Growing Up Native American
Chapter One
The Language We Know
Simon Ortiz
I don't remember a world without language. From the time of my earliest childhoodl there was language. Always language,and imagination, speculation, utters of sound. Words, beginnings of words. What would I be without language? My existence has been determined by language, not only the spoken but the unspoken, the language of speech and the language of motion. I can't remember a world without memory. Memory, immediate and far away in the past, something in the sinew, blood, ageless cell. Although I don't recall the exact moment I spoke or tried to speak, I know the feeling of something tugging at the core of the mind, something unutterable uttered into existence. It is language that brings us into being in order to know life.
my childhood was the oral tradition of the Acoma Pueblo peopie-Aaquumeh hano-which included my immediate family of three older sisters, two younger sisters, two younger brothers, and my mother and father. My world was our world of the Aaquumeh in McCartys, one of the two villages descended from the ageless mother pueblo ... read full excerpt from Growing Up Native American ebook
