Themes and Meanings
Ortiz has accepted as one of his responsibilities as an artist the preservation of a cultural identity threatened by social and political forces. When asked in an interview why he writes, he replied, “Because Indians always tell a story” and explained that for an endangered community, “The only way to continue is to tell a story.” His concept of “continuance” is based on the wisdom of Native American elders who said, “We must always remember” and is informed by a need to keep the stories of the past alive “in the new language” so that they are never lost or forgotten. In this way, each generation is “present in the here and now.Continuance, in this sense, is life itself.”
One of the wisdom-figures of Native American life is the mythic entity known as Coyote, whose presence in different forms occurs across tribal divisions and historical epochs. Ortiz acknowledges this mystical power by recognizing “that’s what Coyote says” when he refers to the storytelling trait as fundamental for American Indians, and in the poem, Coyote plays a prominent part as a source of almost instinctive emotional responses that are the product of a previous history of unsettling activity. While the poem does not explain these responses, they would be familiar to an audience used to the oral tradition, and Ortiz frequently brings Coyote into stories and poems in his collected writing to widen the scope for other readers and listeners. In this poem, it...
(The entire section is 527 words.)