community.
Ours. Our own. Our heart, blood, soul.
Yours, the grandmothers and grandfathers said.
Yours, ours, yours, ours, always, always. (21)
The title alludes to the moment before contact, when the indigenous
inhabitants of the Americas could not imagine how their lives would
change after contact. Ortiz acknowledges the ancestors and the future
as he thinks of what is most important in his Acoma Pueblo heritage:
land, culture, and community. These aspects of life are what constitute the peoples’ ontological identity, and they will remain the same
forever for everyone. In the second stanza, the speaker reasons why
there must be resistance in the people’s lives: “As he thought, he
Hollrah: Resistance and Continuance
83
prayed: / always this is ours, our way of life, / this is why we must fight
for ourselves, always” (21). Having established what makes up life for
the Acoma Pueblo community, the speaker argues that the people
must fight to maintain that life, or the unspoken result is that their
way of life will no longer be. Ortiz also equates thinking with praying,
erasing any boundaries between intellectual thought and spiritual
meditation, by having the two activities exist simultaneously. Not
privileging one activity over the other, he reverses their order at the
beginning of stanzas 1 and 2. To conclude the poem, the speaker
moves from the past verb tense to the eternal present and recommends what action the people must take: “And today, we must think
as we pray: / always one with our struggle, hope, and continuance, /
always for the sake of the land, culture, and community” (21). Yet
again, Ortiz urges the community to understand that as a group they
must continually think of their resistance to outside forces in order to
preserve their way of life, their identity, and their future.
The second section of Out There Somewhere is titled “Images,” and
the poems are just that—images of natives, some of themselves and
some that others have of them. The opening poem, “‘Being Poor’ and
Powerless. And Refusing Again,” deals with the economics of being
native. The speaker thinks of himself when he does not have any
money and the sense of helplessness that accompanies poverty: “I
think of myself. Being poor, feeling mostly powerlessness because of
it. I know, I know, poverty doesn’t have to mean powerlessness. Yet
that’s how it mostly is” (35). Ortiz illustrates a history of natives being
economically disadvantaged by the time line and characters in the
poem. Roxanne calls the speaker and asks him, “Guess who’s back in
town?” (35). The speaker remembers back twenty-five years, but cannot think who might be in town. When Roxanne tells him that Mendoza has been living in a shack and is very poor, she “adds without
sympathy, ‘He reminds me of my father’” (35). Hence, there are four
native characters who understand poverty in a generational way: the
speaker, Roxanne, her father, and Mendoza. However, Mendoza is,
according to Roxanne, “still at it,” which implies survival (35). The
speaker remembers times in the past that he has been poor but refuses to be poor in spirit: “And I think of myself at times counting my
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last pennies again. Feeling poor. Feeling poor again and again yet at
the same time also refusing poverty I think” (35). The refusal is the
struggle to endure despite the overwhelming odds of economic disenfranchisement. In fact, Ortiz compares the desperation that poverty engenders to the Unabomber’s agenda and wonders “how many
of us have made plans for bombs intended for corporations, their
banks, and the police state that protects them from the poor and the
powerless” (35). The conclusion indicates the extremes to which poverty will drive people and the resistance that people will affect toward
the rich and powerful.
Another poem from the second section, “Welcome to America the
Mall,” deals with economics and natives. After defining the mall with
brand names and familiar chain stores, the speaker complains about a
white friend who proudly boasts, “I’m glad my children are not consumer oriented” (43). The speaker agrees, but he is also angry about
the class differences:
I’m glad also.
But it pisses me off she can say that.
That she should say that.
With no compunction about it.
That she and her children can afford
not to be consumer oriented. (43)
The friend’s obliviousness to her family’s status and privilege, to their
ability to make a conscious decision about whether to engage in the
capitalistic enterprise of shopping at the mall, reveals the gap between
the middle and lower classes. The speaker is sympathetic to those who
do not have the freedom to make such a decision, and he accusingly
remarks, “This is America where poor people have to pay for bare survival” (44). In a country where malls have an abundance of goods, as
listed at the beginning of the poem, the speaker implies that there is
injustice in the inequality among classes when there are those who can
scarcely eke out a living. He indicts those who are blind to the condition of the have-nots and reminds them that everyone is implicated in
the production of goods and services: “This is the Mall. / Welcome. /
Hollrah: Resistance and Continuance
85
Because we’re within it” (44). The inclusive “we” refers to natives, who
work in the mall in low-paying service jobs, as well as the white consumers, who have the money to spend in the stores, and the mall represents the United States as a capitalistic nation. The critique of this system is resistance against the economic forces that keep the classes
separate. Oritz’s indignation at the insensitivity to the poor is reflective
of his belief that people have responsibilities in life to those around
them. In commenting on the stories of native authors, he writes that
their stories “make sure that the voice keeps singing forth so that the
earth power will not cease, and that the people remain fully aware of
their social, economic, political, cultural, and spiritual relationships
and responsibilities to all things” (Earth Power vii–viii).
In “Gifts,” part three of Out There Somewhere, Ortiz writes about
the gifts that he finds in life, the new possibilities for hope, family,
love, and regeneration, whether they are in the children and the
promise of their future or in the natural world. In “Our Children Will
Not Be Afraid,” he speaks of his obligation to the earth:
Marking my own stricken yet struggling word, I owe
something
to this Earth Our Mother. Let my debt be without loss;
let it be with song, joyous, affirmed, loving.
For the reason is I am alive, you are alive, we are alive! (68)
The relationship to the earth and its support of life is clear, and the
speaker asks for celebration of that sustenance through his writing,
words that continue the “struggle” for survival. Ortiz has pointed out
the relationship between language, the people, and survival: “There
have always been those words which evoked meaning and the
meaning’s magical wonder. There has always been the spirit which
inspired the desire for life to go on. And it has been through the
words of the songs, the prayers, the stories that the people have found
a way to continue, for life to go on” (Earth Power vii). He also recognizes the possibilities for today’s children, predicting that they will
succeed because of the inspiration of the ancestors and famous warriors of the past:
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Our children will welcome the call and song into their
breasts.
Their dreams will be engendered by Popée, Tecumseh, Crazy
Horse,
Chief Joseph, Geronimo, and all our grandmothers
and grandfathers.
And they will hear them say their lives are our lives,
their hearts our
hearts.
And they will come to know it will not be the thieves,
killers, liars
but our people who will have victory! (69)
Naming the well-known warriors who resisted the encroachment of
the whites, who fought for their people’s land against the injustice of
the U.S. government, signifies continuance through cultural connections to the past. Ortiz honors a history of Native American political
resistance.
In the fourth section, “Horizons,” Ortiz looks at the possibilities
beyond him, “out there somewhere,” and includes poems in his native
Keres language with an accompanying English version. In the opening poem of the cycle “Acoma Poems,” “Kuutra Tsah-tseh-ma Srutaikyuiyah” (Your Life You Are Carrying), he addresses again the relationship between the land and people: “This is the dirt / This is the
land. / This is ours” (90). The land belongs to the natives, and the
speaker claims that the people carry the earth rather than the earth
carrying the people: “Dirt you are holding. / Land you are carrying. /
Your life you are carrying” (91). People carrying the earth indicates a
responsibility to the land, one of protection, a reciprocal relationship
in which their very survival is at stake. Frequently Ortiz has commented on the relationship between the land and native writers: “[T]he
inspiration and source for contemporary Indian literature [. . .] is the
acknowledgement by Indian writers of a responsibility to advocate
for their people’s self-government, sovereignty, and control of land
and natural resources” (“Towards a National Indian Literature” 12,
emphasis added). In the poem’s deceptively simple message, there is
Hollrah: Resistance and Continuance
87
an element of action that people should take: “This is what I am
showing and telling you. / This is what I am telling and showing you”
(91). Language and action cannot be separated. If people carry the
land, they must also “control” their land, resisting the forces that
would not allow that.
In “Ever,” the fifth section of Somewhere Out There, the poems are
about relationships among people, the natural environment, and
time, in that memories continue forever. In “Tsegi Canyon,” the
speaker begins with the single word “Motel,” a place that connotes a
transitory nature, but the symbol is immediately followed by “at the
edge of stone,” which implies a sense of permanence, such as the Tsegi
Canyon will always have (116). The third line is simply “deep sigh,” so
there is serious emotion to be found in this setting (116). The speaker
fears that the “deep sigh” “may be the last,” but by the end of the poem
he understands “It will not be the last / place, words, or motel” (116).
In other words, the natural environment will continue, the words expressing emotion will continue, and the temporary places where
people come together when traveling, such as in motels, will also continue. Life will go on. The underlying theme is continuance.
The final section, “Connections After All,” returns to a more political tone with the poems that frame this part: “Beginning and Ending Song: Part I” and “Beginning and Ending Song: Part II.” There are
connections for Indians “out there somewhere,” both positive and
negative. There are positive connections in “Smiling for Victory”:
“Don’t anybody ever tell you that it is all in vain. / Don’t anybody ever
tell you that Indians never smile. / Just look at all those smiles!” (156).
Ortiz subverts the stereotypical image of the stoic Indian who never
wins and humorously affirms the survival of Indians “out there
somewhere.” Humor is also apparent in “Beginning and Ending
Song: Part II” as the speaker resists the judiciary system by refusing to
pay fifty dollars in bail to avoid a fifty-day sentence: “No way I’ll stay or
pay, Judge” (157). The guilty party refuses to participate in an “eitheror” situation, to do jail time or pay the fine. Instead, he accuses the
judge as the guilty one: “You honor no honor, Judge” (158). The
“honor” alludes to the treaties in this country that the U.S. government has not honored. Thus, the speaker exhibits resistance, rejects
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the verdict that others have handed him, and decides instead to survive on his own terms. He will not be incarcerated by a history of
oppression and injustice. Repeatedly Ortiz has explained how natives
have survived:
Throughout the difficult experience of colonization to the
present, Indian women and men have struggled to create
meaning of their lives in very definite and systematic ways. The
ways or methods have been important, but they are important
only because of the reason for the struggle. And it is that reason—the struggle against colonialism—which has given substance to what is authentic. (“Towards a National Indian Literature” 9)
“The Beginning and the End” represents an endless story of how the
speaker maintains his authenticity as a native, no matter where he is,
whether in his home community, an urban location, or “out there
somewhere” in America, and he does so through his cultural connections.
works cited
Headlands Center for the Arts. 11 Apr. 2004, http://headlands/org/.
Ortiz, Simon J. (Acoma Pueblo). Introduction. Earth Power Coming: Short
Fiction in Native American Literature. Ed. Simon J. Ortiz. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College P, 1983. vii ix.
———. Out There Somewhere. Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literature
Series 49. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.
———. Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People. KNME-TV Albuquerque and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Program Concept
and Initial Development Larry Walsh. Prod. Larry Walsh and Edmund J.
Ladd. Dir. Diane Reyna. Writer Larry Walsh. Original poetry written by
Simon Ortiz and Rina Swentzell. West Los Angeles: PBS Home Video, 1992.
———. “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism.” MELUS 8.2 (Summer 1981): 7–12.
Morning Star Song
kimberly roppolo
There is a revolution going on; it is very spiritual and its manifestation is economic, political, and social. Look to the horizon and listen.
Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek
Simon, I want to thank you in this way.
I want to honor you for what you have done for us.1
I don’t want to use the language of academia
or its forms
because I want to thank you from the place where you touch me . . .
somewhere in my spirit.
You spoke to Tsis-tsis-tas sorrow
and I saw your word-magic
ease the hardness in the eyes of tomorrow.
You have taken our wounds and showed us
their counterparts
in each other,
from place to specific place,
from tribe to tribe,
from man to woman to child,
from generations past into the future.
You took our Aunties and Uncles,
writers from many tribes,
Beadwork by Bobbi Ann Blackbear. (Photo courtesy of the author.)
Roppolo: Morning Star Song
91
and showed them a road,
back in Al . . . bur-quer-que,
back in the 70s.
You put their feet on a path
and held their hands,
pulled them along into song
and re-story-ing the Peoples.
Yes, I know you all had your tears,
Your moments of cloudy anger,
but Love was at the center of it all,
and fire spread from your belly to theirs.
We still warm our hands at it now.
It still creeps through our palms,
en nos brazos,
en nos corazones,
and flames out in our tongues,
filling the air with smoke, cinder, and new growth.
You have gifted us—Wa-do.
You have fathered us—Ma-do.
You have mothered us—Ya-ko-ke.
You have guided us—Ni-a’-she-men.
Tonight, when I look up,
You are there.
I will follow you until morning,
where, transformed,
our children will map trails by you
for seven generations more.
note
1. The Cheyenne look to the Morning Star to find their way, and that is
how they regrouped after the massacre at Sand Creek. Because of the impact
of From Sand Creek on my Cheyenne students, I thought this was an appropriate metaphor for Simon. Also, Simon has guided us all—he really is the
one who broke ground and guided the whole American Indian literary re-
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naissance back in Albuquerque in the seventies. Where would any of us be
without him? Moreover, he taught us all to look beyond a narrow tribalism
and see what we have in common with each other, with the world. The moccasin in the illustration is a Cheyenne Morning Star pattern.
The Work That Must Be Done
daniel heath justice
Although I can clearly recall the first day I met Simon, the memory of
that afternoon doesn’t quite fit my sense of reasonable time, because
in many ways his words have guided me for much longer. I was
twenty when I first read Woven Stone, at a time when I was shuffling
off the heavy shame I felt as a mixed-blood Cherokee hillbilly from a
poor mountain town, and Simon’s deep love of land, language, and
his Acoma Pueblo community—the substantive concerns of all his
work—found a healing home in my spirit. It was a while before I read
more of his work, as my focus quickly moved from literature by
American Indians in general to Cherokee literature in particular, but
each time I returned to Simon’s poems, essays, and stories, I listened
to new rhythms in his words, and new dimensions to the driving purpose of his writer’s voice.
Thus it was with no small bit of apprehension that I prepared to
meet him for lunch on my first day as an Aboriginal literatures job
candidate at the University of Toronto, where Simon was in his first
year as a visiting professor in the English Department. After all, it’s
one thing to be inspired by a writer’s work, but quite another thing to
risk watching that inspiration vanish if the writer turns out to be
something less than generous.
I needn’t have worried, because Simon was just as I hoped he’d be:
kind, thoughtful, and certain in his dedication to the dignified continuity of indigenous peoples. Although I was still a graduate student
at the University of Nebraska and felt rather overwhelmed by the
rush and bustle of Toronto and the Anglophilic splendor of U of T,
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Simon put me at ease during our conversation. He’d read some of my
writing and shared his thoughts on it and made clear to me that there
was a lot of work to be done in Toronto for whomever was hired for
the position. It was my first personal meeting with Simon, and a
memorable one, for he provided encouraging support coupled with
high expectations.
I was fortunate enough to be the chosen candidate for the job, and
in the two years since, I’ve had many opportunities to work with
Simon on a number of projects dedicated to increasing the presence,
access, and visibility of indigenous people at the University of Toronto. Rather than focus exclusively on U of T or even on Toronto,
Simon’s attention starts with the local but also encompasses hemispheric and international indigenous concerns. He’s given U of T a
stronger name in indigenous studies and provided time, energy, and
money to developing or enhancing projects like the Indigenous Literary Reading Series and the Aboriginal Studies Distinguished Lecture
Series, which bring renowned native scholars, artists, and political
leaders to share their knowledge with the city and university communities; an ambitious, interdisciplinary indigenous studies journal; and
the development of a critical reference project on the literatures of indigenous North America.
Simon’s work and life are embedded in the teachings of the ancestors, the traditions and spirits of the land and the people. He has
noted that “we are living today only because the generations before
us—our ancestors—provided for us by the manner of their responsible living,” and this ethic of respect and humility characterizes everything he does.1 He is an energetic mentor to young native writers
and scholars across North America, leading us toward good creative
and economic opportunities and reminding us by his example that
our work is not just for ourselves, but for all our people today and in
the days to come. Never content to just stay put and speak from the
security of the Ivory Tower, he travels across the world to speak about
the continuing indigenous struggle for justice and provides his poetic
voice as a powerful healing tool in that struggle.
As a professional writer and an indigenous professor, Simon is one
of a small but growing group of native scholars and writers who are
Justice: The Work That Must Be Done
95
reclaiming the academy for our people, and his example has been
invaluable in helping me to see how my own scholarship can be richly
rooted in my nation’s intellectual and cultural traditions. And as a
colleague and co-teacher, he has given me tangible teaching strategies
for successful engagement with a wide range of issues, as well as support, guidance, and friendship.
Simon’s influence has traveled far beyond Acoma Pueblo and will
long continue to do so; it is a great honor to have benefited from his
intellectual and personal generosity. I am a better scholar, a better
teacher, and a better person for his example. There are many others
who can say the same.
note
1. Simon J. Ortiz, Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing
(Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1998), xii.
Revisiting the Regenerative Possibilities
of Ortiz
matthew e. duquès
As a graduate student in liberal studies at Dartmouth, and a recent
transplant from St. Michaels, Arizona, I find myself returning again
and again to Simon Ortiz. At St. Michaels high school on the Navajo
reservation, I had Ortiz’s epigraph to From Sand Creek plastered in
large black letters on my high school classroom corkboard.
This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising
from Sand Creek.1
Such words seem crucial for us, in both my American history and my
American literature courses, not only at a reservation high school located one mile west of the window rock, which marks the capital of
the Navajo nation, but to any classroom throughout the country.
Ortiz must be there. Few authors, poets or novelists are so deeply
disturbed and enchanted by the stories that scar and mar the American landscape as Ortiz. His writing takes us from his tribal home of
Acoma Pueblo, west of Albuquerque, to the massacred site of the
Duquès: The Regenerative Possibilities of Ortiz
97
Arapaho and Cheyenne in southern Colorado, to the prairies of the
Midwest, across countless cities, towns, and reservation lands. Consequently we are never unaware of where we are within Ortiz’s lines,
and that sense of place grounds us inseparably to who we are in relation to the country in which we live.
In response to both a discussion of this quotation and my apparent pedagogy, a student once asked me, “Mr. Duquès, for a white guy
you talk a lot about all of the bad things in American history. What
about the good stuff, you know the ‘spring wind’ and the ‘new grass’
that’s always gotta be there somewhere?” The question reminded me
poignantly of the manner in which Ortiz can in so few words convey
both the horrific tragedy of conquest and colonization, while at the
same time find a space for possibility, a means for recovery that is
never about forgetting but always occurs as a kind of recuperative
remembering. He speaks of “bad things” which are so pervasive in
our past, detrimental ideologies that persist today, pain that lingers,
yet with a remarkably powerful sense of courage and optimism.
I know my students at St. Michaels need this and can thrive upon
the sentiments that imbue Ortiz’s work, finding clarity and sense of
self within his words, which exemplify both criticality and assuredness, condemnation and hope. Likewise, I know I need them too, in
order to remind me as I continue to pursue further academic studies
a long way from the reservation that, for a time, I called home, that
often what is most cogent and essential in fields as diverse and interrelated as Native American studies, American studies, and cultural
studies, is the work that is done not solely in the name of justifiable
bitterness, visceral reconstruction of the past, and a fidelity to the representation of injustice, but work that sees such imperative subjects as the means toward reparative possibilities. What is more, I
think that in lieu of the complex dynamics of a post-9/11 America and
planet—where culture, religion, politics, and nationality are reinforcing binary oppositions with real world horrors—it is necessary
for all of us to return to Ortiz’s poetry. We must immerse ourselves in
the simple beauty of his words, remembering what we often forget,
acknowledging, as Ortiz tells us, that “repression works like a shadow,” choosing not to overlook what is destroyed and beaten down
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amidst those mentalities that operate under dichotomies that desecrate difference, learning not only from our own past genocides and
massacres, but also recognizing the arduous yet fruitful process, circumscribed to a site, geographic or otherwise, that is regeneration.2
notes
1. Simon Ortiz, From Sand Creek (Oak Park, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1981), 9.
2. Ortiz, 14.
Tribute to Simon J. Ortiz
robin riley fast
I think I first encountered Simon Ortiz’s writing in Duane Niatum’s
Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry.
(Many of us, I’m sure, benefited greatly from this anthology.) I was
especially moved by “A Story of How a Wall Stands,” a poem that
makes vivid and palpable the sustaining interrelatedness of family,
culture, land, and language. In the same anthology I found “The Creation, According to Coyote,” and was amazed by its multilayered
significances, complex tone, and linguistic agility. After this introduction I knew I would have to keep reading Ortiz, and I have. His work
continues to challenge and enlighten me and to give me great pleasure.
I could say, simply, that my tribute to Simon Ortiz exists in my
writings on his work and in the fact that I often include his poetry on
my syllabi (thus I also know of his power to move students to new
insights and recognitions). But I would like to be a bit more specific
about just one of the many ways in which his work impresses: While
he never stops advocating on behalf of native people’s voices, rights,
and history, and while he never suggests that the future will be easy,
he bravely imagines that natives and others might find ways of living
together constructively and creatively in this land whose history is so
deeply, and often so differently, part of all of our lives. Examining the
requirements and the implications of such a possibility is, I think, one
of the struggles that makes After and Before the Lightning an important book. In this book he exposes historical and contemporary disasters of Manifest Destiny, but he also affirms the restorative poten-
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tial in the human spirit and in the natural world. He insists upon
painful recognitions and hard work—especially for his non-Native
readers—but he also tells us all that if we commit ourselves to this
work we may hope that “The future will not be mad with loss and
waste,” that a new dream
wealthy with love
and compassion
and knowledge
. . . will rise
in . . . our America. (From Sand Creek 86, 95)
For this, among many other things, we owe him thanks.
work cited
Ortiz, Simon J. From Sand Creek. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2000. New York:
Thunder’s Mouth, 1981.
Prairie Songs and Poor Prayers
kathryn w. shanley
When I first met Simon Ortiz back in the early 1980s, a friend and I
had gone to visit him at his home outside of Albuquerque, New
Mexico. We brought with us a tree, a sapling, as a gift to honor
Simon’s newborn son. Now that son and that tree are grown, but
memories of our first visit linger.
Simon asked me if I knew him, and I said no, except for knowing
his work. He balked, as if offended, and said something about how
knowing his work is knowing him. Then Simon asked my friend to
tell the stories back to him that Simon had told him the last time my
friend had visited. Bo was chastised for not being able, or not having
the courage, to retell the stories, and Simon began again, telling us
many of the stories that identify him as human, as Aacqumeh.
That evening Simon would lie down for a while and we would visit
with his wife, but just as we were about to leave, he would be up again,
ready to talk, to tell stories. I love him for that night. I can’t exactly say
why, except to say that people are most believable who have a deep
belief—not as obvious of a thing as it may seem.
Although Simon does not drink now, he was drinking at the time,
drinking the way my mother used to drink and the way I have drunk
myself, to obliterate sorrow while at the same time remaining aware,
even intimately in touch with people, places, ideas. Believe me, I don’t
romanticize alcohol addiction or glamorize the longing and loss it
entails, and neither does Simon. No. I speak of those three things together—being known through one’s words, the importance of remembering stories, and climbing on the beast called Grief, a.k.a. Sor-
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row, determined to ride, to let ’er buck! They are the truth and fierce
beauty I associate with knowing Simon J. Ortiz Jr.: a child, a tree, a
story, a lesson, a life, a sorrow, a joy, and a raging grief.
Simon knows the howling winds of my own prairie homeland,
and knows them as if he were born there. In “The Prairie’s Song,”
Simon writes,
More than anything else
what we want to feel and finally know is the prairie’s song.
With this cored tightly always and forever enduring in
ourselves,
we can know
all manners and dimensions of grief and we will not fail
ourselves (83)
We pray our “poor prayer,” as he calls it, when eloquent words fail us
and when our pitiful selves know keenly how pitiful we are.
I love Simon for his insistence on enduring, “cored tightly always
and forever.” Those who love Simon’s words understand how that can
be because his “before” and “after the lightning” become more than a
season. He invokes a ceremonial space of grace and forgiveness, healing and remembering and being beyond all those abstractions into
sky gazing and wondering—a gratitude for being alive.
work cited
Ortiz, Simon J. Out There Somewhere. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.
Telling Our Daughters
robert m. nelson
There is a certain power that is compelling in the narrative of a storyteller simply because the spoken word is so immediate and intimate.
It was the desire to translate that power into printed words that led
me to write A Good Journey.
Simon Ortiz, preface, A Good Journey
“To Insure Survival,” which is often published as a freestanding poem,
was also published in A Good Journey as the final movement of a much
longer narrative, “Notes For My Child” (54–59). The first part of this
longer narrative records the interior monologue of a father-to-be, beginning in the early morning of July 5, 1973, and moving through the
taxi drive, the admissions procedure, the waiting room, and eventually
to the birth of a daughter. Around the same time Simon Ortiz was writing this poem in celebration of the birth of his daughter Rainy Dawn,
my own first daughter, Erin Carlisle, was born. But because it was 1976
and a C-section delivery, I wasn’t present in the delivery room to welcome her into her new life. Even if I had been there I suspect I
wouldn’t have known what to do, what to say.
About a decade later, in 1987, on a whim I applied to, and was unaccountably selected to participate in, an eight-week NEH Summer Seminar on American Indian Verbal Art and Literature. Near the
end of the seminar the director, Larry Evers, passed around a sheet of
paper containing the names of a dozen important Native American
poets, and each seminar participant selected one of those poets for a
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half-hour presentation. Since I was indisputably the most ignorant of
all the seminar participants (having read only two Native American
novels and a driblet of poetry prior to the seminar), I had absolutely
no basis for selecting one poet over another, and so I simply accepted
the one left for me: Simon Ortiz.
Later that week I read A Good Journey from cover to cover, mesmerized by the motion of the language but unsure what I could possibly say about this work that would matter to my colleagues. As a
fellow father, I finally homed in on his poems about his children, in
particular his birthday song to his daughter in “To Insure Survival.”
The poem seemed to me to be the very form of my own unsaid,
unarticulated feelings about my own first daughter’s birth, some of
my own unfinished business. Had I been witness, I thought, would
that I were moved to such words.
About a decade later, in 1996, I watched my second daughter
emerge into the world of air and light. It was a terrifying moment: she
came forth, howling, first a pale blue (I thought, Good lord, a Pict!)
and then, suddenly and with no perceptible period of transition,
bright red (I thought, Good lord, whose child IS this?), and eventually, after I cut the umbilical chord and she had buried herself in her
mother’s chest, she transformed into the pale complexion she wears
to this day. Watching my daughter come forth triggered a sudden and
certain memory of the opening lines of Simon’s poem, in which his
narrator describes the transformation of colors of his own daughter
during her birth, changing from “blue, to red, / to all the colors of the
earth” (58). So I wrote to Simon, asking his permission to use those
lines as part of my own daughter’s birth announcement, and of
course he said yes.
Then, as now, I read “To Insure Survival” as a dramatic monologue
that is part emergence story, part introduction to Acoma traditions,
part survival lesson, part prayer, and all love song. In stanza 1, cast in
the present tense, Ortiz’s narrator insures that the first story his child
ever hears is the old story of the People’s, and every new person’s,
natural identity with the land. In this case, the narrator fuses the image of enduring rock with the name of the newborn child, Rainy
Dawn, by comparing her emergence to
Nelson: Telling Our Daughters
105
a stone cliff
at dawn
changing colors,
blue to red
to all the colors of the earth (58)
The sequence of colors here being identical with the sequence that his
daughter’s body goes through at birth. In the second stanza, the narrator assures his daughter that the Keresan creatrix figure, Grandmother Spider, has been weaving a “life to wear,” a cultural and spiritual identity for her newest granddaughter to grow into, ever since
the beginning of time and place.1 In the third stanza, again in the
present tense, the narrator restates the identity of his daughter with a
“cliff at sunrise” and emphasizes the child’s kin identity with her own
mother, whose blood the newborn child still wears (59). Then, shifting to the future tense in the fourth stanza, the narrator returns to the
story of how spirit beings are working to insure her survival: he tells
his daughter of her kin relationship to the katsinas, “the stones with
voices, the plants with bells,” who will gather at sunrise in five more
days to dance welcome to the newest daughter of the People (59). For
the poet/parent, as for Spider Grandmother and the katsinas, his
daughter is the latest incarnation of the ageless project of Acoma cultural survival and renewal, and her survival insures this joint project
of Spider Grandmother, the katsinas, and the People for at least one
more generation.
If, that is, she survives. What is easy to overlook in this poem is that
it takes more than identity with the land and with Acoma traditions
to insure survival, because, Grandmother Spider’s project notwithstanding, life—especially new life—is very fragile. In addition to the
connotation of ephemerality implicit in the name Rainy Dawn, there
is the recognition of vulnerability in the narrator-father’s vision of
his daughter being “naked as that cliff at sunrise” coupled with the
tenuous grip on survival he describes a few lines later: “You kept
blinking your eyes / and trying to catch your breath.”2 Given such
shaky beginnings, whether this child will successfully complete the
transition from womb to world is touch and go.
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This, I think, is why Ortiz shifts from present to future tense in
stanza 4. The shift invites the child to anticipate the dawn of her fifth
day in the Fifth World, that time when, according to Acoma tradition,
the spirit completes the transition begun at birth. It is, I think, the
poet’s own attempt to help insure his daughter’s survival, to keep her
in his world with words: the katsinas will, after all, return to Acu to
celebrate their daughter’s arrival only if she is there to be greeted.
This is also where the poem begins to read like a prayer disguised as a
promise, a prayer endeavoring to become a promise, perhaps every
father’s prayer for his daughter upon her arrival. The poem’s final line
and fifth stanza, calculated to represent the fulfillment of Fifth World
promise, repeats the hope of the previous stanza in the form of a
four-word, four-syllable love song: “Child, they will come” (59).
Four sunrises and five days after my younger daughter, Ellie, was
born, she too was taken outside at sunrise—as it happened, the
morning of the spring equinox—and introduced to the universe. Because this was Richmond, not Acu, there were no stones with voices
or plants with bells visible to greet her coming, so we settled for the
black-capped chickadee who came to sing up the dawn at sunrise for
my daughter. Thank you, Simon.
notes
1. Ortiz, 58; readers may quickly, and correctly, recognize Ortiz’s Spider
Grandmother as identical with Leslie Silko’s “Ts’its’tsi’nako, ThoughtWoman” (1) and Paula Gunn Allen’s “Tse che nako” (The Sacred Hoop 13) or
“Sussistinaku, The Spider, Old Woman” (The Woman Who Owned the Shadows 207).
2. Ortiz, 59; more precisely, the name “Rainy Dawn” conjures the image
of dawn coupled with the blessing of rain. In the context of Acoma traditions, this rain can in turn be understood as shiwanna, the ancestor
spiritstuff that works for growth and regeneration. According to Gertrude
Kurath, there are four kinds of shiwanna or cloud people; the gentlest and
most feminine of the four is “heyaashi,” the mistlike cloud that sometimes
appears around dawn and touches the earth like fog. See Ortiz’s poem
“Heyaashi Guutah” in A Good Journey (123).
Nelson: Telling Our Daughters
107
works cited
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American
Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
———. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink,
1983.
Kurath, Gertrude. “Calling the Rain Gods.” Journal of American Folklore 73
(1960): 312–15.
Ortiz, Simon. A Good Journey. 1977. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1984.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking, 1977.
Many Thanks, Simon, for a Wonderful
Gift
carter revard
When I think of traveling between past and future, bringing things I
value with me, there’s a poem by Simon Ortiz that I always think of.
He wrote it as the seventh of his “Forming Child” poems (it is among
the poems in his great collection Woven Stone), at a time when one of
his children was forming in the mother’s womb:
7th
th ONE
Near the summit, SE of Kinlichee,
I saw a piece of snowmelt water
that I thought would maybe look good
on a silver bracelet with maybe
two small turquoise stones at its sides;
but then, I liked the way it was, too,
under pine trees, the snow feeding it,
the evening sunlight slanting off it,
and I knew that you would understand
why I decided to leave it like that. (44)
This has not yet been canonized as one of the great poems of our
age, but it will be—though, for Simon’s sake, I hope not for many
years, since it is much harder to write great poems when people are
telling you what a great poet you are and wanting you to write more
poems just like those that came before. We like what we know, and we
want the same when it comes to our favorite poems and songs: play it
again, Simon! But what he has done here is to keep that memory of a
Revard: Many Thanks, Simon, for a Wonderful Gift
109
particular place and time, that track of his past, and hand it over to
the child. He has “left it like that,” and yet he has also taken it as a gift
to the child yet unborn. He has given it to anyone who can read or
hear the English language and shares the gift of human sight and feelings. It is a turquoise and silver bracelet put into words, but as with
the real silver and turquoise work of Pueblo people, it is also the
mountain, snow-water, pine trees—the natural world—that are invited to come and live in the work of silversmith or wordsmith, who
can craft a story with a little world inside it like good medicine, getting across its human and natural and divine gift of meaning.
work cited
Ortiz, Simon J. Woven Stone. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1992.
Contributor Biographies
joni adamson is associate professor of English at the University of Arizona, South. Her publications include American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place and an edited collection
(with Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein), The Environmental Justice Reader:
Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy.
susan berry brill de ramírez is professor of English at Bradley University where she teaches native literatures, environmental literatures, and
literary criticism and theory. Her last book was Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (University of Arizona Press, 1999).
Her current manuscript is entitled “American Indian Autobiographies:
Storytelling and Ethnography in Navajo Country.” She is presently completing work on indigenous women storytellers and their women ethnographers.
david dunaway, the author of a half-dozen volumes of biography and history, is a professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Awarded the
first PhD in American studies from Berkeley, his specialty is the presentation
of literature and history on public radio and television in such national series as Writing the Southwest, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Worlds, and Across
The Tracks: A Route 66 Story (www.unm.edu/~rt66). Today, Dunaway is
leading an effort to promote southwestern studies at the University of New
Mexico.
roger dunsmore retired in 2003 after forty years teaching in the Liberal
Studies and Wilderness and Civilization Programs at the University of Mon-
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tana. His Earth’s Mind: Essays in Native Literature was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1997. His third volume of poems, Tiger Hill,
Poems From China, is forthcoming from Camphorweed Press, Seattle, 2004.
matthew e. duquès is a graduate student in liberal studies at Dartmouth
College. Prior to coming to Dartmouth, he taught high school English and
history at St. Michaels High School in St. Michaels, Arizona.
robin riley fast, associate professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College, studies and teaches nineteenth-century American
literature, American poetry, women writers, and Native American literature.
She has published articles on poetry, co-edited Approaches to Teaching
Dickinson’s Poetry, and is the author of The Heart as a Drum: Continuance
and Resistance in American Indian Poetry.
p. jane hafen (Taos Pueblo) is associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Reading Louise Erdrich’s
Love Medicine and editor of Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems and The
Sun Dance Opera by Zitkala-Ša and A Great Plains Reader (with Diane
Quantic).
joy harjo (Creek) has published six books of poetry. Her latest is How We
Became Human, New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton). She has received
several awards, including the 2002 Eagle Spirit Award from the American
Indian Film Festival for Outstanding Achievement, the 2002 Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Arts, an Oklahoma
Book Arts Award for How We Became Human, the 2001 American Indian
Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library, and the
2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award.
Harjo’s first music CD was Letter From the End of the Twentieth Century, released by Silverwave Records in 1997. Her new music CD, Native Joy For Real
is in release from Mekko Productions. She is a full professor at UCLA. When
not teaching and performing she lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
patrice hollrah is the director of the Writing Center at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, and teaches for the department of English. She is the
author of “The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell”: The Power of Women in Native
American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Contributor Biographies
113
daniel heath justice is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and
assistant professor of Aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto. His
research and writing interests focus on issues of indigenous literary nationhood, resistance, and decolonization. His indigenous fantasy novel, Kynship,
the first volume of the trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder, is forthcoming in late summer 2005 from Kegedonce Press. A full-length critical study,
“Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History,” will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in fall 2005.
evelina zuni lucero (Isleta/San Juan Pueblo) is a professor of creative
writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She is the author of the award-winning Night Sky, Morning Star.
david l. moore is associate professor of English at the University of Montana. He teaches and publishes on Native American and American literatures and has taught previously at the University of South Dakota, Salish
Kootenai College, and Cornell University. He lives with his family in Mis–
soula, Montana.
robert m. nelson is a professor of English at the University of Richmond, where he teaches a variety of courses in American Indian literatures.
For several years he was a co-editor of Studies in American Indian Literatures.
simon j. ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and storyteller. He has received many awards, including the “Returning the Gift” Lifetime Achievement Award, the WESTAAF Lifetime Achievement Award, the
New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in Art, and awards from the
National Endowment of the Arts, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and
Lannan Foundation’s Artists in Residence. He is currently a professor of literature and Aboriginal studies at the University of Toronto.
carter revard grew up on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma, where a
tornado came through on a Sunday in 1942 but passed by on the other side.
After work as a farm hand and greyhound trainer, he took BA degrees from
the University of Tulsa and Oxford (Rhodes Scholarship), was given his Osage name and a Yale PhD, and then taught medieval and American Indian
literatures before retiring in 1997. His books include Ponca War Dancers;
Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping; An Eagle Nation; Family Matters,
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Tribal Affairs; and Winning the Dust Bowl. He hopes his New and Selected
Poems: Songs of the Winethroated Hummingbird will be published in a year or
so.
kenneth m. roemer is an Academy of Distinguished Teachers Professor
of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. His articles have appeared
in American Literature, American Literary History, and SAIL, and his books
include four books on utopian literature and Approaches to Teaching
Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, Native American Writers of the
United States, and the forthcoming co-edited volume Cambridge Companion
to Native American Literature.
kimberly roppolo, of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek descent, is assistant
professor of native studies at the University of Lethbridge and the associate
national director of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her
recent publications include “Symbolic Racism, History, and Reality: The
Real Problem with Indian Mascots,” in Genocide of the Mind: An Anthology of
Urban Indians, edited by MariJo Moore; and “The Real Americana,” a poem
in This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. She is married and has three children.
kathryn w. shanley (Assiniboine) is chair of the Native American studies department at the University of Montana. She has published widely in
the field of Native American literary criticism on issues of representation of
Indians in popular culture as well as about authors such as James Welch,
Maria Campbell, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and N.
Scott Momaday. She recently edited Native American Literature: Boundaries
and Sovereignties (Delta, 2001) and has a forthcoming book on the writings
of James Welch.
laura tohe is Diné (Navajo). She is associate professor of English at Arizona State University. She has authored Making Friends with Water, the
award winning No Parole Today, and co-edited Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community. She writes essays, stories, and children’s
plays that have appeared in Canada and Europe, and has a book forthcoming, Tséyi’, Deep in the Rock.
Contributor Biographies
115
sarah ann wider is professor of English and Native American studies at
Colgate University where she teaches courses in contemporary Native
American literature. Frustrated by the ways in which conventional literary
criticism perpetuates a colonialist mentality, she is currently working with
other methods of interpretation that step out of the bounds of academic
discourse.