Thank you, Larry.
[SPEAKING IN O'ODHAM]
I'm very happy to welcome our good friend Simon
to this part of the desert.
He's been visiting with us all afternoon.
And we have all been very happy with this event.
So I want to start out by reading a little bit about what
some of the things that Simon I think
holds dear, and has held dear all his life.
And he writes, "The power of language
resides in the beauty of spirit that
come about when we change ourselves
into helpful, generous, understanding, compassionate,
and thoughtful human beings who benefit others."
He continues, "If I am anything as a poet,
I must always try to be a human being who is helpful to others,
for that also is the power of language,
to encourage ourselves always to be helpful to others."
Simon has demonstrated this ideal
as a human being in so many ways.
As a product of the 1960s ideology of equal rights,
human rights, he has made it an important part of his life
to speak for those who can't, to fight for those who can't.
One of his most famous books Fight Back--
For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land
carries this message.
To this day, Simon will stand up for a cause, whether it
is SB 1070, or the book ban in the schools,
or the situation of immigrants in the Southwest.
Standing up for a cause is something
that is important to him as a human, and as a writer.
Simon is a nationally and internationally renowned
poet, essayist, storyteller, scriptwriter.
He is an award-winning author.
He has about 24 books to his credit,
including the seminal work Woven Stone, a volume of three
of his titles in one, including Going
for the Rain, A Good Journey, and Fight Back--
For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land.
Simon, like a number of his fellow writers,
including Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, and Luci Tapahonso,
N. Scott Momaday, and many others,
is in a group of writers who, in the 1970s,
many claim to signify the era when Native American writers'
voices were asserting themselves.
Some referred this time as the renaissance
of Native American writing.
In an interview, Simon comments that he sees this more
as "A first-time awareness that we were expressing ourselves."
When N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn
won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, a new world opened.
Simon has been quoted as saying, "It
was like a gate thrown open to the voice
of the Native American writer."
Through this gate came people like Simon, and many others.
Presently, Simon is a Regents' professor of English
and American Indian Studies at Arizona State University.
He is the organizer of the Simon Ortiz Labriola Center
Indigenous Speaker Series, which because of Simon's stature
is able to attract some of the finest
American Indian scholars, artists, and writers.
In 2013, Simon was selected to receive the Golden Tibetan
Antelope international prize in China.
And I remember I was with him prior,
and he was getting ready to leave for China to receive
that very prestigious award.
I found some of the text that was part of the comment
as the award was given.
And I just want to read a couple of lines from that.
And they wrote, "Mr. Ortiz, an honest, compassionate,
and bold poet, dauntless defender of the dignity
and multiplicity of human culture,
taking poetry as the home of his soul,
and the last purchase of the culture of his people."
Please welcome Simon Ortiz.
[APPLAUSE]