Podcast appearances and mentions of Simon J Ortiz

Greetings! Today I read the poems of Steven J. Bernstein, Simon J. Ortiz, and Harold Norse and I sing an original song In the In Between. Thanks for listening!!

Selected Works: After and Before the Lightning, Simon J Ortiz

Two great Native Poets, in their own words. "Becoming Human" with Simon J. Ortiz and "Love Lessons in a Time of Settler Colonialism" with Tanaya Winder. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wwpoetic/message

Host Melissa Nelson sits down with famous Acoma Pueblo writer, poet, and storyteller Simon J. Ortiz to discuss the intricacies of traditional tribal identities, the wonder of our traditional foods, and our role as Indigenous peoples in the future of ‘green' urban development on our traditional territories. Simon's gentle ease and wise words amplify simple truths and ground large heady concepts, leaving us open to receive the immensity of his final gift a sharing of his poem, Deer Dinner.

Award-winning writer Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) first connected to poetry through music. As an adolescent, he would listen to country and western songs on the radio and write down his own lyrics. Before his decades-long professional writing career, Ortiz served in the military and labored in the uranium mining industry. Both things influenced his writing. We’ll talk with Ortiz about his poetry and prose and how his first language, Keres, shapes his writing and perspective.

Memory is incalculably important to human culture and society—in fact, memory is the conceptual basis of Existence in the present--but to Indigenous American peoples, the importance is denied them. To a very large extent, a certain key memory is not existent for them. It is non-existent to them because it is the memory of the European invasion, occupation, and conquest of the Americas that cannot be openly reconstructed by them so it can be put on display publically for public discourse. This key memory has to do with European invasion and conquest of the Americas, i.e., the lands now known as the continents of North and South America that consist of the lands and the social-cultural-governance systems of the Indigenous peoples who live on the invaded and conquered lands and whose descendents continue to live on them. Vast amounts of Indigenous lands were violently stolen and untold millions of Indigenous peoples were left homeless and the social-cultural-governance systems were dismantled. Literally an untold amount of destruction was wrought. And this memory is not existent because it is denied in many and various ways by domineering Euro-Americans who now are the majority population of North and South America. While a portion of memory of European invasion and conquest is allowed in grand gestures of condescension and even allowed for Indigenous peoples to address to a degree, there has never been adequate redress consisting of true recognition of legal governmental sovereignty that assures Indigenous peoples full recognition they were initially the original and absolute sovereign human stewards of the Americas before the invasion, occupation, and theft and destruction of their lands and way of life. When Euro-Americans have recognized, mostly in condescension, that Indigenous peoples—usually addressed and “recognized” by the misnomer “Indians”—were and are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas they have done so in an obligatory way that has had no formal internationally legal effect. Instead, that recognition has been dismally minimal and that style and manner of recognition has been rejected in the greater part by Indigenous American peoples. The effect has resulted in Indigenous Americans literally having no memory of their original, overall sovereignty over the continental lands now known as North and South America. The colonial condescension is rejected and its memory, if any, is also. Ortiz is a distinguished Professor of Indigenous Literature at Arizona State University, a native of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, a poet, fiction writer, essayist and storyteller. He is the author of over twenty books on Indigenous liberation and de-colonization, poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and children’s literature. His publications include Woven Stone, Out There Somewhere, from Sand Creek, After and Before the Lightning, The Good Rainbow Road, Men on the Moon, and others. "Memory, History, and the Present," a long poem. He is currently at work with Gabriele M. Schwab on a work of memory—for lack of a better term--titled Children of Fire, Children of Water. His courses of study focus on decolonization of Indigenous people's land, culture, and community. With literary perspective as a guide, research interests include cultural, social, political dynamics of Indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South America. Ortiz's publications in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, essay, and children's literature reflect his literary perspective across a range of his varied, active engagement and involvement in contemporary Indigenous life and literature. His publications, research, varied experience and intellectual participation is the basis of his engaging approach to the study of-involvement-engagement with Indigenous literature and its place in the canon of world literatures.

Children of Fire, Children of Water: Simon J. Ortiz & Gabriele M. Schwab read from their unpublished book. Moderator: Leslie Marmon Silko. Ortiz & Schwab's joint project is unpublished as a whole but for two sections in the following: “Imaginary Homeland Security: The Internalization of Terror,” pp. 79-95, America and the Misshaping of a New World Order, Eds. Giles Gunn and Carl Gutierrez-Jones, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2010; “Memory Is Key,” pp. 68-81, The Kenyon Review, Fall 2008, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Gambier, OH. Simon J. Ortiz and Gabriele M. Schwab, Children of Fire, Children of Water is a collaborative book project composed of dialogical memory pieces that reflect on memory, history and trauma in today’s global world. We are drawing on both personal memories and on the collective memories gathered from two different post-World War II cultures, Native American and German. Our memory pieces perform a cross-cultural exchange between Simon Ortiz, a Native American writer growing up on a reservation under the continuing forces of US colonization, and Gabriele M. Schwab, a writer of German origin who grew up in postwar Germany under French and US occupation and lives in the US. Reflecting upon historical violence and the ongoing traumatic effects of colonialism, war and genocide on individuals and communities, we are using a dialogical, experimental and evocative form. A form of cross-cultural boundary work, our memory pieces look at the traces left by the histories of colonialism and wars on our respective cultural imaginaries. Writing together, we position ourselves in a transitional space between our cultures and between history and the present. We use the stories we weave together as evocative objects that trigger memories we could not have recalled in the same way from within ourselves. In this process, individual memories transform themselves into a new synthetic memory born from cultural crossings. Our stories are not mere recordings of memories but rewritings of cultural memory in light of another culture. We hope that our audience becomes part of this process of rewriting memory during which histories are found and enacted in the present. The pieces in Children of Fire, Children of Water resemble mosaic compositions or kaleidoscopic images with fluid boundaries. They create a performance of cross-historical and cross-cultural encounters in two voices that, while discrete and distinct, continually interact with and color each other. The dynamic energy behind our project is created by resonances between our pieces and their power to work as catalysts for new memories that might never have emerged otherwise. Rewriting our stories in light of the other’s stories, we often play with bifocal storytelling and include bi- or multilingual interferences. But we also carry the traumatic silences and mute images of violent histories into our work, reflecting how the latter have marked us in different, yet often comparable if not resonant ways. The juxtaposition of life histories from different traditions, cultures and places may productively test habitual assumptions and patterns of thought as well as feeling states, if not structures of feeling. In the best case, such practices become part of unsettling engrained patterns of remembering violent histories.

A book talk at the UNM Bookstore for “Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance” featuring: Evelina Lucero, Isleta & Ohkay Owingeh, chair of Creative Writing at the College of Contemporary Native Arts, a center of the Institute of American Indian Arts, and co-editor of the book; Gregory Cajete, Tewa, chair of Native American Studies at UNM and author of the preface; and Simon Ortiz, Acoma, poet, writer and professor at Arizona State University.