Margo Tamez

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Margo Tamez, Nde'(Lipan Apache & Jumano-Apache)--Activist, Poet, Scholar

Margo Tamez Co-Founder of Lipan Apache Women (El Calaboz) Defense/Strength, an Indigenous People's Organization of theUnited Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous People, was born in Austin, Texas in 1962. Her parents, Eloisa Garcia Tamez (Lipan-Nde'Apache & Basque [Land Grant], El Calaboz, Texas) and Luis Carrasco Tamez, Jr. (Suma/Nde'(Lipan and Jumano-Apache)Apache) were born and raised in the Texas Rio Grande Valley,near the Mexico-U.S. Border married, and moved to urban areas to follow education and jobs.

Raised in San Antonio, Texas during the Civil Rights Movement the Vietnam era made lasting impacts on Tamez' experiences of and responses to colonialism, racism, gender inequity, segregation, and violence in Texas. Her parents were challenged to find non-hostile community in urban spaces of Austin and San Antonio which pressed intolerance, fragmentation and violence upon indigenous people and families. At the age of seven, she received advice from her mother to use the education of the dominating settler society in order to find new ways to voice stories of the people's struggles.

Tamez completed two undergraduate degrees: Archaeological Studies (1984) and Art History (1985) at the University of Texas.

Tamez worked in arts organizations in various locations in the southwest and the south (San Antonio Art Institute, South West Crafts Center, Atlanta College of Art). She experienced marginalization, discrimination and sexual harrassment as a low-paid worker in arts institutions. The passive attitudes of the majorty towards a structured system of oppression as "customary" made strong impacts on the shape of her work to come.

Influenced by the quiet, but expressive traditions of Apache elders, parents, and relatives from the Rio Grande Valley, as well as a vibrant San Antonio-based, grass-roots poets and song-writers, such as Jo LeCoeur, Melissa Javors, and Juan Tejeda, led Tamez to experiment in assemblages. Her first chapbook, Alleys & Allies published in 1991 is an example of a strong community-based knowledge. This collection was an early attempt to fuse indigenous oral tradition, the aboriginal-rooted 'rancherrias' and 'corridos' from south Texas and Tamaulipas, with strong social, economic and political in-justice themes.

In 1997 Tamez completed an M.F.A. in Poetry in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University, working closely with Dine' (Navajo) poet Laura Tohe, and also non-Native poets Norman Dubie, Jeannine Savard, Beckian Fritz-Goldberg, and Alberto Rios.

Tamez is widely known for her grass-roots work among traditional indigenous communities of the Mexico-U.S. border and U.S. Southwest regions, who are working for autonomy and justice against the combined threats of forced assimilation and genocide under colonialist and capitalist structures.

Her writing explores the complex experiences of marginalized indigenous groups which go against the myths, stereotypes, biased, prejudiced and romantic notions of bi-national indigenous peoples of the Mexico-U.S. International Boundary (I.B.). Her poetry and prose examine the effects of colonization and severe genocidal methods used by settler groups to destroy Nde' people, culture, and land-based identities. Thus her work raises and foregrounds the interlocking forces of oppression which drove and continue to drive erosion of social ties among North American indigenous, bi-national communities and families within their own lands, as a result of colonization and globalization.

Tamez' work critiques oversimplified and stereotypical renderings of indigenous women, children and elders which portray them as invisible, minimal or ineffective representatives of their communities, rather than as complex leaders and politically engaged actors and participants in their present and future well-being of their communities.

Tamez examines indigenous autonomy from indigenous women's perspectives from their own communities' histories in survivance against the violent forces of multiple empires and settler/squatter societies. She seeks to draw out their combined impacts on the suppression of matrilineal and matrilocal forms of social organization, which are the root systems of Nde' people's strength and defense against globalization, environmental degradation, spiritual decline, assimilation, and extinction.

Tamez is sought out as an activist who bridges the human rights interests of the oppressed--from traditional, ceremonial, labor, youth, women, children Indigenous communities of the Lower Rio Grande, Texas; Sonora,Mexico; and Southern Arizona. Her work directly interrogates the "matrix of violence" of the United States, Mexico, Canada, Spain and the Vatican waged upon Indigenous People and specifically against the Nde' nations. She stresses the importance of the centrality of resurging voices and communities from local bi-national border regions, and the need for Indigenous People's core participation as self-representatives in community-based, non-hierarchical governance in the regions and it corridors. She speaks to the combined impacts and dangers that threaten her Nde' bi-national communities (Lipan Apache, Jumano-Apache, and Chiricahua Apache) as the true and legitimate speakers and political actors for Indigenous futures in the region and Nde' traditional spaces.

In 2003, the University of Arizona Press released her first full-length collection of poetry, Naked Wanting. Two books followed in 2006. Raven Eye, a poetry collection, is a testimony of internalized racism within North American bi-national indigenous communities, and the thrust of violence perpetrated upon the most vulnerable. The Daughter of Lightning [a work in progress] is a collection of essays relating bi-national Nde' indigenous oral traditions from her mother's and father's families, who are the descendents of survivors of Mexico and U.S. sponsored, military and para-military hunt-downs, death marches, death camps and trafficking of Nde' women, children, elders and men in Texas and Mexico. This collection traces genocide and diaspora histories of the Nde' through the early 18th century to the present. Tamez makes clear the relationship between current day bi-national indigenous women's lives and resistance movements and their histories under colonization in the region.

Tamez co-organized, with Teresa Leal (Opata-Mayo), Joni Adamson, and grass-roots groups the Symposium On Globalism and the Environmental Justice and Toxics Movement. Focusing on environmental justice, urban nature, and more specifically, grassroots activism which raises questions about the effects of globalism, corporate capitalism, and the unequal distribution of toxic sites in the environments of the poor and people of color communities. This group sought to establish stronger ties and relationships between activists, impacted communities, and scholars.

She educates about community-based Nde' experiences and the importance of recovery, reclamation, reparations and cultural restoration in the Mexico-U.S. binational corridors which will directly benefit indigenous elders, women, children as land-based, autnomous, sovereign communities.

Awards

Margo's awards include a Poetry Fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, First Place Literary Award from Frontera Literary Review, Environmental Leadership Fellowship Award, Distinguished Achievement Award, International Exchange Award from the Tucson Pima Arts Council and others. Her book RAVEN EYE (Arizona 2007) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. RAVEN EYE is the winner of the Willa Award, 1st Prize in Poetry, named for the American author, Willa Cather.