23 February 2016: I spent a lot of today working my way through That Dream Shall Have a Name, a terrific book by David L. Moore on Native American literature. Moore gets his title from Simon Ortiz's from Sand Creek. I confess to not being that familiar with this work or with Sand Creek, but these words are quite moving:
"That dream
shall have a name
after all,
and it will not be vengeful
but wealthy with love
and compassion
and knowledge.
And it will rise
in this heart
which is our America" (95)
About these lines, Moore writes, "With such a vision, Ortiz and other Native writers are clear about America: at the heart of that dream is tribal sovereignty, an extreme test of the plural is America's goal of e pluribus unum" (27).
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