#MYTHOUGHTS LOBO DECODED SERIES#
He then had a series of unsatisfying educational experiences. A résumé he put together for a press kit a few years ago contains the following listing: 1967 – 1969: Jobs, School, DisillusionmentĪmong the illusions Trudell quickly abandoned was that military service was a way of buying into the American dream. But Trudell’s heritage sensitized him to the racism he saw during the war, whether by Americans toward Asians, or the U.S. Trudell saw active Navy duty in the coastal waters off Vietnam, on a ship doing search-and-rescue missions for downed pilots. In 1963, like so many young people with limited economic opportunities, Trudell found himself in the military. This experience left Trudell with a deep contempt for the American “work ethic,” compounded by the endemic racial and economic injustice which surrounded him. His mother died when he was 6, and he watched his father struggle to feed and clothe his large family. (His father was a Santee, his mother’s tribal roots were in Mexico.) Trudell became acquainted with hardship at an early age. John Trudell was born on Februin Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up on and around the nearby Santee Sioux reservation. He took that road primarily through a series of detours, and his poetic and political sensibilities were forged by the remarkable, and some horrifying circumstances of his life. John Trudell did not set out to be a poet. They’re not the total.” Indeed, Trudell was the complex sum of all that he saw, endured and accomplished in his 69 years, a time in which he experienced more than most people might in several lifetimes. They’re things that I do…but they’re parts of me.
“Actually I don’t consider myself to be any of those things.
John Trudell was identified as a poet, a fighter for Native American rights, an agitator, and lots of other things.īut if you were to have asked him which of these descriptions best suits him he would have refused to be pinned down.