Indigenous Voices & RED INK Literary Festival Part 1

On Janurary 21^st, 2017, The Amerind Foundation convened a presentation entitled “Native Voices: Indigenous American & RED INK Literary Festival“. Seven authors shared their work at the Amerind Museum in Dragoon, Arizona. The event was hosted by Simon Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo Native and award winning Regents Professor in the English Department at Arizona State University. We’ll hear two pieces from Henry Oso Quintero, Apache, faculty member at ASU, and oversight editor of Red Ink journal. Finally, Bill Wetzel shared some recent tweets and a piece in progress about a recent trip to Standing Rock. This is part 1 of a multi part series.

Poet, fiction writer, essayist, and storyteller Simon Ortiz is a native of Acoma Pueblo and is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the Reach of Time and Change, The Good Rainbow Road, Out There Somewhere, Men on the Moon, from Sand Creek, After and Before the Lightning, Speaking for the Generations, Woven Stone, and Earth Power Coming. He has received national and international recognition, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers Award, Lannan Foundation’s Artists in Residence Fellowship, “Returning the Gift” Lifetime Achievement Award, WESTAF Lifetime Achievement Award, and, most recently, the Golden Tibetan Antelope Prize for International Poetry. He lives in Tempe, Arizona, where he is a Regents Professor in the English Department at Arizona State University.

Bill Wetzel (Amskapi Pikuni aka Blackfeet from Montana) is an emissary of the masses who has been interviewed on political and cultural topics by the Washington Post, Esquire, Indian Country Media Today, and other outlets. His writing has appeared in the American Indian Culture & Research Journal, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Yellow Medicine Review, Spiral Orb, Studies In Indian Literatures (SAIL), Waxwing Magazine, Red Ink Magazine, Literary Orphans, Off The Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian Writers Vol.2, and elsewhere. He is the curator of the Good Oak Bar Reading Series and a 2016 Peripheral Poet. He is the November 2016 Customer of the Month for Seven Cups Tea House, and claims to be the first member of the Blackfeet Tribe to summit Mt. Lemmon. He also can’t wait to find out “Who Shot America?” in the first episode of our country’s upcoming final season.

Established in 1937, the Amerind foundation and Museum seeks to foster and promote knowledge and understanding of the Native Peoples of the Americas through research, education, and conservation.

Recorded and produced by Amanda Shauger.