4 - Legacies of the Sixties

Summary

The Native American poet Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) describes the decade of the 1960s as “inspirational,” “creative,” and “invigorating,” because it was a “worldwide phenomenon of third-world peoples decolonizing themselves and expressing their indigenous spirit, especially in Africa and the Americas.” And, Ortiz argues, this “process of decolonizing includes a process of producing literature.” Describing “the condition of the Chicano” in 1972, Luis Valdez, the director of the radical Teatro Campesino, writes, “Our people are a colonized race, and the root of their uniqueness as Man lies buried in the dust of conquest. In order to regain our corazon, our soul, we must reach deep into our people, into the tenderest memory of their beginning.” And then he quotes the poet Alurista:

…razgos indigenas

the scars of history on my face

and the veins of my body

that aches

vomito sangre

y llora libertad

I do not ask for freedom

I AM freedom…

What many Native American, Asian American, and Chicano writers learned from the experiences of the 1960s is that literature has a crucial role to play in the formation of ethnic identity and the creation of ethnic pride. Asked to compare the so-called Native American Renaissance to the “Harlem Renaissance in black writing,” N. Scott Momaday pointed to Dee Brown’s best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), researched and written during the 1960s, as a water-shed; according to Momaday, the publication of Brown’s book created “a sudden disposition to understand the experience of the American Indian. The kind of burgeoning that we’re talking about really happened in the publishing world rather than in any sort of social or political arena.”