The American Century: Literature since 1945 779dual personality as a unified one, deriving her strength from marriage between he
cultures she is heir to. That strength enables her, as the novel closes, to strike out for
a territory that inspires a connection with the oldest and newest of American stories.
She is “heading West”; and, as she does so, she tells us, she is “greedy with wants and
reckless from hope.”New and ancient songs: The return of the Native American
Writing of those white settlers who were headed west over a hundred years before
Jasmine, the poet Simon Ortiz (1941–) observes: “It is a wonder / they ever made it
to California. / But of course they did.” “And they named it success. / Conquest. /
Destiny./ ” he adds. “Frontiers ended for them / and a dread settled upon them / and
became remorseless / nameless / namelessness.” Ortiz is from the Acoma Pueblo
tribe. The cycle of poems from which these lines are taken, from Sand Creek (1981),
weaves together autobiography and history, as Ortiz rehearses his experiences as a
veteran in a military hospital, the wars white Americans fought to wrest the land
from its original inhabitants, and the wars the tribes still have to fight in a society
that is oblivious to their presence, let alone their needs. “I am a veteran of 30,000
years,” Ortiz declares in another work, “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day” (1992).
Exploring personal and cultural dispossession, Ortiz finds the tools of survival in
the ancient stories and songs, the oral traditions of the Acoma Pueblo people. “I am
talking about how much we have been able / to survive insignificance,” he explains.
And the “we” here includes other Native American tribes since, as he observes wryly
in another, earlier collection of poems, Going for Rain (1974), “You meet Indians
everywhere.” All Native Americans, Ortiz insists in this collection – which was
published at a moment of particularly fierce political activism – must work against
the “feeling of no self-esteem, insignificance, powerlessness.” They can do so by
rediscovering their connection with the land and with the myths of their peoples.
More specifically, he suggests, they can do so by striving for a holistic consciousness
that is rooted in language: “not necessarily only native languages but the consciousness
of our true selves at the core of whatever language we use, including English.” “There
is a revolution going on,” Ortiz announces in from Sand Creek; “it is very spiritual and
its manifestation is economic, political, and social. Look to the horizon and listen.” It is,
for him, a revolution that embraces both the traditions of the tribal past and the
inspired talk of the present. Native Americans are “caught now, in the midst of wars /
against foreign disease, missionaries, / canned food, Dick and Jane textbooks, IBM
cards, / Western philosophies and General Electric.” Their way of escaping this
imprisonment, Ortiz suggests, is through a rediscovery of “ancient and deep story”
and “song as language.” Only by such means can they make a place and presence for
themselves and realize their dream of a true homeland. “That dream / shall have a
name / after all,” Ortiz prophesies in from Sand Creek, in words that offer a
triumphantly new variation on an old American theme. “And it will not be vengeful /
but wealthy with love / and compassion / and knowledge,” he concludes. “And it will
rise / in this heart / which is our America.”GGray_c05.indd 779ray_c 05 .indd 779 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM