User:7jbostic/sandbox

Later he attended Albuquerque Indian School and, in 1961-1962, Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. After serving in the army from 1963 to 1966, he returned to Albuquerque and enrolled at the University of New Mexico.

Things were changing so fast. The atomic bomb was exploded right at the beginning of my life. I was born in 1941, right at the beginning of that war. And in 1945 and the changes that wer wrought by the war, and especially the bomb, you know, are part of the history that I was living.

Mother and father were both singers in Acoma tradition. Acoma songs are part of stories: hunting songs with my father. Acoma storytelling and oral tradition: includes advice and counsel... Simon "tells" that poetry is a form of the oral tradition of the Acoma and native history. Poetry is included within prayer and song, a sense of spirituality, a sese of being connected so inexplicably and forever to that whole general story of life as we live and know it and practice it. Transposed his native oral tradition and expresses it (his tradition of his grandparents... etc) through poetry, through his own form of prayer and story. - The use of English as a political colonizing tool - weapon - was very useful to the settlement after the 1800s, in this part of hte southwest. This of course has changed the native, indigenous cultures of the United States Indian America. Southwestern writers have a kind of consciousness that leads to share images metaphors... Southwest is essentially still a territory, colonized territory. = This "struggle" bleeds through and helped create Ortiz' creative and poetic nature. His lifestyle of those in the area must resist the destructive Western expansionism, including by railroads, land developers, uranium exploitation. His environmental influences bring about inspiration. The phenomenon and aspect of nature inanofitself lends a certain kind of linguistic outlook that also has that sense of economy. rhythm. Twelve or thirteen, i had started to make up songs, folk country western, singing along with the radio. Carl Sandberg and Whitman, Theodore Dreiser,, realists like Hammond Garland, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, " spoke ofreal America".

Ortiz relates the struggles of those living within the Southwest to the destructive Western expansionism, including the railroads his father worked on, land developers and uranium exploitation, which Ortiz himself worked within. These struggles and the exploitation of the land are inherent within Ortiz' poetry and his writing style as a whole.