From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which Is Our America (Sun Tracks, V. 42)

Rating:
Summary: creative repersentation of honest views -- SAND CREEK
Review: I have been reading about THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE for school, a topic I chose, and I have been astonished by the lack of corresponding information on the subject. This book of poetry has served me well to offer some different views on the subject, and the information is presented in a creative manner, while remaning concise. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys some poetry and who would want to see the history of Native Americans and their views on how the U.S. came to be through eyes untypical to a general school classroom.

Rating:
Summary: Offers a spiritual center
Review: In November 1864 in Colorado Territory a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho was savagely assaulted by the Colorado Volunteers under the leadership of the Reverend Colonel Chivington. Ortiz calls to mind this event in prose, and then offers on the facing page poetry of hope and renewal. That is how this remarkable book begins. Throughout the book, the author (one of the best American poets writing today) pairs poems on one page with historical vignettes, personal notes, and political comments on the facing page. The book moves through alcohol treatment in VA hospitals, American mythology that undergirds a sense of mission, episodes in Indian-white relations, and many other such topics. In this work Ortiz builds toward a vision of America that is political committed, spiritually centered, and humanizing. He expresses this vision in full knowledge and acceptance of the awful truths of patterns of mistreatment and oppression. Unlike so much of the patriotism that is rooted in a "my country right or wrong" attitude, Ortiz writes as an Acoma Pueblo Indian and US citizen who loves this country deeply for what it can be.

I came to this book a number of years ago full of anger and cynicism developing as a result of learning the history that had been suppressed from the school curriculum. I had always been deeply patriotic, but was finding the truth might shatter that. Ortiz offered more evidence of the lies, but placed these facts in a framework of a dream "of love and compassion and knowledge" (96). No book has done more for the development of my sense of myself as a white American. From my point of view this book is simply the best book in print (and it was out of print for several years).