Wendy Rose

Wendy Rose (born May 8, 1948) is a Hopi/Miwok writer. Having grown up in an environment which placed little emphasis on her Native American background, much of her verse deals with her search for her personal identity as a Native American. She is also an anthropologist, artist, and social scientist.

Also known under her pseudonym Chiron Khanshendel, Wendy Rose is a poet, nonfiction writer, artist, educator, and anthropologist. As a blend of all of these things, Rose rejects marginalization and categorization, but she is best known for her work as an American Indian poet.

Wendy Rose was born Bronwen Elizabeth Edwards on May 7, 1948, in Oakland, California. Though she is of Hopi and Miwok ancestry, Rose was raised in a predominantly white community in San Francisco. Growing up in an urban environment far removed from reservation life and Native American relations gave her little to no access to her native roots as a child. A theme at the forefront of her poetry, she comes from a mixed-blood family. Though her father is a full-blood Hopi, Rose was denied membership in her father’s tribe because ancestry is determined matrilineally. Her mother was partly Miwok, but refused to acknowledge her American Indian heritage (instead she acknowledged her European ancestry including English, Scottish, Irish, and German extraction).

She began making her own path as a young woman when she dropped out of high school to go to San Francisco and join the American Indian Movement (AIM) and took part in the protest occupation of Alcatraz. During this time, Rose spent time coming to terms with her ethnicity, gender, and an Indian’s place in the world.

From 1966 to 1980, she began a new scholastic endeavor where she was enrolled in multiple colleges. First she attended Cabrillo and Contra Costa Junior colleges. Then in 1974, Rose enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. While attending the university in 1976 she married Arthur Murata and earned her B.A. in anthropology in that same year. Two years later she got her M.A. in 1978 and enrolled in the doctoral program. During this period of her life, Rose published five volumes of poetry and completed her Ph.D. in anthropology.

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