The End of Old Horse

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The End of Old Horse

Simon J. Ortiz
1974

Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

"The End of Old Horse" is an excellent example of the understated, precise verbal control that Simon J. Ortiz wields in his fiction. Principally known as a poet, Ortiz has worked in all forms of literature since the 1960s. His stories tend to illuminate the subtle emotional forces at play in brief, supposedly inconsequential moments.

Ortiz was raised on the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, and most of his writing reflects this fact without dwelling on it. In "The End of Old Horse," two boys growing up on a reservation spend a quiet, eventless summer day trying to catch fish in a creek before their neighbor approaches to tell them that his dog strangled himself by straining too hard against the rope that tied him to a pole. The younger boy, Gilly, who has a supposedly grownup liking for obscenity, tries unsuccessfully to suppress his anger; the older boy, who is the story's narrator, nearly convinces himself that he does not care. Their actions are minimal, but with masterful control Ortiz conveys the suffering and confusion of children facing grief alone apparently for the first time.

"The End of Old Horse" was included in The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians, edited by Kenneth Rosen and published in 1974. It has also been included in Ortiz's short story collection Men on the Moon, published in 1999.

Author Biography

Simon J. Ortiz was born on May 27, 1941, and raised on the Acoma Pueblo, near Albuquerque,
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New Mexico. His father was a stonemason and later a railroad worker, and his mother was a potter. As a child, he spoke the native Acoma language, Keresan. Early in his education, however, while attending a reservation school, he was forced to learn English, giving him a bicultural world-view that has characterized his writing.

In 1961 and 1962, Ortiz attended Fort Lewis College. He served in the army from 1962 through 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War. After his return, he attended the University of New Mexico, earning his bachelor of arts degree and then went on to earn a master's of fine arts from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After graduating, he supported himself by working in public relations at Rough Rock Demonstration School in Arizona and as a newspaper editor at the National Indian Youth Council in Albuquerque. In 1974 and 1975 he was treated for alcoholism.

In 1969 Ortiz was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, which gave him the motivation to keep writing. His first collection of poems, Naked in the Wind, was published in 1971. His first collection to be distributed by a major publisher was Going for the Rain, in 1976. Since that time, he has regularly published poetry, short fiction, and essays. His works have consistently focused on his identity as an Acoma American, and he has served on numerous Native American committees, as well as the editorial staffs of Native American publications. He has won several awards, including being named a White House Salute to Poetry Honored Poet in 1981 and the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award. Since the mid-1970s, Ortiz has held a variety of teaching positions, starting at the Institute of American Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As of 2005, he is a professor at the University of Toronto. His book Out There Somewhere, a collection of poetry, was published in 2002.

Plot Summary

"The End of Old Horse" begins with the narrator, an unnamed Native American boy, leaving home with his younger brother to go to the nearby creek to cool off on a hot summer day. They pass by Old Horse, a dog who is tied up with a rope, in front of the home of a neighbor, Tony. Old Horse jumps about wildly, chewing at his rope, trying to free himself. The boys tell Tony, who is fixing up an old horse stall so that he can park his truck in it, that the dog is overexcited, and Tony tells them to just ignore him. Gilly, the younger brother, curses about the dog, calling him stupid, awkwardly working the word "hell" into what he says.

The narrator muses about how boring life is. The only real excitement in the summer, he says, is when there are Grab Days during festivals for saints. Grab Days are a tradition of giving out candy and toys to children, similar to the practice of piñatas. It is here that he first points out the different perspectives of his mother and father: his father does not mind if the children hear graphic or explicit language, but his mother does.

At the creek, the boys chase trout into a trap that they made with some scrap tin. Gilly stops to wash some mud off of his jeans when Tony, the dog's owner, approaches, looking somber. Tony makes small talk about the cleaning that Gilly is doing before announcing that Old Horse, the dog who was straining against his leash, has strangled himself with the rope and is dead.

After a moment of silence, Gilly, trying to hold back his tears, eventually cries.

The narrator tells Tony that he should not have tied the dog up and is surprised that Tony's reaction is as emotional as it is: he reaches out and pushes the narrator, who falls into some bushes. But Tony immediately regrets having done this, and he reaches down and pulls the boy to his feet and brushes him off. He apologizes, tells the boys to go home, and then hops across the creek and walks off beside it.

On the way home, the boys glance mournfully over at the place where Old Horse had been tied up. Gilly curses, using a variety of words that he knows are offensive, and then cries openly. The narrator blames Tony for having tied the dog, when he could have let him roam freely or even asked the boys to take him to the creek with them. The narrator, angry and sad, tries to distract himself by asking Gilly to race him, but Gilly is not interested in running. The narrator swears at Gilly and takes off alone. He ends up running so hard that he makes himself sick and vomits on the side of the road. When Gilly catches up, the narrator apologizes for having sworn at him.

They arrive home after dark, and their mother is angry. She tells them to wash for supper. Their father seems to notice the mud on Gilly's jeans, but he does not point it out to their mother, instead changing the subject to an upcoming rabbit hunt.

When the subject of Tony comes up at the dinner table, the boys are silent. Gilly breaks the silence by saying that Tony choked the dog to death, immediately following his summary with the curse word "hellfire." Their mother warns him about using such language, but the narrator and the father do not react because they both understand the seriousness of the young boy's emotions and feel that swearing is his way of putting his mind to rest over this traumatic event.

Characters

The Father

The father is a quiet, practical man who works for the railroad. The fact that his sons look up to him is clear from the way that the narrator refers to funny stories his father sometimes told as an example of something interesting that would happen in his otherwise boring day.

At times, the father seems to be in collusion with his sons against the moral strictness of their mother. He tells stories that might be inappropriate for children, a point that his wife has to interrupt to remind him of. He notices the mud on Gilly's pants but does not point it out to their mother, in order to keep them from getting into trouble: what is more, he has covered for them before. At the end of the story, the narrator assumes that his father feels the same way that he does that the best way to cope with the day's traumatic event is by putting it aside and not talking about it ever again.

Gilly

Gilly is the narrator's younger brother. Early in the story, he displays his penchant for using foul language, frequently with no particular context: he likes to say crude words but does not seem to understand their meaning. When he hears Tony refer to Old Horse as a "dumb dog," he repeats the idea, calling him a "stupid dog" and then adds the word "hell." "He used to like cuss words when he was a kid," the narrator explains. In doing this, Gilly is copying the speech of Tony, who is a neighbor and distant relative.

After finding out that Old Horse is dead, Gilly tries to repress his sorrow and hold his tears in, crying only silently. After awhile, when the narrator is trying to get him to run, he sobs and hiccups openly, overwhelmed by grief.

Media Adaptations

Ortiz discusses American Indian identity in literature with David Barsamian in an interview titled Simon Ortiz, available on audiocassette from Pacifica Radio Archives, 1986.
Ortiz and five other writers from the American southwest are included on Voices of the Southwest, 2003, a six-disc recording of a conference that took place at University of New Mexico from June 9 to July 24, 2003. The recording is available from University of New Mexico Press.
Ortiz's home page at www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/so/ortizmain.htm is rich with information about his life and his writings.

By the time they are at the dinner table, Gilly is still upset, but not as upset as he had been earlier. Rather than spewing a list of obscenities, he just lets one, "hellfire," slip out while explaining the dog's death. Since he spends most of the story trying to wash mud off of his pants, it is clear that he knows his parents can be strict, and so it can be assumed that Gilly would not have uttered this one blasphemy if he could have held it in.

The Mother

The boys' mother represents logic over emotion. The narrator explains how, faced with a situation, she will try to explain it in a way that they will understand. In the story, she becomes angry with the boys, but her anger is never severe. When they come home late for dinner, she is described as being "more or less mad at us." Later, when Gilly uses "hellfire" at the dinner table, the extent of her anger is that she tells him to never do it again. She is not certain whether to respect his emotions, looking to her husband and other son for some sign of the right way to respond to what Gilly has done.

The Narrator

The story does not say how old the narrator is. He is a boy who is old enough to be cursing as a means of expression but too old to be fascinated with it, as his brother is. He has a philosophical bent, wondering, even before finding out about the death of Old Horse, about the nature of the world and in particular the fact that events happen that are out of human control. He thinks that the way to deal with important events is to not think about them, dismissing his mother's way of coping, which is to analyze and understand.

The news of Old Horse's death creates conflicting emotions in the narrator. He tries to remain dispassionate, but his emotions well up within him. He wants to run, and when his brother Gilly is not willing to let him channel his desire to run into a race he curses him and then runs as fast as he can anyway, to the point of exhaustion. Rather than accept the dog's death as a tragedy, he focuses on the ways his owner could have prevented it by letting Old Horse free from his rope. Though he did not offer to take the dog with them to the creek, he blames Tony for not asking him to take him.

In the end, the narrator copes with the sad news by adapting the indifference that he has seen in his father and in Tony, the "stoic Indian" stance that he has heard his father mock before.

Tony

Tony is related to the boys in the story in some undefined way: the story specifically does not say that they are unrelated, only that Tony "wasn't close family kinfolk." He is, however, familiar with the boys. Early in the story, when discussing Gilly's habit of swearing, the narrator points out that he did it in an attempt to copy Tony. Later, at the dinner table, their father asks what Tony has been doing lately, which indicates that the father knows Tony is an important part of their daily lives.

As a role model, Tony exudes a cool demeanor. When the boys tell him that his dog, tied to a clothesline pole, is acting crazy, he just laughs it off. His general calm is why his appearance by the creek where the boys are chasing fish is so frightening to the narrator, who is not used to seeing Tony behave seriously.

Tony seems to understand his responsibility as a role model. He loses his temper when the narrator blames him for Old Horse's death, shoving the boy into a bush, but he immediately reaches out to him and apologizes. The very fact that he sought the boys out after finding the dog dead suggests his need to talk to someone: when he finds that he cannot talk to them, that it just is not in his nature, he crosses over to the other side of the stream and walks away.

Themes

Language and Meaning

Ortiz uses language, and in particular obscene language, to represent the confused emotions that his characters are feeling. The narrator of this story shows his awareness of the special power of obscene language in the beginning of the story, when he notes that his younger brother Gilly liked to swear and that he did too, only not as much. At that point in the story, the use of obscenity just seems like a way for a younger boy to act older, like Gilly imitating Tony.

As the story progresses, though, it becomes clear that obscene language is not so much a posture, a way of acting cool, as it is an act of desperation, of venting emotions that one cannot show in any other way. When he first learns of Old Horse's death, Gilly does not swear, but instead becomes silent, in an attempt to stop all emotion: he does not let out a torrent of curse words until he passes Tony's house and is overcome with thoughts of the dog's death. His obscenities correspond with open sobbing. Later, when he uses the word "hellfire" at the supper table, it is clear that he does not do it consciously but that it has slipped out of him in his sorrow while talking about what happened to Old Horse. The words that the boys use are powerful, but the story makes it clear that they use the power of these words, not as expressions of emotions, but as substitutes for them.

Stoicism

The central theme of stoicism is examined in this story when the narrator compares Tony, whose dog has just died, with a joke that his father often made about people being "blank as a stoic Indian." The characters here are in fact Indians, and they are struggling to remain stoic in the face of a terribly emotional experience.

The fact that Tony has to struggle to keep his stoic demeanor is obvious from the fact that he loses his composure temporarily and apologizes for it immediately. He is trying to be emotionless, but when the narrator angers him he responds angrily. He has every right to be angry, but anger is too emotional, and so he tries to bury his feelings, helping the boy to his feet almost the same moment that he reached out to shove him.

The narrator uses physical motion to put forth a stoic attitude. When he feels that he is about to cry, he runs instead, burying his feelings under the stress to his body. Just before he runs, he curses Tony and his brother Gilly: after he has run, those angry feelings are gone.

The end of the story shows how much stoicism is a preferred way of life for the grownups in general—the males, at least. When they hear Gilly curse out loud, the narrator and his father are not shocked, nor are they angry. They both recognize his cursing as being all that he can do, and they expect Gilly to quit grieving once he has gotten it out of his system. The story ends with the expectation that this emotional incident can now be forgotten: the narrator thinks that Gilly's use of a forbidden word will be "the end of everything that happened that day."

Topics For Further Study

Research the newest technological restraining devices for dogs, and explain why they are safe.
The narrator mentions gathering good presents at the tribe's "Grab Days" festivity. Research Grab Days and their significance to Indian culture.
The obscenities that Gilly uses in this story are mild compared to things that are considered acceptable for television in the early 2000s. Do you think that his language is obscene if he thinks it is? Explain what you think the rules should be for standards of obscenity.
Tony performs the function of a big brother to the boys in this story. Look through other stories that you have read for similar big brother figures, and compare them to Ortiz's portrait of Tony.
Ortiz is strongly associated with his Acoma heritage. Explore what religious significance the Pueblo Indians give to dogs and animals in general. Then decide what lasting effect the death of Old Horse may have on Gilly and his brother.

Gender Roles

In this story, the boys, their father, and Tony all share a similar outlook, trying to repress their emotions and forget about the problems that are up-setting them. The mother, on the other hand, is more inclined to examine problems, to encourage her sons to face up to what is upsetting them in order to understand it. These two different approaches to life might just reflect their different philosophies, but they come to indicate the parents' places in traditional gender roles. In this family, the mother is more upset than the father about appearance (she is the one they expect to raise a fuss about the dirt on Gilly's jeans, even though it is the father who notices it) and about obscenity. That she values such matters and the males do not divides the family along gender lines.

Poverty

The narrator of this story does not dwell upon the financial situation of the pueblo where he lives, but the story gives enough hints for discerning readers to understand it. For instance, when the boys first talk to Tony, he is working on an old horse stall, trying to nail it together so that it will cover his truck securely. He does not have a garage or the money to build a new structure or have one built but has to make do with fixing what is already old. Later, Gilly spends much time while they are at the creek trying to wash a smudge of mud off of his jeans. Insisting that they care for the condition of their clothes might reflect their parents' interest in having the boys look good in public, but since they are just going home at the end of the day, it is more likely that the parents are concerned that the clothes will not wear out from excessive washing and that he does not have many extra pairs of jeans to wear while these are being laundered. The boys' plan to catch trout in the creek and fatten them up indicates that they do not have much spending money and are conscious of finding the way to turn their playtime activity into cash.

Style

Conflict

One aspect that is particularly notable about "The End of Old Horse" is the story's lack of a general conflict. There are times when tension is raised, as when the narrator accuses Tony of being negligent and Tony shoves him or when Gilly curses at the family supper table and readers expect trouble to ensue. None of these problems develop into conflict, however: the story cannot be said to be "about" the conflict between Tony and the narrator or Gilly and his parents. Instead, Ortiz uses these tense moments to hold the reader's interest while pursuing a larger, less explicitly defined idea. The story is more about the characters' attitudes than it is about their interactions with each other: if one were intent on defining it in terms of conflict, it would be more accurate to say that it is about a series of internal conflicts.

Symbolism

Describing what the boys do at the creek, the narrator gives more attention to Gilly scrubbing his jeans than he does to their fishing project, which is supposedly their reason for being there. He mentions the mud on Gilly's jeans several times over the course of three paragraphs then returns to the matter again when they arrive home. The mud is given almost as much focus as the obscene language that Gilly uses, and, in fact, can be seen as a symbol of Gilly's language: he fears his parents' reaction to seeing his Levis muddied just as much as he fears their reaction to hearing words like "hell." By focusing attention on the jeans and the fear of what the parents will think of them, Ortiz raises the expectation that the parents will be severe about language without having to call too much attention to what they will think of hearing Gilly say "hellfire": the story commands attention for its climactic moment without being too heavy handed about where it is going.

Narrator

The character in this story who draws the most attention is Gilly, the younger brother. Gilly is the one who is going through a phase of using colorful language. He is the one who has the greatest struggle with his emotions concerning Old Horse's death. And he is the one who is openly in trouble at the climactic moment at the supper table.

Still, it is the narrator who is the main character, as first person narrators of stories often are. Though readers know less about the narrator (for instance, his name), his complex emotions are important. While Gilly tries to be as dispassionate and stoic as his hero Tony is, he is unsuccessful and cries several times; the narrator, on the other hand, is much better at suppressing his sorrow. This is a story about a culture where people are expected to shrug off grief, the narrator is a much more sublime study of that state of mind than his younger brother is.

Historical Context

Ortiz was born and raised in the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, about 65 miles west of Albuquerque. For centuries, the Acoma Pueblo existed at the top of a mesa, 7000 feet above sea level, in what is now referred to as "Sky City." The Acoma people first came to the attention of Europeans in 1598, when the Spanish governor of New Mexico, Juan de Onate, sent troops to conquer the indigenous people of the area. Because of their location at the top of the mesa, the Acoma were able to hold off against the Spanish for a while, but a returning force the following year wiped out much of the population and burned many of the buildings. A truce with the Spanish was achieved in 1628, when the construction of the Catholic San Esteban del Rey mission was begun in Sky City. The church, a national landmark, remains to this day, making it the oldest Spanish mission in the United States.

As of 2005, only about fifty members of the Acoma tribe live at the ancestral location in Sky City, on top of the mesa. The rest live in the surrounding areas and only go to Sky City on holidays. The Acoma reservation consists of 378,114 acres around Sky City: the tribe owns most of that area, with 320 acres owned by individual tribal members.

Commerce has never been easy for the Acoma, since they are situated in the desert with just the barest hope of sustainable agriculture. Starting in the early 1900s, the chief commercial enterprise has been the tourist trade. For one thing, the reservation has the marvel of Sky City, which archeologists guess dates back to the middle of the eighth century. Early on, the tourist trade focused on the mission, with people of European descent ignoring the cultural significance of pueblo history. The city had no water or electricity and was difficult to reach until the 1950s or early 1960s, when a motion picture company making a John Wayne film restored the road up the side of the mesa, making Sky City accessible to travelers.

Throughout the sixties, seventies, and eighties, interest in Native American culture grew, and the Acoma made use of the opportunity to make money while spreading awareness of their history. A tourism center was built at the base of the mesa, with water and electricity run in from the village of Acomita eleven miles away; this improvement gave the tribe the opportunity to control access to the ancient city via an old school bus that made the trip up and back throughout the day and offered visitors toilets and cold refreshments. This interest has put a premium on traditional Native American arts and crafts: the Acoma are especially known for their delicate clay pottery and beautiful weaving patterns, and the tourist trade provided a stream of interested buyers.

Compare & Contrast

1970s: The Indian unemployment rate is 10 times the national average, and 40 percent of the Native-American population live below the poverty line.

Today: Half the total Native-American workforce remains unemployed, and nearly one-third live in poverty compared to 13 percent of the total U.S. population.
1970s: Native-American life expectancy is just 44 years, a third less than that of the average American.

Today: Life expectancy for Native Americans remains virtually unchanged.
1970s: The American Indian Movement leads urban Indians, traditionalists, and young Indians along the "Trail of Broken Treaties" to Washington, D.C., seizes the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., and occupies them for a week in order to dramatize Indian grievances.

Today: Most Native Americans maintain an uneasy relationship with the BIA, which is responsible for managing Indian affairs, claiming that the BIA restricts their freedom and continues to demonstrate a paternalistic attitude towards Native Americans.

The citizens of the Acoma Pueblo are unique among the 29 pueblos that are scattered from Colorado to the Mexican border in that they have retained their own language. Many of the Acoma traditions and legends have remained intact, most likely because their isolation at the top of the mesa kept the Acoma from mixing with Spaniards and Americans for most of their history. Ortiz was raised in McCartys, the second largest city on the Acoma reservation after Acomita.

Critical Overview

Men on the Moon, that includes "The End of Old Horse," is Simon J. Ortiz's first collection of short stories: Ortiz has published children's literature, non-fiction, and memoirs, but he is best known as one of the preeminent voices in Native American poetry. When this book was published, Matt Pifer, reviewing the book in World Literature Today, observed that the stories in it "illustrate the sense Simon Ortiz has of the subtleties and power inherent in language, a sense he developed, in part, from the tradition of storytelling so deeply rooted in the culture of his Acoma people."

Ortiz's Acoma background is such an important part of his identity and the stories that he tells that few reviewers neglect to mention it. This is not to say that he has been pigeonholed by the reviewers: his heritage is a fact of Ortiz's life and has been a central frame of reference throughout his long publishing career. In an unsigned Publishers Weekly review of Men on the Moon, for instance, his background is acknowledged in the fact that the stories in the collection "demonstrate the diversity of Native experience in modern America." That review goes on to emphasize the fact that Ortiz is proud of his heritage and the fact that he is a gifted writer, as many reviewers of the book have done: "The language of these rich narratives reflect [sic] both Ortiz's poetic gift and his intimate knowledge of oral storytelling."

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. In this essay, Kelly looks at the story as a "coming of age" tale, questioning just who would be considered to have come of age.

Simon J. Ortiz's short story "The End of Old Horse" is clearly a coming of age story. It tells of two boys of indeterminate age who go fishing one hot, boring summer afternoon. They pass by the home of an older friend, Tony, and point out to him what he surely must already know: that his dog, Old Horse, is barking and straining at his rope. Later, Tony tells them that Old Horse has strangled himself, and the boys are filled with anger and sorrow. The younger brother uses the word "hellfire" at the dinner table, and his parents, who do not approve of such language, respect his sorrow and do not punish him. As with all coming of age stories, the focus here is on a young person having a realization that will change the way he looks at life.

The significance of the story's events, their unchangeable finality, is made clear in the story's two uses of the word "end." First of all, Ortiz uses it in the title, where it draws attention to itself by taking the place of the word "death." It would be more specific to say that Old Horse died: to say that he ended is not incorrect, but it is notably vague. Ortiz brings the word "end" back in the story's final line, when he writes that the boys' father decided "that what my little brother Gilly said was the end of everything that happened that day." This is a story about change, about a way of life that it is over for someone. Like any coming of age story, it represents the time when the old reality of childhood ends, and the reality of adulthood kicks in.

The question that arises, though, is just who is coming of age here. In many stories told in first-person point of view, the answer to this question is simple: traditionally, the story is about the narrator, who is the one most affected by the events. In "The End of Old Horse," though, there are plenty of reasons to see how the story works by understanding characters other than the narrator as being recipients of the story's lessons.

Immediately upon reading it, one might assume that Ortiz means the story to focus on the younger brother, Gilly. Gilly is the one who is most clearly traumatized by the day's events. He cries twice, and at the story's climactic moment he clearly is unable to keep himself from using the kind of language at the dinner table that Ortiz has already shown to be forbidden in this household. The narrator, by contrast, acts as a silent observer: he has one emotional moment, when he wishes to drown his sorrow by running as fast as he can and he curses his little brother for refusing to run with him, but after exerting himself to the point of sickness he says that he "was okay" and he apologizes to Gilly.

If this really is a story about Gilly coming of age, it might not necessarily be about his realization of death. It might just fall into that subcategory of the coming-of-age story called the "fallen idol" story. From the third paragraph Ortiz makes it clear that Tony is a hero to Gilly; here, he likens the boy's use of obscenities to the way Tony uses them. When the boys arrive home, their father asks how Tony is, implying that he would naturally have expected them to have spent at least part of their time at his house.

Gilly's fascination with Tony might be exactly the innocence that he loses. As events transpire, the older boy focuses on ways in which Tony is responsible for the dog's death: he offends Tony by suggesting such, and later, when Gilly expresses his emotions with a string of random obscenities, the narrator focuses his own rage on Tony and the things that Tony could have done that would have kept Old Horse alive. In the end, Gilly's line, which is most noteworthy for its use of obscenity, is "Tony choked Old Horse to death, hellfire." If he believes this, after struggling with it over the course of the story, then he has lost faith in a person he looked up to, possibly the person he esteemed most. His understanding of the world is changed permanently.

It is also possible, though less likely, that it is Tony who is coming of age in this story. This would be unusual, because traditional coming of age stories occur when their subject is young and most impressionable: Tony is older than the brothers. Still, he is able to be affected by the event.

The story does not say how old Tony is. Obviously, he is old enough to own a truck, which he is in the process of building a shelter for, but there is no indication that he is building that shelter on his own land, and not on, say, his parents.' What is presented clearly enough is that the death of Old Horse is an event that affects Tony.

Tony struggles with his emotions after the death of his dog. When he first tells the boys about it, he is described as "stoic" and "blank." Ortiz refers to the cliché, "a stoic Indian," to show that this might be just the posture that Tony is trying to consciously adopt, a rôle that he is playing. When the narrator implies that Old Horse's death might be Tony's fault, his emotions flare, and he strikes out at the boy, though his rational mind regrets it and he immediately apologizes.

What Do I Read Next?

Ortiz's short story "To Change in a Good Way" is about a suburban Indian man coping with the death of his youngest brother. The story is included in Growing Up Ethnic in America, a collection of contemporary fiction, edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan.
Ortiz is just one of fourteen writers included in Writing the Southwest by David King Dunaway. The book profiles each writer with a brief biography, bibliography, interview, and sample works.
Leslie Marmon Silko is a writer from the Laguna Pueblo, born and raised in Albuquerque, not far from Ortiz's home territory. Her collection Storyteller is considered groundbreaking for the way that its pieces weave poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Of the stories in the book, "Ceremony" is the one that has brought her the most widespread fame.
The Antelope Wife, by Louise Erdich, has been commended for its sublime way of capturing the mood of contemporary Native Americans. Set in modern-day Minneapolis, the novel concerns two related Indian couples and their travails.
Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, edited by Ortiz, is an anthology containing essays from leading literary figures responding to the problem of living the dual life of being part of the Indian world as well as part of American culture. Included are essays by Roberta J. Hill, Gloria Bird, and Daniel David Moses.
Navajo poet and short story writer Luci Tapahonso has written about modern Indian life with a sensibility that resembles Ortiz's. Readers can sample her works in her collection Blue Horse Rush In: Poems and Stories (1997), published by University of Arizona Press.

Reading this as a coming of age story makes apparent that Tony is awakening to adult responsibilities, realizing that his actions have consequences. The story starts with Tony ignoring his yelping dog, having tied Old Horse up with rope, unaware that an excited dog on a poorly designed restraint can die. It ends with Tony's remorse. Ortiz does not go into detail about the lasting effect on Tony, but readers are led to infer it. He jumps the creek, crossing to the other side of the water, a movement that many cultures use to symbolize someone leaving their past behind. In addition, Tony is headed west: there is a tradition in white American literature of people abandoning the lives they knew and going westward, a tradition that dates back to the Europeans' arrival on the continent, when the west was considered unexplored, virgin territory (the most famous literary example of this is the way Mark Twain has Huckleberry Finn simply "light out" for the west at the end of his adventures). Ortiz, a native of the Acoma Pueblo, whose people have been in "the west" for nearly a thousand years, incorporates this Eurocentric literary tradition to imply that Tony, in his sorrow, is leaving his past behind.

Even though his reaction is the most understated of all those in the book, it could well be the narrator who is coming of age in "The End of Old Horse." As mentioned before, stories with a first-person narrator are often about that narrator. This narrator does not seem much changed by the events of the story but that may be the point: given these extreme circumstances (the sudden death of a helpless animal), readers expect some dramatic transformation. Instead, we see the narrator shaping into the sort of man his father is. Old Horse's death shows him that suppressed emotion is the way to act like a grownup.

The narrator does have his moment of excitement when he reacts to the death of Old Horse by cursing Gilly and cursing Tony and running as fast as he can, but this is an exception. His ordinary life is defined in the fourth paragraph, in which he explains that "nothing ever [happened] in summer." His life is boring at the beginning of the story and by the last line he is already looking forward to burying the events of the day, pretending like they are ended. Perhaps it would be possible to truly "end" them, but the fact that he is telling this story indicates that what happened before and after Old Horse's death continues. If the narrator seems unchanged, he is at least more aware of what goes unsaid at his house than he was before. Gilly may take a chance by letting a curse word slip out, but the narrator, who curses less often, understands that suppressing the emotion behind cursing can sometimes be as potent as cursing itself.

It is difficult for writers to include children in their stories without critics assuming that they are writing coming of age stories: just about anything that happens to children in literature can be considered potent enough to redirect the course of their lives. Ortiz's style, though, gives fair weight to all of the characters, raising the question of who might be most affected. Reading it as the narrator's story, "The End of Old Horse" is a story about a boy's induction into the stoic Indian posture that his father recognizes, mocks, but adopts when faced with uncomfortable circumstances. If it's Gilly's story, it is a story of a boy who is so outraged about the death of an innocent animal, and so hurt to believe that his role model might be responsible that he can no longer abide by his parents' rules about obscene language. Seen as a story about Tony, it tells of a young man who is careless and causes his dog's death, driving him into isolation. A lesser writer would be lucky to make one of these interpretations viable, not to mention all three.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on "The End of Old Horse," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Dennis R. Hoilman

In the following essay, Hoilman discusses Ortiz's writing career.

Simon J. Ortiz stands out among major Native American writers such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Paula Gunn Allen, and Louise Erdrich in that, unlike these writers, he was not raised in a bior multicultural home with English as his first language. Rather, Ortiz grew up in a traditional Native American home—speaking, understanding, perceiving, and feeling in the Acoma language. As he says in Woven Stone (1992), "if there is anything that has sustained me through my years of writing it is that fact."

Ortiz is best known for his several books of poetry, chiefly on such Native American ideas as the importance of identification with a sacred place, the sense of the poet as the equivalent of the traditional storyteller, and the struggle for cultural survival. The theme of the journey recurs frequently in his verse, as the titles of his early collections of poetry indicate: Going for the Rain (1976), A Good Journey (1977), and A Poem Is a Journey (1981).

Simon Joseph Ortiz was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 27 May 1941 and raised in McCartys—the "Deetseyamah" of several of his poems. The village of McCartys is located approximately fifty miles west of Albuquerque on the Acoma Indian Reservation. Ortiz's family belongs to the Dyaamih hanoh Eagle clan or, literally, Eagle people—a tightly knit clan that fosters close family and kin relationships as well as a communal outlook and sense of responsibility. Ortiz's parents, Joe L. Ortiz and Mamie Toribio Ortiz, attended St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe and spoke English quite fluently, but the Acoma language—Aacqumeh dzehni was spoken in the home. Ortiz, whose father worked as a laborer for the Santa Fe Railroad, was brought up in frugal, difficult circumstances. Ortiz's father and other relatives abused alcohol, a habit that—as Ortiz describes in Woven Stone "caused family tension, arguments, distrust, fear, pain, all of the trauma of alcoholism." Ortiz continues, "Alcoholism I had known all my life. As a child I was traumatically afraid of the behavior of my father and others under the influence of alcohol. I just didn't understand it, yet I knew its fearsome, destructive impact first hand." Ortiz, whose own life and career also suffered because of alcoholism, later referred to his family as "dysfunctional," and alcoholism constitutes another theme that runs throughout his writing.

Ortiz attended the McCartys Day School, operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At McCartys, as he later said, the policy was to "brainwash" the children and turn them into white people. He especially liked reading because of his interest in stories. He had been hearing them all his life—some were traditional stories of mythic heroes, while others evolved from current gossip about the Aacqumeh (Acoma) community in which he lived. All of these stories, however, interested the young Ortiz greatly, because—although unbe-knownst to him at the time—they tied him into the communal body of his people and his heritage. As Ortiz elaborates in Woven Stone,

Consequently, when I learned to read and write, I believe I felt those stories continued somehow in the new language and use of the new language and they would never be lost, forgotten, and finally gone. They would always continue.

He says that his poetry attempts to "instill that sense of continuity" and to connect directly to its primary source in the oral tradition as he knew it in childhood.

Except for an interruption during the fifth grade—when the family moved temporarily to Skull Valley, Arizona—Ortiz was able to remain in McCartys Day School through the sixth grade; McCartys provided him with a strong connection to his people. While in school in Skull Valley, he began to write poetry and song lyrics influenced by country and western singers, such as Jimmy Rodgers and Hank Williams. His first poem—written for Mother's Day—was also published in the school newspaper.

For part of junior high, from 1953 to 1954, Ortiz was sent to St. Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe, and in one of his poems he writes about leaving his home and family to attend the school. He describes traveling with his parents to Santa Fe and how, when the three of them arrived at the school, he fainted:

  I just fainted, that's all, into the subtle chasm that
      opens
  and you lose all desire and control, and I fell, very
      slowly,
  it seemed. I found myself being carried out by my
      father to
  some steps in front of the boys [sic] recreation hall.
      He talked with
  me for a long time, slowly and gently, and I felt
      him tremble
  and stifle his sobs several times. He told me not to
      worry
  and to be strong and brave.
  I wonder if I have been. That was the first time I
      ever went
  away from home.

Next, from 1954 to 1956, Ortiz was sent to Albuquerque Indian School, which was closer to home. He went to high school in Grants, New Mexico, at an integrated public school with a mostly "Mericano" student body. He proved to be an outstanding student, winning many honors, both academic and athletic: Boys State, class officer, cocaptain of the football team, allstate in sports, Mr. Grants High, and Senior Honor Boy.

During his high school years he began to think of himself as a writer. He was reading widely, and he came to believe that "as an Acoma person I also had something important, unique, and special to say." In his nascent fiction—in high school he wrote more prose than poetry—the characters were poor, struggling, hardworking, enduring, and caring, but they were not specifically Native American or Indian or Acoma. Ortiz thought of himself as an Acoma person, but his "views and concepts in large part were those of the dominant society," he wrote in Woven Stone. "I loved my family, people, community, yet I was also swayed by powerful influences of the outside and even yearned and sought for those 'Mericano ways.'"

By the time of his high school graduation, then, Ortiz knew that he wanted to be a writer, but he had no idea how to proceed. He went to work in the Kerr-McGee uranium mines near Acoma, and the men he worked with, mostly working-class whites, served as the models for characters in his stories and poems. At this period in his life, he also developed a political consciousness, becoming aware of racial and ethnic discrimination, and, as he shows in Woven Stone, growing angry at the injustice:

Like other colonized youth, I had been quietly seething for many years…. I recall the anger at my parents and grandparents, blaming them for not warning us and not protecting us from American life and its people, and I was upset at Acoma leadership for not fighting harder to hold our land and water.

During the early 1960s Ortiz began abusing alcohol. A few of his favorite writers—Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Malcolm Lowry—had been heavy drinkers, and Ortiz was undeterred by any thought that "alcohol might have done them in. I believed in their greatness and in drinking as a part of that." Eventually, he spent time in the Veterans Administration hospital in Ft. Lyons, Colorado, for treatment of his alcoholism.

After a year in the uranium mines, Ortiz enrolled in Fort Lewis College in 1962, planning to be an organic chemist. He soon discovered that he had little affinity for chemistry and in 1963 left college to enlist in the U.S. Army. While in basic training in Louisiana, he encountered overt racism for the first time and suffered the humiliations of having to use the "Colored Only" drinking fountains and restrooms. After serving three years in the army, Ortiz returned to the University of New Mexico, from 1966 through 1968. For one year, beginning in 1968, he attended the University of Iowa, where he was a Fellow in the International Writing Program. Although he considers himself first and foremost a writer, Ortiz has enjoyed a varied career. He has been a teacher—chiefly of creative writing and Native American literature—at the following institutions: San Diego State University and the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1974; Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, from 1975 to 1977; the College of Marin in Kentfield, California, from 1976 to 1979; the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque from 1979 to 1981; Sinte Gleska College in Rosebud, South Dakota, from 1985 to 1986; and at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in 1990. He served as official tribal interpreter and lieutenant governor of the Acoma Pueblo community and worked as a consulting editor for Acoma Pueblo Press. He has also been a journalist, public relations director, and newspaper editor. He has had four marriages, each ending in divorce: to Agnes Goodluck, from 1967 to 1971; to Joy Harjo, from 1971 to 1974; to Roxanne Dunbar, from 1976 to 1980; and to Marlene Foster, from 1981 to 1984. He has three children—a son and two daughters: Raho Nez, Rainy Dawn, and Sara Marie.

Ortiz has received many awards and honors. In 1969 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) honored him for his work in journalism with a Discovery Award; in 1981 the NEA also awarded him a fellowship. In 1980 he and other poets were recognized at the White House Salute to American Poetry and Poets. His From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which Is Our America (1981), a book of largely political verse, won the Pushcart Prize in 1981, and in 1989 the New Mexico Humanities Council recognized him for his contributions to literature with a Humanities Award. In 1993 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for literature at the third annual "Returning the Gift" Festival of Native American Writers and Storytellers.

In his first major book of poems, Going for the Rain, Ortiz explores the theme of the journey in the context of a traditional Acoma ceremonial journey to the home of the Shiwana, or Cloud People. Shiwana are the deities who bring the rain necessary for survival in the arid, western New Mexico climate of Acoma—also known as the Sky City for its location at the top of a high mesa. Yet, as he says in Woven Stone, the book is also structured "in the narrative form of an actual journey on the heeyaanih, the road of life, and its experience." In the prologue to Going for the Rain, he compares the traditional journey to the Cloud People's home for rain to his journey—his search for inspiring words with which to heal his people. The traditional journey involves four distinct stages: preparation, leaving, returning, and the coming of the rain itself. Each stage is played out in the successive sections that divide the book.

In the first stage, known as preparation, the poet-persona makes prayers, sings songs, and considers what is important to him—his home, children, language, and "the self that he is." In the thirteen poems of the first section, Ortiz deals with themes analogous to the physical and spiritual preparations needed before the journey itself can begin. Several of the verses—"Forming Child," "Four Poems for a Child Son," "The Expectant Father," "To Insure Survival"—concern both the birth, in 1973, of his first daughter, Rainy Dawn, and the idea of language, a topic that he examines in all his writings. In a poem titled "Language," he listens to the sounds that Rainy Dawn makes as an infant, connecting her human sounds to sounds in nature—"the wind searching hillside ledge." For him the natural language of the infant is akin to a "language of movements—sights—/ possibilities and impossibilities—/ pure existence." The child,

  upon hearing a sound hears the poem
  of hearing—original motion of it
  is complete—sanctified—the sphere
  of who he or she is who is hearing
  the poetry….

Language is primarily oral, something that is heard. Just to hear language is to hear a poem, according to Ortiz's lyric. Language as verse completes and sanctifies a person; hearing a poem thus establishes identity and a sense of self. At the end of "Language," he concludes that language is central to the self, expressing the core of one's being:

  All language comes forth
  outward from the center. Hits
  the curve of your being. Fits
  —"chiseled" occurs to me
  ....................
  into thoughts of sound itself,
  the energy it is
  and the motion inherent in it.

According to Ortiz, language provides identity and continuity—not only for the self but also for a culture.

The second section of Going for the Rain, titled "Leaving," consists of twenty-four poems depicting Ortiz's travels. These travels include some short trips to places such as Spider Springs, Gallup, and Albuquerque in New Mexico, to Many Farms on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, and others to the West Coast, the South, and New York City. While most of the poems in "Leaving," concern the alienation that a traveler sometimes experiences in an unfamiliar place, a few also delve into a traveler's sense of wonder at the diversity and beauty encountered on a trip. Significantly, in the poem titled "Many Farms Notes" and dated spring 1973, Ortiz, in response to a question regarding the main theme of his verse, replies, "To put it as simply as possible, / I say it this way: to recognize / the relationships I share with everything."

The twenty-six poems of the third section, titled "Returning," relate as well to his travels, but—as the title suggests—focus, in addition, on the poet's return to Acoma; these poems represent his gifts and blessings to his people. For example, "Leaving America" is set in the Kansas City bus depot, where the persona—surely Ortiz himself since the poems are autobiographical—meets another Indian, Roy, who is from Arizona and also returning home. "Just got paid," Roy says,

  laid off by the Rock Island Line.
  Going home.
  It's got red and brown land,
  sage, and when it rains,
  it smells like piñon
  and pretty girls at a Squaw Dance,

to which Ortiz replies "I know." As the title "Leaving America" evokes, the journey home bespeaks a cultural journey: Ortiz goes from the alienating American culture of white people back to the land and traditions of the Indian people—who, he suggests, are not "American."

"The Rain Falls" is the title of the fourth section of Going for the Rain. Like the rain that the journey to the Shiwana has engendered, the twenty-five poems of "The Rain Falls" constitute the fruits of the poetic journey that Ortiz has now completed. Launching the fourth section and bearing the dedication "for Joy" (Ortiz's first wife), the poem "Earth Woman" shows how woman embodies the earth itself:

  How gentle
  her movements, her hands,
  soft wind,
  warm rain,
  the moving pain
  of pleasure
  we share.

In the second poem, "Spreading Wings of Wind," about a plane ride from Rough Rock to Phoenix, Ortiz reminds himself that he belongs to a community—the Eagle Clan into which he was born:

  I must remember
  that I am only one part
  among many parts,
  not a singular eagle
  or one mountain.

The lyric ends by addressing non-Indians with a question, "What the hell are you doing to this land? / My grandfather hunted here, prayed, / dreamt…." In "Four Deetseyamah Poems," a title that alludes to the Acoma name of McCartys, Ortiz finds himself absorbed into the land:

  when I have needed
  to envision my home, when loneliness

  for myself has overcome me,
  the Mountain has occurred.
  Now, I see it sharing its being
  with me, praying.

Storytelling, identity, and the journey are bound up in his work. As Andrew Wiget points out in the Dictionary of Native American Literature (1994), Ortiz's journey in all directions establishes Acu, "the point of origin as well as the destination of what otherwise appear to be pointless wanderings—as the geographical as well as spiritual center of the storytelling person's identity…."

Ortiz's next book of verse, A Good Journey, encompasses more than fifty poems, mostly narrative, based on the oral tradition—especially "the oral voice of stories, song, history, and contemporary experience," as he elaborates in Woven Stone. The poems chronicle the writer's experiences and the people he has met in his travels, which took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some lyrics have precise dates, while others mention the event motivating a particular poem. Many of the lyrics are about his children or are addressed to them; indeed, he titles the second of the five sections, "Notes to My Child." In the preface he quotes from an interview in which he was asked why he writes:

Because Indians always tell a story. The only way to continue is to tell a story…. Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued.

Ortiz goes on to explain that he writes for his children, wife, mother, father, and grandparents "and then reverse order that way so that I may have a good journey on my way back home." He suggests that the "good journey" of the title is the journey of return—these poems bring him back to his origins and identity within the Acoma community and culture.

Perhaps the growing political awareness of Ortiz's verse at this point also indicates that poetry returns him home. As in Going for the Rain, the poems in A Good Journey are personal and autobiographical, yet—unlike in the earlier book—they also display his response to history and to the dominant culture of white Americans. For example, in the fifth poem of the book, "A San Diego Poem: January-February 1973"—about an airplane flight to California—Ortiz discloses his resentment of Catholicism:

  I look below at the countless houses,
  row after row, veiled by tinted smog.
  I feel the beginnings of apprehension.
  Where am I? I recall the institutional prayers
  of my Catholic youth but don't dare recite them.
  The prayers of my native selfhood
  have been strangled in my throat.

The poem concludes when the persona arrives at Los Angeles International Airport and tries to find his way through the tunnels of its "innards":

  I am under L.A. International Airport,
  on the West Coast, someplace called America.
  I am somewhat educated, I can read and use a
        compass;
  yet the knowledge of where I am is useless.
  ...................................
  America has obliterated my sense of
      comprehension.
  Without this comprehension, I am emptied
  of any substance. America has finally caught me.
  I meld into the walls of that tunnel
  and become the silent burial. There are no echoes.

In "Blessings," which concerns a civil rights fund-raising function in 1969, he writes that Native Americans are not hungry for money or for "carefully written proposals." Rather,

  We are hungry for the good earth,
  the deserts and mountains growing corn.
  We are hungry for the conviction
  that you are our brothers and sisters
  who are willing to share our love….

Storytelling as a theme also informs A Good Journey: the first section of the book is titled "Telling," and several of the poems stress the importance of the oral tradition. In dedicating A Good Journey to his children, Raho Nez and Rainy Dawn, Ortiz says:

  The stories and poems come forth
  and I am only the voice telling them.
  They are the true source themselves.
  The words are the vision
  by which we see out and in and around.

Stories are, in the words of his dedication, "the true source"—not just of themselves but of everything in one's consciousness, because they shape the consciousness of who people are and of what the world is. According to him, words are the eyes through which people see and know themselves—as well as the world outside and around them. In "I Tell You Now," the final poem in A Good Journey, Ortiz addresses an Indian woman he has seen on the street:

  I really have no words to match your stride.
  ...................................
  Even the sheaf of written stories
  I am carrying under my arm to the printers
  because as I watch you, the stories
  which I did work carefully at lack the depth
  and the meaning of your walk.

He then acknowledges the political ideas that he has incorporated with increasing frequency in his writing:

  Oh I guess the words are adequate enough—
  they point out American depredations,
  the stealing of our land and language,
  how our children linger hungry and hurt
  on street corners like the ones I just passed,
  but then I get the feeling that these
  words of my youth are mere diatribes.
  They remain useless and flat when what I really
       wish
  is to listen to you and then have you listen to me.
  I've been wanting to tell you for a long time.
  I tell you now.

He implies that political diatribes are lifeless and flat, because they do not entail stories. "I Tell You Now" ends with a series of stories that Ortiz has been wanting to tell,

  because I want you to know
  and in that way
  have you come to know me now.

He shows that through stories people come together—not just Ortiz and the Indian woman to whom he is ostensibly speaking in "I Tell You Now," but also all Native American people and, indeed, his readers.

A third significant component to A Good Journey besides the two themes of travel and storytelling—is the character of Coyote, a combination of culture hero and trickster in the oral tradition. Coyote is prominently featured "in the origin and all the way / through" the stories in the oral tradition and the history of the people. Often Ortiz identifies himself with Coyote—the trickster, the troublemaker, the constant victim of his own pranks. Yet, Coyote is also ancient, present at the creation of the world, and he is not only a source of disorder and sorrow but also brings good things to the people. In A Good Journey, Ortiz occasionally shows Coyote in the role of ragged wanderer—a lonely outsider—such as in "Two Coyote Ones"; while the lyric begins in the first person, suggesting Ortiz as the wandering persona, it ends with the assertion that the poem was really told in Coyote's voice.

At this early stage in his career as a writer, Ortiz was writing short fiction as well as poetry. Five of his short stories appear in Kenneth Rosen's 1974 anthology The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians, including four of his best: "The San Francisco Indians," "Kaiser and the War," "The Killing of a State Cop," and "The End of Old Horse." "The San Francisco Indians" captures with irony an old Indian man's encounter with members of a hippie "tribe" in San Francisco. The hippies seek a "genuine Indian" to show them how to conduct a peyote ceremony—a rite about which the old man knows nothing. Both "Kaiser and the War" and "The Killing of a State Cop" depict the difficulties that confront Native American veterans when they return to the reservation. "The End of Old Horse" recounts, simply yet profoundly, a young boy's first encounter with the futility of death—in this case the death of a dog named "Horse."

In 1978 Ortiz published four additional short stories in The Howbah Indians, a collection that takes its title from that of the first story. "Howbah," as the narrator of the story explains, means "you all Indians—like you Oklahoma folks say: yo'all." Eagle, an army veteran who served in Korea, returns to the reservation and buys a gas station. He puts up a sign that is "a couple of hundred yards long," "like it was a high board fence." In red letters on a bright yellow background, so they can be discerned from ten miles away, the sign reads "Welcome Howbah Indians." The sign makes the Indians proud of Eagle. After a couple of years, however, Eagle loses his way and is found dead in a dry rainwash. "He had what looked like bruises from falling on his face or a stone, but the government police from the Bureau of Indian Affairs never bothered very much." Because the Indians still remember the sign, laughing and laughing "for the important memory and fact that it is," the futility of Eagle's aspirations becomes somewhat muted. As it turns out, the narrator of "Howbah Indians" has awakened suddenly one night, the memory of the sign having entered his sleep. "I felt good for remembering," he says, "and I wrote it down on a notepad. Howbah Indians." The irony of the sign seems to escape the narrator, who does not recognize the fact that the "welcome" that "you all Indians" will receive will be the same quashed aspirations and the same end that "welcomed" Eagle. The story strongly implies that Eagle was murdered because he dared to aspire to a position of ownership, and because he dared to welcome all Indians to his station. Apparently, someone tried to teach Eagle a lesson—that Indians are not welcome and should stay in their place.

For Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980), Ortiz set the story, told in both lyric and narrative forms, in the context of the uranium boom of the 1960s. The focus of the book is on the injustice, discrimination, and bigotry that befell Indians as the "boom" flourished on land stolen from the Acoma people. In "What I Mean," a poem from Fight Back, he writes:

  We didn't talk much.
  Some people say Indians are just like that,

  shy and reserved and polite,
  but that's mostly crap. Lots of times
  we were just plain scared
  and we kept our mouths shut.
  I mean Grants and Milan and the mines
  between Haystack and Ambrosia Lake,
  all that area used to be Indian land—
  Acoma land—but it was surveyed
  by the government and stolen
  at the turn of the century
  and there was plenty to say
  but we didn't say it.

The book is divided into two sections—titled, respectively, "Too Many Sacrifices" and "No More Sacrifices." The first section features eighteen poems, mostly about people and incidents that he remembers from working in the mines and in the processing mills around Grants and Milan, towns in the vicinity of Acoma. The second section embodies a lengthy work—a piece mixing prose with poetry and titled "Our Homeland, A National Sacrifice Area"—and a concluding lyric called "A New Story." In the prose sections of Fight Back, he recounts the history of the land that surrounds Acoma, from the time that white people arrived on the land until the present. The interspersed poems make up his more personal responses to the prose story that he tells. The story recounts four hundred years of exploitation and injustice, and how the mining and processing industry has depleted and contaminated the water upon which Acoma depends. As he describes in Fight Back, Ortiz feels that

Only when we are not afraid to fight against the destroyers, thieves, liars, exploiters who profit handsomely off the land and people will we know what love and compassion are. Only when the people of this nation, not just Indian people, fight for what is just and good for all life, will we know life and its continuance.

Ortiz sets his next book, From Sand Creek, in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ft. Lyons, Colorado, where he underwent treatment for alcoholism in 1974 and 1975. The book takes its title from the site of Colonel John M. Chivington's massacre of more than a hundred peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people on 29 November 1864; the Sand Creek massacre is one of the most infamous episodes in the history of the conflict between the white man and the Indian. From Sand Creek consists of brief prose comments, often only a single sentence, on roughly one page and somewhat longer poems—though never longer than a single page—on the facing page. As he notes in the preface, Ortiz analyzes himself in From Sand Creek "as an American, which is hemispheric, a U.S. citizen, which is national, and as an Indian, which is spiritual and human." He juxtaposes history with his own experience, presented as fragmentary, traumatic, and confined largely to Colorado in the vicinity of the site of the massacre. Many of the poems center on his experiences in the hospital or in the nearby town of La Junta, alluding to fellow patients such as Toby, Billy, Nez, W., the Texan, Dusty, the Colonel, Danny, Larry, and the Oklahoma Boy. In other poems the speaker imagines the scene of the massacre: "It almost seemed magical / that they had so much blood. / It just kept pouring, / like rivers, / like endless floods from the sky." He frames From Sand Creek with poems of hope and reconciliation, particularly his hope that "we will all learn something from each other. We must. We are all with and within each other." The opening poem suggests that instead of dwelling on the victimization and the guilt of the massacre, the "burden of steel and mad death," one must now look to the "flowers and new grass and a spring wind rising from Sand Creek." America, as the concluding poem says, must "not be vengeful but wealthy with love and compassion and knowledge." From Sand Creek is Ortiz's most cryptic, most difficult work.

In 1992 the University of Arizona Press published Woven Stone, which brings together Going for the Rain, A Good Journey, and Fight Back. Woven Stone includes an excellent autobiographical introduction by Ortiz, in which he discusses the events and issues that have influenced his life and poetry.

In After and Before the Lightning (1994), a collection of 133 short poems, with interspersed prose passages, Ortiz reflects on the events of the winter of 1985–1986, which he spent working among the Lakota people and teaching at Sinte Gleska College on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He dates the poems, beginning 18 November and ending 21 March—a span of time denoting the season, as he says in his preface, between the last thunder and lightning in the fall and the first thunder and lightning in the spring. He divides the collection into four approximately equal sections: "The Landscape: Prairie, Time, and Galaxy," "Common Trails: Every Day," "Buffalo Dawn Coming," and "Near and Evident Signs of Spring."

After and Before the Lightning, like Ortiz's other works, develops the theme of the interrelatedness between people and the land, and—especially—his experiences driving on Highway 18 between the towns of Okreek and Mission, with the wind and snow fiercer than anything he had known at Acoma. As he writes in "Driving, the Snowy Wind," dated 19 November,

  The snowy wind is fierce,
  insistent, unrelenting,
  picking up dry snow
  off the hills, turning the hills
  into churning clouds and the sky,
  blending everything
  into one cold surging,
  exhaling, forceful breath.

In the preface to After and Before the Lightning, he explains the origin of these poems:

I've felt I have never been very good at facing reality nor at dealing with it. And when I lived in South Dakota … I needed a way to deal with the reality of my life and the reality in which I lived. The winter prairie surrounded me totally; it was absolutely present in every moment…. The reality of a South Dakota winter demanded to be dealt with. So I was compelled the write the poetry in After and Before the Lightning.

The book concludes with "Lightning IV," a poem that encompasses the themes found not only in After and Before the Lightning but also in Ortiz's work as a whole: memory, life as a journey, man's relationship with the land, the significance of place, and the stories that sustain a people.

  Why we should keep riding
  toward the storm, we don't know.
  ...........................
  It is perhaps way past questioning,
  past the moment when it's too late.
  Our only certainty, when the horizon
  is no longer clear, is our memory
  of how the journey has been till now.
  ..............................
  How completely we feel the tremoring
  and shuddering pulse of the land now
  as we welcome the rain-heart-lightning
  into our trembling yearning selves.

For Simon J. Ortiz, memory and the storytelling inspired by memory provide his people with a sense of continuity. Together, memory and storytelling comprise a blueprint for the survival of Native American culture.

Source : Dennis R. Hoilman, "Simon J. Ortiz," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 256, Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Third Series, edited by Richard H. Cracroft, The Gale Group, 2002, pp. 239-47.

Matt Pifer

In the following review, Pifer praises the Men on the Moon collection for its "lingering sense … that stories, our own personal histories, tie us to and teach us about our cultural importance and our political relevance."

The twenty-six short stories collected in Men on the Moon illustrate the sense Simon Ortiz has of the subtleties and power inherent in language, a sense he developed, in part, from the tradition of story-telling so deeply rooted in the culture of his Acoma people, and from decades of communicating these narratives in short stories, essays, and, perhaps most famously, poems, many of which have been gathered in Woven Stone. Ortiz's stories are testaments to quiet lives balanced between extremes, which, as these dichotomies break down, leave the reader always conscious of the thin line between survival and death, freedom and repression, joy and anger. The characters, then, for better or worse, are often left facing a confused world wherein salvation is decided upon the edge of a quick wit, belligerence, ignorance, anger, or simply a good laugh.

These stories echo in both content and language the oral storytelling tradition, and thus offer a location, an intellectual pivot upon which political action can be promoted and maintained—a space of cultural recognition and, thus, cultural resistance. Driven by this political subtext, Ortiz's collection suggests that place is inextricably bound to a sense of identity, and that this act of defining, resisting dominant stereotypes, and so surviving, is a political action, is a way for Ortiz and other Native Americans to resist their own cultural and economic demise. For example, in the title story "Men on the Moon," Grandfather Faustin, an archetype who recurs in the stories, is given a television and witnesses one of the later Apollo missions to the moon. Faced with this technology, the advanced search for "knowledge," Faustin perhaps rediscovers the importance of dreams and stories in explaining life and uncovering how things are kept in relation.

This sense of ancestral perseverance surfaces throughout the collection, acting as an imaginative focal point, often in the subtle images which are lingering reminders to the characters of something they have lost or forgotten. These images, these textual voices, are a call to action, to remembrance. In "Woman Singing" the ancestral voice emerges from the song of a migrant worker who has been forced to sleep with Wheeler, the "potato boss," in order to survive, as Clyde, a fellow worker, realizes one terrible night: Clyde "tried to think of the song he had heard her singing. The People singing, he thought. Yes, the woman singing. The mountains, the living land, the women strong, the men strong, the children strong." The voice reverberating with this ancestral song pulls Clyde back to memories of his "People," and his identity is recast, made visible and powerful, by its relationship with the land, the women, the children, all of whom are strong and alive - surviving.

These major themes, ancestry and its emergence and persistence in the land, become frames, the prevailing context, for understanding and experiencing the quiet lives in Ortiz's stories, lives at once full of humor and anger and love and hate, all of which are vested in the rise and fall, the dirt and trees of the landscape. The lingering sense of this collection is that stories, our own personal histories, tie us to and teach us about our cultural importance and our political relevance.

Source : Matt Pifer, Review of Men on the Moon, in World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 1, Winter 2000, p. 215.

Bowker Magazine Group

In the following review, the reviewer praises "Ortiz's poetic gift and his intimate knowledge of oral storytelling."

Ortiz (After and Before the Lightning) is best known as a foremost contemporary Native American poet; his short fiction, written with a poetic emphasis on dense, potent language, is collected here for the first time. These 26 stories—penned between the late '60s and the early '80s—demonstrate the diversity of Native experience in modern America. Speaking in homage to, and solidarity with, his own Acoma Pueblo heritage, the author depicts American Indians in a wide range of social and geographic settings, from reservations to urban landscape. Many tales are melancholy, as they trace the fates of maligned, misunderstood and often visionary characters. In the title story, an aged Pueblo man watches television for the first time, sees astronauts walk on the moon and senses a sudden, irreversible loss of mystery. A young war widow takes a job at an Indian boarding school and must say goodbye to family and friends in the short "Home Country." Another tale, set in Oklahoma, juxtaposes generations in another way, as two brothers listen to an old drunk tell the story of Tecumseh's war; they know that Indians today need a new vision of themselves, another story that can build a powerful Indian identity. A sense of gentleness and wonder pervades the piece in which a father builds his son his first kite and watches the boy's exhilaration. The language of these rich narratives reflect both Ortiz's poetic gift and his intimate knowledge of oral storytelling.

Source : Bowker Magazine Group, Review of Men on the Moon, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 246, No. 32, August 9, 1999, p. 345.

American Library Association

In the following review, the reviewer praises Ortiz for weaving "the tragic with the transcendent, the absurd with the cosmic."

Native American poet Ortiz's short stories seem more spoken than written, but there is nothing casual about their structure or intent. Having grown up in the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, Ortiz is acutely sensitive to the spiritual conflict between Indian and white cultures, and this ongoing strife is the underlying theme in each of his dramatic, sometimes humorous tales. In the unforgettable title story, for instance, a grown daughter and her son give her father his first television on the day the second Apollo mission blasts off for the moon. Faustin peers into the box and asks his grandson why these men want to go there. To learn "how everything was made in the beginning," he answers. "Hasn't anyone ever told them?" Faustin asks, both amused and alarmed at the white man's powerful machines, monomaniacal determination, and deep ignorance. Each of Ortiz's powerfully tender stories weaves the tragic with the transcendent, the absurd with the cosmic, whether it focuses on work or family, happiness or heartache, the laws of nature or of society, loyalty or love.

Source : American Library Association, Review of Men on the Moon, in Booklist, Vol. 95, No. 22, August 1999, p. 2028.