ABSTRACT
In his recent study American Indian Literatures and the Southwest, Eric Gary Anderson makes a passing reference to Simon Ortiz (Acoma) as a “cosmopolitan Indian poet” (22). Anderson does not elaborate, but the context surrounding the remark makes clear that, for Anderson, Ortiz is among those native authors who show how “[t]ravel is an essential condition of American Indian literature” and who “combine rather than separate their ‘local’ (or ‘regional’) identities and their ‘migratory’ identities” (21). In their recent study American Indian Literary Nationalism, Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior, Jr. honor Simon Ortiz as “one of our major statesmen” for the “foundational contribution” of his 1981 MELUS article, “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” which they include as an appendix to the book (xvi). For Weaver, Womack, and Warrior, Ortiz’s monumental essay “is central to any serious consideration of Indian literary nationalism” because in it, “[he] provides the justifi cation for its [Native American writing’s] existence and how it can be viewed as Indian” (xix).
