Simon Joseph Ortiz was born in 1941 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised at Acoma Pueblo. He has spent much of his life traveling, witnessing, and writing about the world around him. His observations about and his place in the world as an indigenous person would shape his writing on language, education, colonization, and the effects of colonization on indigenous peoples worldwide. While attending a Bureau of Indian Affairs day school, he learned English as a second language and would later focus on the way language shaped his worldview. Later, he attended several educational institutions, including Saint Catherine’s Indian School in Santa Fe, Albuquerque Indian School, Fort Lewis College (1962–1963), the University of New Mexico (1966–1968), and the University of Iowa (1968–1969). These institutions informed his views on the legacies of boarding school and how they affected generations of indigenous peoples. Having served three years in the army (1963–1966) and holding several teaching positions—San Diego State (1974), the Institute of American Indian Arts (1974), Navajo Community College (1975–1977), the College of Marin (1976–1979), the University of New Mexico, Sinte Gleska College, the University of Toronto, and Arizona State University, where he retired as a Regents’ Professor of English and American Indian Studies—Ortiz’s perspectives expanded beyond New Mexico and the Southwest. His thoughts on traveling, shaped by Pueblo cosmology, and his chance encounters with American Indians focused his attention on indigenous peoples’ persistence despite centuries of colonization. His growing global perspective as well as events connected to the Red Power movement and his involvement in the National Indian Youth Council also influenced his writing. The death of Navajo activist Larry Casuse in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1973 at the hands of the police undoubtedly moved Ortiz to write some of his most powerful and influential work, and issues that fueled indigenous activism nationally and globally are interwoven throughout his writing. Racism, poverty, the exploitation of indigenous lands and peoples, and tribal sovereignty appear prominently in his work, but woven into these legacies of colonization are also stories of survival. His children’s books carry messages of hope, because indigenous peoples’ ultimate survival lay in the hands of children. As a whole, Ortiz’s work presents a message of hope, triumph, and survival in spite of more than five hundred years of attempts to mold American Indians into US citizens. Ultimately, his work exemplifies political and cultural resurgence, documenting indigenous peoples’ survival, as stated in his poem “Survival This Way.”
“The Last Lecture on the Edge”: American Indians are not Invented for Public Consumption
