ABSTRACT
Though his work has received scant attention from the mainstream critical establishment, Simon Ortiz is generally recognized by critics and scholars of American Indian literature as one of the most talented and accomplished writers of the “Native American Renaissance” of the 1960s and 1970s. While productive as an essayist and short story writer, his reputation is usually associated with his poetry. Joseph Bruchac asserts that Ortiz may be the Native poet best known to other American Indians (1987: 211); both Paula Gunn Allen (1986: 132) and Kenneth Lincoln (1983: 189-200) offer his work as a model of the traditional American Indian voice holding its own in the contemporary world. His role as a leading figure in the struggle to preserve and continue traditional forms and themes is acknowledged, for instance, in the title of Joseph Bruchac’s anthology of interviews with American Indian poets, Survival This Way-a line borrowed from one of Ortiz’s poems. 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 1970s and 1980s; even in these works, however, the voice of militant protest, the quality of anger and defiance heard 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.
