Simon Ortiz: An Introduction

"Earth Power Coming: Simon Ortiz and the Poetics and Politics of Telling"

"These few things then, / I am telling you / because I do want you to know / and in that way / have you come to know me now."

--Simon Ortiz, "I Tell You Now"

In his visit on February 3, 1992 to the University of Arizona's Poetics and Politics: A Series of Readings by Native American Writers, Simon Ortiz repeatedly emphasized the explicit connection he sees between telling--which is an act he sees being inextricably bound up in the Earth's inevitable power--and the struggle being waged by the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the world to go beyond survival to continuance. In his visit to Ofelia Zepeda's and Larry Evers' graduate seminar, his words at the Intertribal Graduate Center, and his evening reading--as well as in all his other tellings--Ortiz stands in marked opposition to the notion that the Earth is an inert, exploitable commodity. Instead, he sees the Earth as our Mother and literally alive with power; she might be blasted open and polluted by humans, but she can never really be desecrated.

This view of the Earth's living and inevitable power literally emerges from Ortiz's relationship to the people by whom he was raised and the land where he was born. It is a land which has sustained his people even as it has been colonized by both the United States government and several large corporations who commodify the people as labor and use them to extract the large deposits of uranium and other natural resources found in the Four Corners area. The Acoma people, Ortiz told us, were among the first to realize the improved prosperity afforded those willing to work deep in the dusty mineshafts; they have also experienced the devastating effects of breathing radioactive particles and drinking contaminated water. The Acome hanoe are a people, Ortiz emphasized repeatedly, whose creation myth tells them that their ancestors migrated up through underground world(s) to emerge from the sipa-po or sacred place from which all life emerges. Therefore, there is a profound irony, Ortiz points out, in sinking mine shafts deep into the sacred earth to extract the very substances that could destroy all life.

Ortiz's tellings, speeches, essays, interviews, poems and prose, then, set the power of ancient Acoma stories, which literally emerged with the people from the Earth, and present-day stories, as Silko might say, "in motion" to fight against nuclear colonization of the Four Corners area and all other forms of colonization as well. And through these "Earth powered" stories, Ortiz strongly affirms, Native Americans will inevitably regain the right to exercise the responsibility towards the land given to them by their ancestors. For by listening to the stones moving beneath the earth's surface and the voices of the dead which cry out from the ground, Ortiz tells us in a poem which he discussed at length during his visit, "That's the Place the Indians are Talking About," we can hear the "moving power of the voice / the moving power of the earth / the moving power of the People" (Fight Back 35 ).

Here, Ortiz makes very clear the connection between language/storytelling and a proper relationship with the earth in the ongoing struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Indeed, he told us, it is only when we are in a relationship that is responsible and proper, loving and compassionate, that we will "hear" what the earth has to tell us about survival and--going beyond survival--about continuance. By listening to what Ortiz, following D'Arcy McNickle, has termed "Earth power coming," we will be able to hear. And "Hearing, / that's the way you listen" (Fight Back 35). Through listening and hearing, "pretty soon it will come. / It will come / the moving power of the voice" (Fight Back 35). In other words, by listening to the stories from the Earth and her people, we come to voice and are able to tell our own stories of both oppression and destruction and hope and struggle. In this way, we not only survive, but we bring about change in the systems which oppress us; in short, like the Indians who, according to Ortiz, have not disappeared but are surviving and continuing everywhere in the United States, we prevail.

In visits such as the one he made to our class, Ortiz is participating in a relationship with the land and the people which he sees as responsible and proper. Quick to point out that he is not a spokesperson for all Indian people, he does acknowledge his responsibility to tell the stories of his own Acoma people and to work actively for causes that concern all Native American people. Western cultures, he told Laura Coltelli in an interview, "have claimed for themselves lands that are the responsibility of indigenous peoples; . . . Western cultures have attempted to break that responsibility . . . . [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, your children and so forth" (111). In his tellings or stories, then, Ortiz tries to articulate the struggle against these destructive forces of colonization. After his classroom visit, at the Intertribal Graduate Center, Ortiz forthrightly expressed his concerns about the ways in which he and others can participate in and articulate the struggle. He has at different times, he told those gathered at an informal brown-bag lunch, worked to make Indian studies a viable program on its own instead of a footnote to the American studies department, and he has championed Indian curricula at the University of New Mexico. He is also concerned, especially, about the nature of control over Indian programs. In addition, he sees language as a main source for redefining the Indian self and for asserting an Indian point of view. He also believes that there is a great need for Indian unity in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism. When asked about the seeming hopelessness of a struggle against those monolithic powers which oppress so many in the United States, Ortiz was very eloquent in his insistence that the hope is in the struggle itself, for in the experience of the struggle, we discover among ourselves some sense of a common denominator which can bring people with disparate beliefs and backgrounds together on some sort of political and spiritual ground. "We survive and go on," he insisted, "by the constructions made by our hope."

When questioned about his ideas about using language as a source for asserting the Indian point of view and about the possibility of English as a "Native American language," Ortiz acknowledged that to some extent, English is indeed an instrument of colonization and conquest. "Yet it is possible," he noted, "to claim the language as your own, on your terms, so that it's no longer similar to what it was before. When we claim it, we claim a responsibility for using it in terms that are ours. We can 'indigenize' language, I believe. When words are spoken in a cultural context." Ortiz added that words can, for example, be "Acomized." The main point here, Ortiz wanted us to know, is that we need to be in the process of what he calls, the "decolonization of the mind." Yes, English can be colonizing, but we can also use it in ways that decolonize.

Several times during the day, Ortiz spoke of his involvement in writing a screenplay which comments on Columbus from a Native American point of view. He sees his involvement in the project as an important gesture for him and a particularly appropriate opportunity to express the Native American perspective. In his artistic and political involvement with this project, Ortiz, who consistently asserts his Indian identity, demonstrates the synthesis of the artist and the social activist. Indeed, he takes the stance that politics and poetics cannot be separated. In a relationship that is proper and responsible he tells us something of himself, something about the Earth. Having heard his tellings, the responsibility is then passed on to us.