Simon J. Ortiz

Simon J. Ortiz
Born	(1941-05-27) May 27, 1941 Albuquerque, New Mexico, US
Occupation	Writer, educator, politician
Nationality	Acoma Pueblo
Period	c. 1976–present
Genre	Poetry, fiction
Literary movement	Native American Renaissance
Notable works	From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America

Simon J. Ortiz (born May 27, 1941) is a Puebloan writer of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. He is one of the most respected and widely read Native American poets.

Background

Ortiz is a member of the Eagle Clan. He was raised in the Acoma village of McCartys (the Keresan name is "Deetzeyaamah"), and spoke only Keresan at home. His father, a railroad worker and woodcarver, was an elder in the clan who was charged with keeping the religious knowledge and customs of the pueblo.

Ortiz attended McCartys Day School through the sixth grade, after which he was sent to St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe, as most Native children were sent to Indian boarding schools at the time. Attempting to provide an English language education, such boarding schools sought to assimilate Native American children into "American" mainstream culture, and strictly forbade them to speak their own native languages. Thus, the young Ortiz began to struggle with an acute awareness of the cultural dissonance shaping him and began to write about his experiences and thoughts in his diaries and compose short stories. While frustrated with his situation, he became a voracious reader and developed a passionate love of language, reading whatever he could get his hands on — including dictionaries, which he felt let his mind travel within a "state of wonder."

Homesick for his family and community, Ortiz became disillusioned with St. Catherine's. He transferred to Albuquerque Indian School, which taught trade classes such as plumbing and mechanics. He took both metal and woodworking classes, but his father was opposed to the prospect of his son's future being in manual labor. However, the day after graduating from Grants High School (in Grants, New Mexico near Acoma) Ortiz began work as a laborer at Kerr-McGee, a uranium plant. Interested in becoming a chemist, he initially applied for a technical position. Instead, he was made a typist, soon demoted to being a crusher, and later promoted as a semi-skilled operator. His experience as a mining laborer would later inspire his work, "Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, for the Sake of the Land."

Ortiz eventually saved enough money to enroll in Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, as a chemistry major with the help of a BIA educational grant. While enthralled with language and literature, the young Ortiz never considered pursuing writing seriously; at the time, it was not a career that seemed viable for Native people; it was "a profession only whites did."

Literary career

After a three-year stint in the U.S. military, Ortiz enrolled at the University of New Mexico. There, he discovered few ethnic voices within the American literature canon and began to pursue writing as a way to express the generally unheard Native American voice that was only beginning to emerge in the midst of political activism.

Two years later, in 1968, he received a fellowship for writing at the University of Iowa in the International Writers Program.

In 1988, he was appointed as tribal interpreter for Acoma Pueblo, and in 1989 he became First Lieutenant Governor for the pueblo. In 1982, he became a consulting editor of the Pueblo of Acoma Press.

Academic career

Since 1968, Ortiz has taught creative writing and Native American literature at various institutions, including San Diego State, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Navajo Community College, the College of Marin, the University of New Mexico, Sinte Gleska University, and the University of Toronto. He currently teaches at Arizona State University.

Awards and honors

Ortiz is a recipient of the New Mexico Humanities Council Humanitarian Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and was an Honored Poet recognized at the 1981 White House Salute to Poetry.

In 1981, From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America, received the Pushcart Prize in poetry.

Ortiz received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Returning the Gift Festival of Native Writers (the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers) and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (1993).

Works

• "My Father's Song" (poem; 1976 in Going for the Rain)
• A Good Journey (1977)
• The people shall continue (Fifth world tales) (1977)
• Howbah Indians: Stories (1978)
• Song, Poetry, and Language (1978)
• Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980)
• A Poem is a Journey (1981)
• From Sand Creek: Rising In This Heart Which Is Our America (1981)
• Changing the Routine: Selected Short Stories (1982)
• Blue and Red (1982)
• The Importance of Childhood (1982)
• This America (1983)
• A Good Journey (1984)
• Fightin': New and Collected Stories (1984)
• Always the Stories (1984)
• The Creative Press (1985)
• Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature (1988)
• The People Shall Continue (1988)
• Woven Stone (selected works) (1992)
• After and Before the Lightning (1994)
• Center (1995)
• Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, editor (1998)
• Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories (1999)
• Out There Somewhere (2002)
• The Good Rainbow Road: Rawa Kashtyaa'tsi Hiyaani (A Native American Tale in Keres) (2004)
• Ortiz, Simon J. "What We See: A Perspective on Chaco Canyon and Pueblo Ancestry," Chaco Canyon: A Center and Its World. Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994.

See also

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Studies

Further reading

• Wiget, Andrew. Simon Ortiz. Boise State University Printing and Graphic Services, 1986.

External links

• Works by or about Simon J. Ortiz in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Simon J. Ortiz at Native American Authors, Internet Public Library
• Simon J. Ortiz at Library of Congress Authorities, with 18 catalog records