The Native American poet dreams of the past because of his inability to live in a hostile American environment. For Indians, being born and raised in the reservations, the American society becomes a place of dislocation and exile.

Ortiz criticizes features of European civilization brought to his native land by the invaders: “street’s gray with cement / glaring glass and oil wind”, he weeps for aggressive attempts of the colonizers to destroy the nature and cause damage to the plant, animal and human worlds. In this context, Ortiz compares the materialistic values of the colonizers with the moral ethics of the Indian ancestors. According to him, the basic problem that the modern world encounters is to be found in America’s isolation from Mother Earth and from fellow human beings. Ortiz also attacks the American urge for domination which is rooted in the American mentality.

 This corrupt ethics, in Ortiz’s view, would lead to the destruction of America and the world. Observing the exploitation and destruction of Indian territories for a long time by American capitalists just to achieve profit, Ortiz longs for a pre-colonial past where his indigenous people lived in harmony with nature. On this basis, Ortiz’s poetry, serves to deliver context as well as an understanding of the racism that exists against Indians, the constant burden by commercial America to exploit the remaining Indian lands, and the role that many Indian cultures could fill in saving the people and the land if allowed. In The Indians Won, Ortiz overlooks his feelings of nostalgia for a long lost past and discusses the plight of the Indians who were isolated for a long time in reservations. Ortiz points out that even when his own people were released they felt they were being imprisoned by the modern and materialistic American society.

These Native Americans long to return to their land as they feel the American colonizers do not feel the connection to their land, the way they do. The compare all things modern as killing of the natural beauty that has been provided to us but mother earth. The land is being neglected which should be the basic source for all human life. It is all seen as polluting and disturbing the ecology. The writer just wishes to return to a see the forest and clean river and not the city lights that seem to rapidly be replacing it all. He wishes to return to as simpler time before they were ever colonized. The recalling of the frontier experience in Native American poetry is often associated with feelings of nostalgia for a pre-colonized paradise, a Utopian homeland which exists only in the imagination of the Native American poet.