Water, History, and Sovereignty in Simon J. Ortiz's “Our Homeland, a National Sacrifice Area”

Abstract

Water, History, and Sovereignty in Simon J. Ortiz’s “Our Homeland, a National Sacrifice Area” Robin Riley Fast (bio) As Native peoples face contemporary threats to land, water, and life, Simon Ortiz’s 1981 memoir-essay “Our Homeland, a National Sacrifice Area” (Woven Stone 337–63) still has a great deal to teach us about the impacts of colonialist depredations and the importance of resistance. Ortiz focuses on the damage caused by a history of exploitation that has exacerbated drought and contributed to other “sacrifice area” conditions. How he tells the story is also instructive, as it demonstrates the kind of creative resistance that he identified in “The Historical Matrix”: using the colonizers’ languages and cultures for Indians’ “own purposes” (8, 10). “Our Homeland” exemplifies resistance and claims sovereignty in both political and literary terms. At the same time, parallels to other struggles signal the work’s continuing relevance for contemporary issues and resistance movements. “Our Homeland” enacts its concerns and commitments simultaneously on numerous planes. Every word of the title evokes conflicts and ironies. Thematically, Ortiz’s account of a personal pilgrimage is inseparable from a multilayered history of his people’s identity with the land and their experiences of colonization and resistance. These intertwined stories are linked by persistent references to the depletion and degradation of life-sustaining water, damage associated with exploitative industrialization, beginning with the railroads and including, most prominently, uranium mining and processing. Because uranium is involved, the story Ortiz tells will inevitably be “current” indefinitely into the future. But the story of exploitation and destruction of Indigenous lands and water continues in many places, so the message of “Our Homeland” also encompasses contemporary struggles such as those surrounding the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines; the Athabasca-Chipewyan [End Page 36] First Nation’s struggles related to tarsands extraction in Alberta; Navajo and Hopi concerns about coal mining on Black Mesa; and the campaign to defend the Bears Ears National Monument. The stories of “Our Homeland” prompt a reaffirmation of sovereignty and a call for resistance. Water is a major element of Ortiz’s sovereignty claim; given water’s centrality to life and culture, the claim is all-encompassing. As he has said elsewhere, a water-dependent “farming way of life and economic self-sufficiency is the basis of culture and community for the Pueblo Indian people. . . . [W]ater defines our culture” (quoted in Adamson and Stein 21). Water is thus part of community. Accordingly, references to water—its presence, absence, and history and people’s relationship to it—run through “Our Homeland.” The core story of “Our Homeland” focuses on the Acoma people’s experiences of life in a “national sacrifice area,” in “lands [that] have suffered . . . severe and prolonged environmental degradation . . . purported[ly in the interests of] the collective [US national] good” (Hooks and Smith 562). Scholars Gregory Hooks and Chad Smith focus on the “severe and prolonged environmental degradation” resulting specifically from “military activities” (562), which would certainly include uranium mining and processing.1 They quote a 2001 Department of Defense document that confirms the contemporary currency of “Our Homeland” as it describes effects of uranium mining and milling on Native lands in the US Southwest: “Evidence . . . remains: hazardous materials, . . . abandoned equipment, unsafe buildings, and debris. This contamination degrades the natural environment,” including, of course, water, “and threatens tribal economic, social and cultural welfare” (562). The designation of a national sacrifice area, with the concomitant implication or explicit determination that the damage is too severe for meaningful repair, “implies a government policy that involves the sacrifice of the native peoples and cultures who live there” (Tarter 108), based on the assumption that “[t]he land, and the people living on the land were better left ignored. That is, neither was worth saving” (Kuletz, Tainted 27). This combination of exploitation, destruction, and abandonment, which in the case of uranium occurs preponderantly on or near Indigenous lands, clearly constitutes environmental racism.2 Such actions and policies are responsible for the depletion and pollution of water that is a major focus in “Our Homeland,” as well as in other sites of Indigenous struggle: the people of Standing Rock have resisted the Dakota Access [End...