[This essay originally appeared in Handbook of American Indian Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland, 1996.  483-89. Rpt. Handbook of American Indian Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland, 1996. 483-89.]

ORTIZ, SIMON J. (27 May 1941- )

Though his work has received scant attention from the mainstream critical establishment, Simon Ortiz is generally recognized by critics and scholars of American Indian literature as one of the most talented and accomplished writers of the "Native American renaissance" of the 1960s and 70s. While productive as an essayist and short story writer, his reputation is usually associated with his poetry. Joseph Bruchac asserts that Ortiz may be the Native poet best known to other American Indians (211); both Paula Gunn Allen and Kenneth Lincoln offer his work as a model of the traditional American Indian voice holding its own in the contemporary world (Allen 132; Lincoln 189-200). His role as a leading figure in the struggle to preserve and continue traditional forms and themes is acknowledged, for instance, in the title of Joseph Bruchac's anthology of interviews with American Indian poets, Survival This Way--a line borrowed from one of Ortiz's poems. The voice of the Acoma traditionalist which informs his early work expands in his later work to encompass concerns usually identified with the pan-Indian nationalism of the '70s and '80s; even in these works, however, the voice of militant protest, the quality of anger and defiance we hear in the work of Jimmy Durham or Carol Sanchez, is subsumed and subordinated to the gentler rhythms of assurance and continuity characteristic both of his early work and of traditional Pueblo oral narrative and song.

Born in Albuquerque, Simon Ortiz was raised at the Acoma village of McCartys (called Deetziyamah in the Acoma language and in several of his works) in an Acoma-speaking family. The shaping power of these early years upon his own creative vision and self- concept as a writer is clear and evident in much of his work, as Ortiz himself both acknowledges and celebrates in his essays "Always the Stories" and "The Language We Know." In 1948 he began attending the BIA day school in McCartys; beginning with the seventh grade he attended the St. Catherine's and the Albuquerque Indian Boarding schools, and later attended college at Fort Lewis College (1962-63), the University of New Mexico (1966-68), and University of Iowa (1968-69). To support his writing career, Ortiz spent much of the following decade on the move, teaching at San Diego State (1974), the Institute of American Indian Arts (1974), Navajo Community College (1975-77), the College of Marin (1976-79), the University of New Mexico, and Sinte Gleska College; recurring images of bus depots, airports, and subway stations in his poetry of this period record a demanding schedule of lecture tours and speaking engagements.

Ortiz's commitment to preserving and expanding the literary tradition into which he was born--the oral tradition of Acoma-- accounts for many of the themes and techniques characterizing his work. Ortiz regards himself less a "poet" than a "storyteller"; however, the repertoire of the traditional Pueblo storyteller includes not only oral narrative materials which, given their oral texture, adapt easily to short story or essay form (e.g., anecdotal historical material) but also songs, chants, winter stories, and the more sacred oral narratives associated with origin stories and their attendant ceremonies, and such materials when recited aloud have a distinctly "poetic" texture.

Ortiz's role as a storyteller in the traditional Acoma sense is made explicit in the structure of his early collections of poetry, Going for the Rain (1976) and A Good Journey (1977). Read separately, many of the 90 poems that make up Going for the Rain seem lyric fragments, voicing a spectrum of human emotions ranging from exuberance (e.g., "A Pretty Woman") to despair (as in "The Wisconsin Horse") and a spectrum of occasion ranging from overheard barroom anecdote ("A Barroom Fragment") to intimate interior monolog ("Earth Woman"). Read within the context suggested by the prolog to the volume, however, the individual poems become steps of an integrated four-stage journey, the overall motion of which recapitulates the sacred motion of the shiwana or Cloud People of Acoma ceremonial tradition, whose function is to ensure continued life for the land and the people by ensuring the periodic return of rain. By metaphorically entering into identity with the motion of the life of Acu (the place where life happens), the persona of these poems ensures his own return, or re-emergence, into the life of acumeh hano (the Acoma people), which is at the same time a "return to himself." Thus contextualized, moments of both joy and despair acquired during the journey (which in this text takes the persona to such farflung places as Florida, San Diego, Wisconsin, New York City, and [closer to home] Gallup, Hesperus, and Albuquerque) become appreciable as gifts or blessings, brought home to the people in prayer. This journey in all directions further re-establishes Acu--the point of origin as well as the destination of what otherwise appear to be pointless wanderings--as the geographical as well as spiritual center of the storytelling persona's identity, a pattern which incidentally confirms the traditional American Indian concept of the healing power of human identity with sacred place. Ortiz's small chapbook A Poem Is A Journey (1981) is patterned along the same lines as Going For the Rain; here, the persona follows the trail of Tsaile Creek from Tsaile Lake to where it disappears into the earth of the Lukuchukai Mountains, a journey that reveals in passing the land's own need for some analog of a shiwana priest to bring the water back from "underneath, moving silently," into human consciousness and voice. In the final movement of this work, the persona, finding himself on the California coast, completes the journey of the poem by entering into motion with the clouds forming there, a motion that carries the combined life forces thus created eastwards, in the persona's regenerative vision, towards a reunification with the "thunder on Kaweshtima" and a vision of "moving grass at Aacqu."

This re-emergence aspect of the journey motif also informs several of the 60 poems comprising A Good Journey, Ortiz's most accessible volume. In "Heyaashi Guutah" the shiwana spirit still moves across the land on its southwest-to-northeast axis linking the mesas southwest of Acoma to Kaweshtima (Mt. Taylor), and in poems like "Notes For My Child" (part of which appeared in Going For the Rain as "To Insure Survival") human life still takes its distinctive colors and texture from the land of its origin. In the overall structure of A Good Journey, though, the center of the persona's identity is less a place on the land and more immediately the oral tradition that "lives" there, and the journey is about keeping that tradition (and, of course, the cultural values it encodes) in motion. The title of the volume derives from an interview statement (included in the volume's prefatory materials) in which Ortiz asserts that his creative vision is addressed to the continuum of generations of which he is a part--his children at one end, his grandparents on the other--and that the "good journey" is the movement from previous generations down through his own to the newest ones, i.e. the preservation through re-telling of the stories of "how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued." The titles of the five sections of this volume, beginning with "Telling" and ending with "I Tell You Now," contextualize the enclosed poems as oral events rather than merely objects, and in many of the individual works in the collection techniques such as multiple voicing, direct address, imbedded quotation, and internal glossing further enhance the impression of oral performance while at the same time bringing the voices of elders into contact with the voices (or sometimes simply the audience) of children. The frequency with which Coyote, the popular and in some ways populist Trickster/Transformer figure of Acoma oral tradition, appears in this volume (five of the nine pieces in "Telling," the opening section, are coyote stories) provides Ortiz not only with some delightful storytelling opportunities but also, as Patricia Clark Smith has pointed out, implicates Ortiz's storytelling persona in the search for new strategies of survival at both the personal and communal levels ("Coyote Ortiz" 1983). This concern also informs overtly the poems of the volume's fourth section, "Will Come Forth in Tongues and Fury," as well as much of Ortiz's later published work.

The theme of survival at the communal level is the major focus of the (lamentably neglected) works collected in Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980). Published in journal form jointly by the Institute for Native American Development and the University of New Mexico's Native American Studies program as a tricentennial commemoration of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, most of the 19 poems and the lengthy mixed-format piece comprising this volume are stories of "now-day Indians" and their co-workers (Cajuns, Okies, Blacks, Mexicans) struggling against government and corporate exploitation--exploitation of the land in the form of the Kerr-McGee uranium mining and refining operations at Ambrosia Lake in Acoma country and those of Anaconda at the Jackpile site in neighboring Laguna country, exploitation of the people in the form of economic and political control over the lives of the people, workers and non-workers, living in or near these places. Despite the preface to the volume by Roxanne Dunbar, which proposes an ideologically Marxist reading of both Pueblo history and Ortiz' work in this volume, the strong recurring theme in these works--the way Ortiz proposes to insure survival--is that the people have survived and continue to survive both as individuals but, more importantly, as a collective entity by identifying themselves with "the creative forces of life" ("Mid-America Prayer," the first poem of the collection). Heroism, or "fightback" in these works, takes the form of maintaining and promulgating the old ways, of preserving life in the oral traditional way, as for instance happens in "Ray's Story" when the story of how Lacey (an Indian from Muskogee) died in the mines becomes "Ray's Story," preserved in Ray's voice and further kept alive in Ortiz's written version of it. The role of storytelling in the preservation of the land and the people is the point of one of the finest poems in this collection, "That's the Place Indians Talk About," in which the story of the spiritual significance of the Ambrosia Lake area, regarded in Acoma oral tradition as the emerging place of the Acoma people, enters into identity with the story of Coso Hot Springs, a sacred place of the Shoshonean people. In this poem, the voice of an elder Paiute man telling the story of how his people still draw strength from this place despite the fence around it built by the China Lake Naval Station, combines with the voice of Ortiz's persona to confirm the ongoing "moving power of the voice" as a creative force of life in which are identified the moving powers of both "the earth" and "the People."

Perhaps the clearest stylistic indication of Ortiz's overall purpose in this collection (a purpose informing later works as well) is the mixed format of "No More Sacrifices," which takes up nearly half the volume. Formally, it presents as a prose essay interspersed with stanzas of a journey poem; generically, it reads as autobiography, contextualized within a cultural history of the Southwest (focused on the history of the Acoma area) and responsive internally to the embedded journey poem, which uses the traditional quest-for-water motif to make the point that changes in the life of the land oblige changes in the lives of the people who identify with it. Within the poem, the "sacrifice" takes the form of a sacred spring which is losing its energy; within the essay, Ortiz points out inter alia the extravagant wastes of water involved in "Mericano" railroad and mining operations in the area, operations also involving the kinds of human sacrifices to "progress" recorded in the stories comprising the rest of the volume--most notably episodes of physical relocation, spiritual dislocation, and surrenders of land. To upset the fragile balance of life on the land is to upset the life of the people as well. But what is equally apparent in the structure and texture of this piece (as in the volume as a whole) is that the roots of Ortiz's story lie not in the political ideology of the times but rather in his heritage of received oral tradition, recalled and celebrated as a source of continuing life here as it is in his earlier work. Even so, there is a certain strained tone to the works in Fight Back, as though the healing power of oral tradition were barely a match for the sheer quantity of pain encoded in the lives of the characters Ortiz tells and thereby makes a part of his own story.

This strain constitutes the dominant impression of From Sand Creek (1981), published the same year as Fight Back. Like "No More Sacrifices," From Sand Creek is a dual format work composed of 42 poetic sketches each accompanied by a short (frequently one-sentence) prose meditation on the facing page. As a whole, the work is set in the Fort Lyons, Colorado Veterans Administration Hospital, where Ortiz himself underwent treatment in 1974-75. the storytelling persona of these works seems less informed by the regenerative (healing) power of Acu in Acoma oral tradition than by the memories, the cultural heritage, of this non-Acoma place, Fort Lyons, understood not only as the site of the contemporary VA Hospital but also as the headquarters of the U.S. troops who, along with the Colorado Volunteers under the command of the reverend Colonel John Chivington, massacred about a fifth of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped along Sand Creek under a U.S. flag in the winter of 1864. Despite the images of regeneration and renewal with which the volume opens and closes, the tone of these works is almost unremittingly bleak. Andrew Wiget sees in these poems the operations of "a compassionate vision that would transform grief and guilt into hope" (Simon Ortiz 46); and Ortiz's own willingness and ability to enter into identity not only with the spirits of Native victims of Sand Creek (and Korea, and Vietnam) but also, astonishingly, into sympathetic identity with the diseased and dangerous spirits of all the parties to that massacre, Chivington included, certainly evidences the poet's compassion. Still, Ortiz's storytelling power in From Sand Creek seems strained beyond its ability to heal, this far away from its Acoma wellsprings and given the amount of pain and disease his persona enters into identity with in this collection.

The power of the creative vision informing much of Ortiz's poetry is somewhat attenuated in his prose fiction. In all, twenty-four of his short stories have been published in three volumes. Four of them appear in Kenneth Rosen's 1974 anthology, The Man to Send Rainclouds; another four comprise Ortiz's Howbah Indians; and Fightin': New and Collected Stories (1983) contains nineteen short stories, three of which appear in earlier collections ("Kaiser and the War" in The Man to Send Rainclouds, "Men on the Moon" in Howbah Indians, and "To Change in a Good Way" in Fight Back, presented there in poetic format). As Wiget has observed, Ortiz's short stories (like many of the works collected in Fight Back) "deal principally with the nature and consequences of cross-cultural encounters" (24), encounters ranging in anecdotal gravity from an old Acoma grandfather's exposure to, and eventually successful struggle to come to terms with, 20th century technology in the form of a television ("Men on the Moon") to a younger Acoma man's ambush and slaying of a New Mexico state policeman ("The Killing of the State Cop," in Rosen). Typically, though, the potential violence of these encounters is gentled not only within the plot structure but also by the point of view--the storytelling persona--Ortiz creates in order to convey the events of each story: as in much of his poetry at its best, it is the narrative voice which commands our attention and gives life to the story it tells. Such devices as the telling of stories within stories, multiple voicing, and direct quotation occur frequently in these stories, foregrounding the oral texture of the printed text. As significant as many of these stories may be as storytellings, however, they still read as more "prosaic" and to that extent less vital than Ortiz' poetry at its best, perhaps because of the monotonic appearance they have in prose form (compare, for instance, "To Change in a Good Way" in Fight Back with the prose version in Fightin'). Even so, Ortiz' short stories bespeak the same values that characterize the personae of his poetry and give cause for celebration: he is a spokesman for, and his work has the power to evoke in us, "respect, compassion, and the promise of hope" (Wiget 50).

  PRIMARY SOURCES

POETRY:

Naked in the Wind. Pembroke NC: Quetzal-Vihio, 1971. Chapbook.

Going for the Rain. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

A Good Journey. Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1977. Rpt. Tucson: Sun Tracks and U. Arizona, 1984.

Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land. Albuquerque: Institute for Native American Development--U. New Mexico, 1980.

A Poem is a Journey. Bourbonnais IL: Pteranodon, 1981.

From Sand Creek. New York and Oak Park IL: Thunder's Mouth, 1981.


SHORT STORIES:

The Man to Send Rainclouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians. Ed. Kenneth Rosen. New York: Viking, 1974.

Fightin': New and Collected Stories. Chicago and New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1983.


MAJOR ESSAYS:

"Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism." MELUS 8.2 (Summer 1981): 7-12.

"Always the Stories: A Brief History and Thoughts on My Writing." Coyote Was Here. Ed. Bo Schöler. Aarhus, Denmark: English Department--U of Aarhus, 1984. 57-69.

"The Language We Know." I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln and London: U. Nebraska, 1987. 185-94.

"The Story Never Ends." Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Tucson: Sun Tracks and U. Arizona, 1987. 211-29.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Gingerich, Willard. "'The Old Voices of Acoma': Simon Ortiz's Mythic Indigenism." Southwest Review 64.1 (Winter 1979): 18-30.

Lincoln, Kenneth. "Common Walls: The Poetry of Simon Ortiz." Rpt. in Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U. California, 1983. 183-200.

Smith, Patricia Clark. "Coyote Ortiz: 'Canis Latrans Latrans' in the Poetry of Simon Ortiz." Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. Paula Gunn Allen, ed. New York: MLA, 1983. 192-210.

Wiget, Andrew. Simon Ortiz. Western Writers Series No. 74. Boise: Boise S. U., 1986.