The Politics of Language
by Andrew Peterson

TO ACOMA PUEBLO writer Simon Ortiz, language is a sort of living entity. It has an existence and a power independent of us. It's not a tool to be used, but a sort of presence, in which we can participate.

“Language is in the doing,” Ortiz says. “That's really how people learn—by doing, by living. That's how oral tradition is maintained. It's not something that you learn just from a book, but from the relationships that you have, the context that you're in, the relationships you have with those things in the context.”

His long, respectful engagement with language has made Ortiz one of the most moving and influential voices among contemporary Native American writers. Ortiz has written numerous books of poetry and fiction (among them A Good Journey, Going for the Rain and From Sand Creek) and his writing speaks deeply to his own experience as a part of the Acoma Pueblo community and to the lives of all Native Americans.

As he talks, Ortiz will complicate language in fascinating ways. He'll expand on an idea sentence by sentence, echoing certain rhythms, pausing to revise or repeat words and phrases. He almost compels you to listen to him, to discover where the path of his words will lead.

“Writing should always be a very physical act,” he says. “It's not an intellectual, abstract process entirely—obviously that's a part of it. But it should be like eating or playing—that you're involved with it, you as the writer or speaker and also the people that are listening to you or reading your work. They, as much as possible, are participating in that act of language. The oral tradition really insists on that.”

Although he's lived and taught all over the country, these days Ortiz is keeping busy back home on the Acoma reservation, east of Albuquerque , New Mexico . Among other projects, he's currently writing a segment of the upcoming PBS series called Surviving Columbus, to be aired this summer. In addition, a compilation of three of his earlier books of poetry will be coming out soon as part of the University of Arizona 's Sun Tracks series, under the title Woven Stone.

Around his house, outside the town of McCarty's, many of the landmarks that Ortiz refers o thin his writing are visible. In the distance, trucks and RVs are barreling down U.S. Interstate 40. Like all of the other “developments” that have traced their lines across Acoma land over the years—the railroad, the gas line, electric power, cable TV—the interstate occupies an important place in the geography of Ortiz's poetry.

“They took the best land,” he says when asked about the construction of the highway, “the bottom land where the river flows. People still talk about what used to be there. There used to be peach orchards down there.”

And for Ortiz, the political struggles that continue to be fought around problems such as land rights are issues that cannot be separated from the practice of poetry and storytelling.

“There's two kinds of stories that I grew up with,” he explains, “old-time stories—pre-colonial—and then other stories that dealt with community dynamics and the historical relationships between the Acoma people and other peoples, the struggle of Acoma people to live. That struggle sometimes took the form of cultural resistance, political resistance.”

The idea of separating stories and politics never even occurs to Ortiz. And in this respect, he sees himself as part of a much larger movement in Native American writing, a movement that continues to resist colonization through the act of language.

“I think,” he says, “that the kind of writing and literature that is developing is really evidence of a process by which we are asserting ourselves—in our own terms. We are not imitating the classical European forms, nor even the American forms. We are developing forms and styles and a language that's really our own.”