My writing was to develop topics and themes from my Native American background. The experience in my village of Deetziyamah and Acoma Pueblo was readily accessible. My mother was a potter of the well-known Acoma clayware. My father carved figures from wood and did headwork. This was not unusual, as Native American people know there was always some kind of artistic endeavor that people set themselves to, although they did not necessarily articulate it as 'Art' in the sense of Western civilization. One lived and expressed an artful life, whether it was in ceremonial singing and dancing, architecture, painting, speaking or in the way one's social-cultural life was structured. I did so because this was my identity, the substance of who I was, and I wanted to write about what that meant. My desire was to write about the integrity of a Native American identity. To a great extent my writing has a natural political-cultural bent simply because I was nurtured intellectually and emotionally with an atmosphere of Native American resistance. The Acoma Pueblo, despite losing much of their land and surrounded by a foreign civilization, have not lost sight of their native heritage. This is the factual case with most other Native American peoples, and the clear explanation for this has been the fight-back we have found necessary to wage. At times, in the past, it was outright-armed struggle currently, it is often in the legal arena, and it is in the field of literature. In 1981, when I was invited to the White House for an event celebrating American poets and poetry, I did not immediately accept the invitation, I questioned myself about the possibility that I was merely being exploited as an Indian, and I hedged against accepting. But then I recalled, the elders going among our people in the poor days of the 1950s, asking for donations--a dollar here and there, a sheep, perhaps a piece of pottery--in order to finance a trip to the nation's capital, to demand justice, to reclaim lost land even though there was only spare hope they would be successful. I went to the White House realizing that I was to do no less than they and those who had fought n the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and I read my poems and sang songs that were later described as 'guttural' by a newspaper. I suppose it is more or less understandable why such a view of Native American literature is held by many, and it is also clear why there should be a political stand taken in my writing and those of my sister and brother Native American writers. The 1960s and afterward have been a invigorating and liberating period for Native American people. It has been only a little more than twenty years since Native American writers began to write and publish extensively, but we are writing and publishing more and more we can only go forward. We come from an ageless, continuing oral tradition that informs us of our values, concepts, and notions as native people, and it is amazing how much of this tradition is ingrained so deeply in our contemporary writing, considering the brutal efforts of cultural repression that was not long ago outright U. S. policy. We were not to speak our languages, practice our spiritual beliefs, or accept the values of our past generations and we were discouraged from pressing for our natural rights as Native American human beings. In spite of the fact that there is to some extent the same repression today, we persist and insist on living, believing, hoping, loving, speaking and writing as Native Americans. The central idea conveyed in the passage is that ______.