Kimberly M.

Blaeser
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Returning, remembering, retelling=motion, memory voice

Going for the Rain, A Good Journey, Fight Back: For the Sake of the People,
For the Sake of the Land, From Sand Creek=Ortizs journey in his life>spiritual, cultural, literary, political
- Fight Back=literary work intended to be a political statement
- A Good Journey=the oral voice of stories, song, history and contemporary
experience
- Literary journey of return and remembrance as he poetically recollects and
retells the traditional stories
- Fighting back=fightning on, and this is the continuance=carry on the
stories=aspect of Native American life and outlook
- After and Before the Lightning=I felt like I was putting together a map of
where I was in the cosmos=metaphors of map and journey
- The feel to adapt the ancestral sacred journey patterns and practices to
contemporary and to literary ends
I.
Taking Bearings
- Karl Kroeber: The poem he writes in Smoothing the Ground is means by which
psychic energy flows into sociological structure, thence into practical activity
which makes the participants effective in the natural world, provides them
with power
- Ortiz: Oral tradition is inclusive, it is the actions, behavior, relationship,
practices, it evokes and expresses a belief system, and it is specific activity
that confirms and conveys that belief
- Pilgrimage=preparation, verbal performance, physical enactment, spiritual
transformation, followed again by re-turning and re-telling.
- Travel=might in its enactment invoke the long historical tradition of an older
journey, of migrations, of particular subsistence activities, or of harvest
celebration.
- The verbal performance=intricate network of relationships, simultaneously
traversing wide ranges of time, experience, and belief.
- Ortiz-> by story or allusive gesture, often engages in a recollection
acknowledging the legacy of loss, and the works to transform that history
through the literary journey of renewal.
- The Holy Grail=the blessing of continuance for a tribe or nation, the privilege
to proceed in the journey, the search, the sacred motion of existence.
II.
Poetic Leavetakings
- Going for the Rain=literal journey in the southern and eastern US and
entwines the telling of that pilgrimage to look for Indians with a ritual going
for the shiwana or rain spirits. =>The Preparation, Leaving, Returning, The
Rain Falls.=>small motions of existence, a woman at loom, planting corn,
giving birth, travel by Greyhound bus, everyday conversations.
- Preparation=mythic context to the ceremonial
- The birth of Ortizs daughter, recalled with prayerfulness.
III.
Traveling Songs
- Going for the Rain=covers much ground=Leaving and Returning, find Ortiz
Passing Through Little Rock, Crossing the Colorado River into Yuma, West of

Ocotillo Wells, Crossing the Georgia Border Into Flodrida, going All the Way to
New York City.
- Political unrest, racist incidents, personal struggle
- The Significance of a Veterans Day=the narrator identifies himself as a
veteran calling for signicance when no one answered
- The final line in Veterans Day reverberates, drawing and subtracting
meaning on several levels.I am talking about how we have been able to
survive isignficance
- Passing through Little Rock->the sense of pilgrimage is strong=>Ortiz voices
his search, his longing for the symbolic rebirth inherent in the ceremonial
reenactment
- East of Tucumcari=the narrator arrives home to see the brown water/falling
from a rock where it fel so good/to touch the green moss and smell/the
northern mountains/in the water.=>the life force of water, the green growth
of moss, and his placement in the northern mountains.
- The Rain Falls = filled with the thirst-quenching waters of Ortizs poetici
vision, with several of the richest poems of the book: The Story of How a Wall
Stands and Dry Root in a Wash, Curly Mustache, 101-Year-Old Navaho Man.
- It Doesnt End of Course-Ortizs text gestures back to the words of the
prologue:The cycle has been traveled; life has beauty and meaning, and it
will continue because life has no end.In words and gesture, the text thus
respeaks itself, as does life.
IV.
Poetic Activism
- Myth and meaning-mythica reality, strong engagement with place, the
influence of orality, the mapping based upon traditional practices, and
especially, the intercessions for historical truth, resistance, and justice
- From Sand Creek=the massacre of 133 peaceful Arapaho and Southern
Cheyenne by the troops of Colonel John Chivington at Sand Creek, COlordao
in 1864, and it links this atrocity to the more generalized domination of
Native peoples in American and to specific narratives of loss.
- Near the end of From Sand Creek: There is an honest and healthy anger
which will raze these walls, and it is the rising of our blood and breath which
will free our muscles, minds, spirits.=> possibility of change here-> The
future will not be mad with loss and waste though the memory will be there;
eyes will become kind and deep, and the bones of this nation will mend after
the revolution.
- Ortizs volumes=>refuse to whitewash Americas historical culpability, and
yet the conversation they undertake with the reader includes gestures
towards a path of healing or renewal with the reader includes gestures
towards a path of healing or For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the
Land was published in commemoration of the Pueblo Revolt 300 years earlier
in which, Ortiz baldly explains, the people rebelled against theft of land and
resources, slave labor, religious persecution, and unjust tribute demands.
- Returning it Back, You Will Go On-> GREED
- he exposes the self-interest of the US government in its dealing with the
Native peoples of the region, the governments collusion first with reailroad
interests and later with the mining industry, and exposes the false
justifications of ther actions=>It would be in the national interest, of course,

with the US economy at stake that Indian lands and people, whose affairs
were ruled by the BIA, would be exploited.
Ortiz tries to say through his work that there is hope for change, he has returned to both the ceremonial and the historical pathways of Native peoples,
and in his poetery, re-tells these journeys.