Simon J. Ortiz

The massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children by U.S. soldiers at Sand Creek in 1864 was a shameful episode in American history, and its battlefield was proposed as a National Historic Site in 1998 to pay homage to those innocent victims. Poet Simon Ortiz had honored those people seventeen years earlier in his own way. That book, from Sand Creek, is now back in print. Originally published in a small-press edition, from Sand Creek makes a large statement about injustices done to Native peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny. It also makes poignant reference to the spread of that ambition in other parts of the world--notably in Vietnam--as Ortiz asks himself what it is to be an American, a U.S. citizen, and an Indian. Indian people have often felt they have had no part in history, Ortiz observes, and through his work he shows how they can come to terms with this feeling. He invites Indian people to examine the process they have experienced as victims, subjects, and expendable resources--and asks people of European heritage to consider the motives that drive their own history and create their own form of victimization. Through the pages of this sobering work, Ortiz offers a new perspective on history and on America. Perhaps more important, he offers a breath of hope that our peoples might learn from each other: This America has been a burden of steel and mad death, but, look now, there are flowers and new grass and a spring wind rising from Sand Creek.

From Sand Creek

Through poems and journal entries Simon Ortiz explores his Native American culture and the various challenges they face.

Out There Somewhere

poems

Going for the rain 

Woven Stone

The weather--portrayed with vivid imagery--dominates this collection, set on the prairies. In Three Days Before Spring, Snow Again, he writes: "Wind is up again, / swirling and pushing around / like it had nowhere to go, / losing and finding things / and losing them again." By the author of Woven Stone.

After and Before the Lightning

"There have always been the songs, the prayers, the stories of Native American writers. There is a wide variety of styles, themes and topics presented in the fiction of this collection of thirty authors. Their stories are evidence of the commitment made by Native American writers to express themselves in this genre of literature."--Amazon.com.

Short Fiction in Native American Literature

Earth Power Coming

Stories about American Indians of the past and present focus on their traditions, relationship with nature, independence, loneliness, visions, family life, and old age

New and Collected Stories

Fightin'

Poems

Going for the Rain

When Faustin, the old Acoma, is given his first television set, he considers it a technical wonder, a box full of mystery. What he sees on its screen that first day, however, is even more startling than the television itself: men have landed on the moon. Can this be real? For Simon Ortiz, Faustin's reaction proves that tales of ordinary occurrences can truly touch the heart. "For me," he observes, "there's never been a conscious moment without story." Best known for his poetry, Ortiz also has authored 26 short stories that have won the hearts of readers through the years. Men on the Moon brings these stories together—stories filled with memorable characters, written with love by a keen observer and interpreter of his people's community and culture. True to Native American tradition, these tales possess the immediacy—and intimacy—of stories conveyed orally. They are drawn from Ortiz's Acoma Pueblo experience but focus on situations common to Native people, whether living on the land or in cities, and on the issues that affect their lives. We meet Jimmo, a young boy learning that his father is being hunted for murder, and Kaiser, the draft refuser who always wears the suit he was given when he left prison. We also meet some curious Anglos: radicals supporting Indian causes, scholars studying Indian ways, and San Francisco hippies who want to become Indians too. Whether telling of migrants working potato fields in Idaho and pining for their Arizona home or of a father teaching his son to fly a kite, Ortiz takes readers to the heart of storytelling. Men on the Moon shows that stories told by a poet especially resound with beauty and depth.

Collected Short Stories

Men on the Moon

Two boys are sent by their people to the west to visit the Shiwana, the spirits of rain and snow, and bring back rain to relieve a drought.

The Good Rainbow Road

Joy Harjo

Leslie Marmon Silko

Lee Marmon

A collection of award-winning photographs celebrate the culture, history, traditions, and landscape of the Laguna Pueblo Native Americans, in a volume complemented by prose and poetry.

Landscape and Memory in the Photography of Lee Marmon

The Pueblo Imagination

Traces the progress of the Indians of North America from the time of the Creation to the present.

The People Shall Continue

Presents profiles of such authors as Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Bird, Esther B. Belin, Daniel David Moses, and Victor D. Montejo

Native Writers on Writing

Speaking for the Generations

Frank A. Rinehart

Around the turn of the twentieth century, most photographs of Indians pandered to shameless, insensitive stereotypes. In contrast, photographic portraits made by Frank A. Rinehart conveyed the dignity and pride of Native peoples. More than 545 Native Americans representing tribes from all over the country attended the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha in 1898 to be part of an event known as the Indian Congress. Rinehart, the expositionÕs official photographer, and his assistant Adolph Muhr made more than 500 glass-plate negatives depicting Native Americans in their traditional dress, now housed at Haskell Indian Nations University and regarded as one of the best photographic documentations of Indian leaders from this era. This book provides an unusual perspective on the Rinehart collection. It features one hundred outstanding images printed from the original negatives made by Rinehart and Muhr at the Congress and over the course of the next two years. It also includes 14 essays by modern Native American writers, artists, and educatorsÑsome of them descendants of the individuals photographedÑreflecting on the place of these images in their heritage. Beyond the Reach of Time and Change is not another coffee-table book of historical Indian photographs but rather a conversation between Indian people of a century ago and today. Just as the Rinehart collection offers today's Native Americans a unique connection to the past, this book offers all readers a positive understanding of continuity and endurance within the American Indian community.

Simon J. Ortiz

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