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Critical Praise for Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey Through Indian Country

• Raúl Salinas's Indio Trails is the Indigenous journey on highways, rez roadways, city streets, trails from city to rez, and other ways that Raúl has taken in his life as he has lived and worked for the land, culture, and community. Indio Trails is not only "indigenous" in the sense of the Native or Indigenous way of people who are indigenous or native to the Western hemisphere, but indigenous to the human cultural spirit of everyone. This makes Indio Trails the human story of everyone, and everyone must travel that trail spoken by Raul's stories, poems, prayers, and songs.

  — Simon J. Ortiz, author of Woven Stone and Out There Somewhere

• Finally, this book, long in the growing. Dip into the blood words — words that weld a people's past to peoples' futures, words which give more than they take back, which teach, which know. Somewhere along the way from the mindjail to east of the freeway, there is this viaje, a red and real road through grief and despair, an exit off frustration, signed with la estupidez of cultural and historical illiteracy. We have a way to "shatter ... the sadness in the song."

  — Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of Emplumada and Drive: The First Quartet

• Raúl Salinas is a troubadour of justice and makes his way through our generation's history with his songs of truth. Some songs are elegies, some love songs, some are howling at the moon, some pure witness. Beautiful.

  — Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet, writer and musician

Reviews

• Raúl Salinas's Indio Trails is the Indigenous journey on highways, rez roadways, city streets, trails from city to rez, and other ways that Raúl has taken in his life as he has lived and worked for the land, culture, and community. Indio Trails is not only "indigenous" in the sense of the Native or Indigenous way of people who are indigenous or native to the Western hemisphere, but indigenous to the human cultural spirit of everyone. This makes Indio Trails the human story of everyone, and everyone must travel that trail spoken by Raul's stories, poems, prayers, and songs. -- Simon J. Ortiz, author of Woven Stone and Out There Somewhere

  Raúl Salinas is a troubadour of justice and makes his way through our generation's history with his songs of truth. Some songs are elegies, some love songs, some are howling at the moon, some pure witness. Beautiful. -- Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet, writer and musician

  Finally, this book, long in the growing. Dip into the blood words – words that weld a people's past to peoples' futures, words which give more than they take back, which teach, which know. Somewhere along the way from the mindjail to east of the freeway, there is this viaje, a red and real road through grief and despair, an exit off frustration, signed with la estupidez of cultural and historical illiteracy. We have a way to "shatter ... the sadness in the song." -- Lorna Dee Cervantes, author of Emplumada and Drive: The First Quartet

• School Library Journal

  Adult/High School. This collection of poems written over the course of 20 years brings together more than just expressions of Salinas's Chicano and Native American identity. He sums up his poetic aim in "Pueblo Murals," where he writes of a woman weaving "tranquility within the storm" and creating a tapestry that enables one to "assess and survey the turbulence of the times." His poems are this tapestry, woven during his turbulent years fighting for human rights and his own political voice. The range is wide, encompassing all of the drama, pitfalls, and need to reclaim and assert one's self. Some selections are fueled with anger, and readers can hear the influence of the Beat poets in the rhythm of the poet's passionate staccato rampages. Others, like "Survival Song," are soft and light and lead with gentle humor into the lives of Native Peoples. In other selections, Salinas writes about the journey from sorrow to solace through the practice of ritual ceremonies or the universal appeal of love. The best of the collection is "Feel Good Song," a poem of short inspirational instructions that build on and repeat one another, spurring readers to wake from lassitude. The poems provide hope and vision for teens experiencing their own turbulent times.

• San Antonio Express News

  Now in his seventies, raulrsalinas (aka Autumn Sun) has experienced a variety of incarnations: barrio boy, prisoner, activist, Xicanindio (i.e., Chicano and Native American), performance artist, professor. It is his role as poet that has garnered him the most acclaim and adulation from an ever-expanding and diverse world of admirers. In the winter of his years, Autumn Sun brings us a new collection of poetry entitled "Indio Trails." The book, documents Salinas' experiences as a tireless proponent of the rights of Native Americans.

  Salinas, who was born in San Antonio, is widely known for the poetry he wrote while incarcerated on a drug charge during the 1950s and 1960s. The seemingly inauspicious time there led Salinas to a writing life and raised his consciousness about, not just his own identity, but a wider and more inclusive awareness of oppression of minority groups, including the Native Americans.

  His time in prison gave birth to Salinas' "Un Trip though the Mind Jail." Described by fans and critics as the "Chicano 'Howl,'" the poem gained much attention within and without the federal penitentiary system. Salinas helped shed light on the deplorable conditions prisoners face, but also on the socioeconomic system that leads impoverished youngmen down a lonely, destructive path.

  In "Indio Trails," again Salinas directs our attention to the injustices suffered by underrepresented, underserved groups in American society. After his release from prison, Salinas relocated to Seattle. In his introduction to "Indio Trails," Professor Louis G. Mendoza, department chair of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota, writes that in Seattle Salinas became fully immersed as "activist, student and instructor" in the struggle for Native American fishing rights in the Seattle Tacoma region. He adds that the poems in this volume are "centrally, not exclusively, concerned with this period, the heyday of the American Indian movement from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s." According to Mendoza, for Salinas, his new awareness that "as a Chicano his history and destiny are intertwined with that of American Indians" was for the poet "a call to action, an obligation that required him to integrate two identities" he had heretofore thought of as disparate and distinct.

  In the poem "Song of a Sad Lover" written in Seattle in 1979, we see the gentle and undeniable integration of these two identities. Salinas begins,

  After you left
  folks on the rez
  couldn't understand
  my pain
  as you suffered
  with me.

  The poem ends with,

  And even now
  sunday morning rides
  up Beacon Hill
  Jazz ballads
  somehow remind me
  Of
  You.

  In "Casualties of War" Salinas harkens back to his time on Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada in 1979 to recall an even earlier time. He writes:

  From all the four directions
  of the sacred Turtle's back we came
  for the burial of our own.
  
  And we humbly
  (in two traditions)
  delivered our relations
  to the warm womb
  of Mother the Earth.

  There are poems about love and war, birth and death and survival in "Indio Trails." There is also a bit of humor--the comedy of errors that sometimes comes from earnest efforts to assimilate and understand. In the poem, "Cultural Exchange," the Washington state denizen Leroy "attempting to lure" Texan Ramona to share his meal of roe dipped in simmering water, with salt and lemon, ends by comparing the simple soup to her "red soup" back home, "Menoodle."

  In his introduction Mendoza insists to us that neither "blueprint" nor "guidebook" can be composed for others to follow the incredible journey Salinas has so far undertaken. "As readers," he adds, "we are witnesses to the profound possibilities." As Salinas tells his deeply personal story of his own survival on the streets of the inner city, the prison, and in his struggles for equal rights for the underrepresented, he tells always the most universal story. This book by Autumn Sun exists as a shining example for the rest of us on how to begin a life of awareness and understanding. In the poem "Knowledge" he gives us a few tools for the journey:

  Knowledge is living.
  Knowledge is forever.
  Knowledge has no end.
  Knowledge is beginning.

  Yvette Benavides is an English professor at Our Lady of the Lake University.