Matt Kriz's List: Ortiz Research

• The progression from the opening romanticized description of the moon to critiquing state prisons and federal organizations, which deal in foreign intelligence and national security, leads to the final verbal assault on the U.S. government in the ninth entry. The progression symbolizes romanticized notions of American Indians that are demythologized by the reality of oppressive institutions of authority.
• By examining the "relationship between place and the creative process," the mission of the HCA, Ortiz engages in an artistic act of resistance and decolonization, imagining the possibilities for a different relationship between the U.S. government and native peoples, one in which the natives are in control
• he conclusion indicates the extremes to which poverty will drive people and the resistance that people will affect toward the rich and powerful.

  • This is really lame, but maybe I can use it to counterpoint a bit.
• The inclusive "we" refers to natives, who work in the mall in low-paying service jobs, as well as the white consumers, who have the money to spend in the stores, and the mall represents the United States as a capitalistic nation.
• native Keres language
• Ortiz subverts the stereotypical image of the stoic Indian who never wins and humorously affirms the survival of Indians "out there somewhere."
• The "honor" alludes to the treaties in this country that the U.S. government has not honored. Thus, the speaker exhibits resistance, rejects [End Page 87]  the verdict that others have handed him, and decides instead to survive on his own terms. He will not be incarcerated by a history of oppression and injustice

5 more annotations...

• "The language I spoke was that of a struggling people who held ferociously to a heritage, culture, language, and land despite the odds posed them by the forces surronding them since 1540 A.D." (424)
  "When I began school in 1948 at the BIA day school in our village, I was armed with the basic ABC's and the phrases "Good Morning, Miss Oleman" and "May I please be excused to go to the bathroom," but it was an older language that was my fundamental strength." - Matt Kriz on 2008-06-17
• We were to set our goals as American working men and women, singlemindedly industrious, patriotic, and unquestioning, building for a future which ensured that the U.S. was the greatest nation in the world. I felt fearfully uneasy with this, for by then I felt the loneliness, alienation, and isolation imposed upon me by the separation from my family, home, and community." (427) - Matt Kriz on 2008-06-17
• "I remembered my grandparents' and parents' words: educate yourself in order to help your people. In that era and the generatio who had the same experience I had, there was an unspoken vow: we were caught in a system inexorably, and we had to learn that system well in order to fight back." (427)
  
  "We persist and insist in living, believing, hoping, loving, speaking and writing as Indians. This is embodied in the language we know and share in our writing. We have always had this language, and it is the language, spoken, and unspoken, that determines our existence, that brought our grandmothers and grandfathers and ourselves into being in order that there be a continuing life." (429) - Matt Kriz on 2008-06-17
• My childhood was the oral tradition of the Acoma Pueblo people--Aaquumeh hano--which included my immediate family ... My world was our world of the Aaquumeh in McCartys, one of the two villages descended from the ageless mother pueblo of Acoma. My world was our Eagle clan-people among other clans. I grew up in Deetziyamah, which is the Aaquumeh name for McCartys." (423) - Matt Kriz on 2008-06-17

• Ortiz spoke about remembering   the past in terms of the present. His observation here was that such memory   was about values, and that this type of memory was neither abstract nor nostalgic   in nature. Beyond that, he touched upon the idea of collective memory, as opposed   to individual memory, explaining that the former found itself at the core of   cultural, philosophical and religious concepts.

   
• Through forms of expression,   such as writing and other creative efforts, it was pointed out that the more   technological and industrial elements of colonization could be actually counteracted.   By reaching out to the hearts and minds of those who now share the land with   us, we can perhaps instill a sense of responsibility for Mother Earth in the   collective consciousness.

• The first recorded report of"Wild Horse Island" is in the 1854 journal of John Mullan, a member of Issac Stevens's exploration party. Mullan wrote:
• In 1872 the Flathead Indian Reservation was created, ostensibly placing land-including Wild Horse Island-in trust for the exclusive use of members of the Salish and Kootenai tribes. Only fifteen years later, the 1887 Dawes Act stipulated that the reservation be dismantled with tribal members receiving individual allotments of land, and in 1904 the Flathead reservation was surveyed and divided. At least two tribal members chose land on the island. Divided into lots called villa sites and 80- and 160-acre plots, unclaimed land was offered to white settlers in 1910, beginning a new chapter in Wild Horse Island's history.
• During the dry summer of 1955 nearly half of the herd was rounded up and transported by barge to the mainland for sale, but despite airlifts of hay, most of the island's wildlife and the majority of the horses starved when a bitter winter set in
• and MacDonald and his wife Almarie became the island's new owners for the purchase price of $240,000

2 more annotations...

• When Adrian and I were "talking" via e-mail, we were not writing a poem. Far from it. We were not being "literary." Not at all. We were simply conversing, telling stories, very much in the tradition of oral storytelling. In other words, we were simply sharing information and knowledge.
• Although not overtly addressed in the poem, my personal history has been replete with alcohol abuse—thankfully I do not drink anymore and I have not for nine years

• Joseph Bruchac asserts that Ortiz may be the Native poet best known to other American Indians (
• The voice of the Acoma traditionalist which informs his early work expands in his later work to encompass concerns usually identified with the pan-Indian nationalism of the '70s and '80s; even in these works, however, the voice of militant protest, the quality of anger and defiance we hear in the work of Jimmy Durham or Carol Sanchez, is subsumed and subordinated to the gentler rhythms of assurance and continuity characteristic both of his early work and of traditional Pueblo oral narrative and song
• Ortiz regards himself less a "poet" than a "storyteller"
• Even so, there is a certain strained tone to the works in Fight Back, as though the healing power of oral tradition were barely a match for the sheer quantity of pain encoded in the lives of the characters Ortiz tells and thereby makes a part of his own story.
• Despite the images of regeneration and renewal with which the volume opens and closes, the tone of these works is almost unremittingly bleak

3 more annotations...