Note: I wrote this piece in 2013 and it first appeared at hcn.org and remembered it while reading some of Ortiz’s poetry recently. I figured I should re-up it here.

About 20 years ago, my father gave me the book, Woven Stone, by Simon J. Ortiz. I was reading a lot of Indigenous writers at the time, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday and Sherm…