Telling Our Daughters

Abstract

To Insure Survival, which is often published as a freestanding poem, was also published in A Good Journey as the final movement of a much longer narrative, Notes For My Child (54-59). The first part of this longer narrative records the interior monologue of a father-to-be, be ginning in the early morning of July 5,1973, and moving through the taxi drive, the admissions procedure, the waiting room, and eventually to the birth of a daughter. Around the same time Simon Ortiz was writ ing this poem in celebration of the birth of his daughter Rainy Dawn, my own first daughter, Erin Carlisle, was born. But because it was 1976 and a C-section delivery, I wasn't present in the delivery room to wel come her into her new life. Even if I had been there I suspect I wouldn't have known what to do, what to say. About a decade later, in 1987, on a whim I applied to, and was un accountably selected to participate in, an eight-week NEH Sum mer Seminar on American Indian Verbal Art and Literature. Near the