Roundtable on Indigenous Poetics

When I began thinking about the idea for this special issue, I struggled to articulate my thoughts. Then I realized that emotional angst and apprehension is the starting point. I often feel the terror that overwhelmed Indigenous youth when they were forced to articulate thoughts in a foreign tongue. My insides crush at the cruel and racist manner in which they were lingually introduced to this new world and how they attempted to relationally connect to the emotional geography of the English language, the logic of colonization. I often start at that emotional state, grieving over the dehumanizing humiliation my parents experienced in federally run boarding schools. It takes more than a few minutes to recompose myself but moving through those difficult moments is always revealing. In the roundtable discussion that follows, the contributing writers represent numerous Indigenous nations and our shared thoughts start a deeper, longer conversation about poetics and language revitalization. The gathered collective thoughts are a restorative way to close this issue.
—Esther Belin

Esther Belin: When you think of the future of your tribal language, what thoughts come to mind? What role do storytellers/writers have in that future? How do you place yourself in that future?

Beth Piatote: When I think about the future of my language I am concerned, because Nez Perce is endangered and it is rare that a child is born into it as a first-language speaker. But that doesn’t mean I or others who are learning it as adults or children are discouraged, only that we will keep working. The language is a living being. I believe that my language will always be spoken, written, and remembered by humans and other beings to whom it belongs. The language will always remain strong as the language of prayers, kinship, song, and place, and it can always expand from that base.

Storytellers and writers have a particular role in carrying the language forward because we are gifted with a relationship to language—its structure, its sound, its meaning. We are innately interested in the aesthetics of our languages and literatures. When we ground ourselves in our traditional stories and languages, we have the opportunity to contribute to a genealogy of thought and aesthetics that will sustain our tribal imaginaries and ways of doing (I cannot say “ways of being” because that is too static for our language—our language is verb-based). Even our use of English will become inflected with our Native languages and practices. One of the important things we can do is demonstrate the importance of play. Often in contexts of endangerment, people are terrified of making mistakes or being shamed by others for experimenting with the language, because the pressure to carry it exactly as our ancestors and elders did is so intense. But we can have both language play and language fidelity—in fact, the two are dependent on each other.

I have chosen to write in my language primarily for Nez Perce language learners and speakers. My goal is to produce work for them first, following the knowledge I have of the language and stories. This means that others might not always see or appreciate the specifics of the work, yet I believe the aesthetics of the language and the literature (if done well) will shine through, even if readers can’t identify the exact principles or linguistics at work. In my work I want to demonstrate a rigorous understanding of our language and stories, while also demonstrating the joy of language play and creation.

Denise Low: Unlike the Diné language, virtually no fluent Delaware-language speakers remain. The Algonquin people known as Delawares—Lenapes, Munsees, Unamis—as well as their language suffered ongoing diaspora when settler Europeans made contact in the 1500s. Yet neither the people nor the language has disappeared. The surviving fragments, audio tapes, and historical grammars, as well as contemporary Algonquin languages like Ojibwemowin, all suggest the elegance of Lënapei lixsëwakàn. When appropriate, I have used some of the words I learned in tribal settings and through historical resources in my poems, especially when the context can be strengthened—plus references to ungendered nouns, animate natural objects/beings, histories. 

Language is more than spoken sound, in my opinion. It interacts with music, dance movements, and ceremonies. Glyphic signage of petroglyphs, basketry, carvings, and painted animal hides signal cultural narratives that expand into lifeways. Language persists within the stories, and the stories reside in a living dimension sited in unspoken nettings of community tradition.

Kimberly Blaeser: Denise, I’m glad you brought up the visual literacies. Expression, including poetry, comes via non-alphabetic means as well as via verbal or written language. I think of the poetry of Anishinaabe picto-graphs—of hide paintings, beading, birchbark biting. Maps, of course, offer another way of storying relationships. And many Indigenous poets, especially those who work in concrete or visual poetry, continue to map identity, relationships, and meaning via more than words. This is one of my current preoccupations—what I call picto-poems. This is also why Indigenous Nations Poets includes inter-art activities in each retreat we hold. We want to honor and continue these interconnected art literacies.

DL: A respected Cherokee elder from Oklahoma, next to the Delaware community, assured me that tribal stories can be told in English, although the original language was preferable. What was important was the original intent. Because a language is compromised does not mean that the people give up. Keeping the language intact is ideal, but not always possible. Preservation efforts for Lenape will continue, as will developing interaction with neighboring tribal nations. Since arrival in Oklahoma, Delawares have borrowed dances—which are body languages as well as music—from Cherokees, like the stomp dance. I refer to this in my poems “Dance” and “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County.” Delawares’ Bean Dance is another survival of narrative, movement, music, and language. Mixed media always have been used to map Lenapehoking, and this will continue.

For storytellers and writers, this heritage, fractured and multi-chronological, encourages experimentation with hybrid texts and moving images. Nations’ narratives are essential to cultural survival and sovereignty. The stories hold us together, as Leslie Marmon Silko has said—unlike the European tradition of stories being fictional and somewhat marginal. 

My role is to be a link in the chain of cultural transmission, as much as possible. I stand between the last fluent speakers and the future. I am not formally enrolled, but nonetheless commit myself to bringing culture forward as much as I can, in creative and historical genres—all leading into the future.

KB: In her book The Droning Shaman, Nora Marks Dauenhauer speaks of “Trapped voices,/frozen/under sea ice of  English.” In my earliest years, I grew up in my Native grandparents’ household. For them, Anishinaabemowin was a first language, while for my mother (whose first language was English), it was receding under a “sea ice of English.” The language dynamic from that time and the repression of Indigenous languages in the boarding school era (experienced by my grandparents and older aunts and uncles) are all reflected in my work. Indeed, the Ojibwe language that is visible in my poems is like the peak of a land mass that rises to the surface in a lake, while underwater mountains—the sources and influences—remain submerged. Given the history of assimilation policies that included linguicide, reclaiming Anishinaabemowin in and through poetry becomes an act of resistance. For me, it is also a gesture of zaag’idiwin—of love for those who carried the language through the years of trauma. 

Indigenous languages live differently inside us and on the tongue. I code-switch because I live between languages—in the shadow of old losses, making a pathway for recovery. In my writing, I unlock language memories, treasure and repeat the implanted cadence and the voices who carried it, reclaim and relearn Anishinaabemowin by using it. This work brings both rewards and frustrations. In the poem “Speaking, Like Old Desire,” I ask, “how can you conjugate after forty?” and “Will we make spirit houses for buried languages? /Or sing healing songs—nanaandawi’iwe—nagamonan.” My mistakes, too, I braid into the community mosaic. Through Indigenous language use we enact sovereignty, we claim continuance.

DL: Kim, that image of “Trapped voices” caught in “sea ice” is so powerful. Dauenhauer was prescient of these issues and a great contributor. What is static has lost life. When I visited the Cherokee immersion program some years back, students were creating new forms of the language for text messages, with abbreviations similar to English text messages. This adaptation is growth and vitality. And your term “zaag’idiwin” inspires me to keep going with what recuperation and transmission is possible.

Elise Paschen: It inspires me to envision the powerful revitalization of the Osage language. The Osage Nation claimed back our language by inventing an entirely new orthography system. The thirty-six-character orthography was developed by Mogri Lookout and the Osage Nation Language Department in 2004. Before this time, we used the English alphabet when we transcribed our language, while now the language system is dedicated to Osage sounds. The Osage Congress officially adopted orthography in 2015, and the Osage Nation Language Department offers classes for all levels of language-learners. As we say, “Orthography is sovereignty!”

My great grandmother, Eliza Bigheart Tallchief, conversed mostly in Osage. My grandfather, Alex Tallchief, conditioned by Indian boarding school, spoke only in English. The Osage language was not passed down to me by my family.

For many years, I have explored our language through Francis La Flesche’s Osage dictionary as well as Carolyn Quintero’s Osage Dictionary. In these past months, the Language Department created an Osage Nation online dictionary. I recently translated Osage words in a poem which had incorporated phonetic spellings into orthography, thanks to this new resource.

Our worldview is connected to the language. By instilling poems with the Osage language, we breathe life into our landscape, our culture, and our heritage.

EB: I completely agree that orthography is sovereignty. I feel like I have these conversations within the Indigenous writing community frequently—that a colonial residue constricts/mutilates Indigenous thought within the English language orthography. We are so aware of this phenomena—and my interest currently investigates/relocates Diné poetics using the shape-shifting verbs—situating our concepts of time and thought into the page or other vessel.

Jake Skeets: There are many committed to keeping the Diné language alive; so as long as we are alive, the language will be. However, our country has proven it doesn't want a lot of us to live—either here or abroad. I think of the genocide happening in Gaza and think of the genocide here. I think of the recent election. This country does everything in its power to rob us of our ability to live.

EB: Jake, your thoughts weave into how we transfer or communicate using our tribal language. What differences are we aware of, in comparison to the English language? What is the intermedial point or interplay between conceptual/contextual thought in tribal and English language? What does it sound like and what form does it take?

BP: This is such a complex set of questions! First of all, Nez Perce language is verb-based and polysynthetic. This means that a verb is in the center of a word, prefixes form the who and the how, and the suffixes express the when and the where. This structure makes the language highly relational—nearly every word expresses a spatial and/or social relationship to the world around it. Our language has time tenses beyond what English has, allowing one to move across temporal zones, going from deep time to recent past. Our language also has many onomatopoetic terms, so that the language sounds like the land.

EB: Beth, you raise such an interesting point about the grammar of Indigenous languages. And I wonder how many other Indigenous languages are structured around relationships; Diné bizaad is also verb-based and our worldview, our ontology, can be derived from the word k’é, which indicates relationship to people, animals, nonanimates, and deities. Syntax often represents relationality, and in contemporary times could be comparable to positions of agency, power.

KB: Anishinaabemowin is similarly constructed to Nez Perce in that it, too, is verb-based and polysynthetic with a high number of morphemes per word. Words are formed with the root verb in the center and prefixes and suffixes adding grammatical information to words. They express relationships, such as identifying who is performing the action of the verb. The interconnected morphemes often tell a story. The longest word in Anishinaabemowin is sixty-four letters. Though translated as “blueberry pie,” the Ojibwe word doesn’t name as much as it describes the process of blueberry pie. 

Alive in storytelling, the language also often involves play and motion. And, of course, the morphemes themselves link to other morphemes and the stories carried by those root woods. 

DL: The Lenape root for the word Turtle, Packoango, translates as Dragging Along, describing the Turtle’s motion on the earth, not a visual (and static) description. Movement and transformations are central goals as I write, so readers find themselves moving with me through an experience kindled into shared flames. 

Oscar Kawagley, Yupik, impressed me in a lecture when he said that the land teaches people their language—what words are needed—opposite to the biblical assignment of names to objects in Genesis. Because Lenapehoking encompassed sea, rivers, and land, words existed for Turtle, Tortoise (Land Turtle), and Terrapin (Freshwater Turtle); these became clan assignations. Land and Water Turtles separated during one of the many removals west, and the Water Turtle clan went to Canadian areas around the Great Lakes, and the Land Turtle clan went to Kansas.

Turtle Island and the creation account inflects in Lenapes’ Turtle references. Hilly uplands in the original region of southern New Jersey were called Lenhacki, original land that rose from the seas, like North America. In New Jersey, there are “Turtle-back” hills, called this by locals because they are shaped like a Turtle’s shell (Raymond Whritenour is my source here). In Kansas City, my grandfather’s family lived for a time in an area of Wyandot/Lenape settlement called Turtle Hill.

As a writer, I have found myself pursuing imagery that carries dense interactions, including Turtle references in many poems and my memoir, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival. I have spent inspiring moments watching piles of river turtles bask on sandbars of the Kansas River.

EP: Osage is a metaphorical language. It is a noun-deficient language, consisting of numerous verbs. Often the words incorporate onomatopoeia. When I discover a word or phrase of our language, I often catch a glimpse of our ancestors’ perspectives—a way of seeing that I hope to absorb. As I apprehend our language and our story lines, I recall this phrase from an Osage song: “To the door of the House of Mystery I have come.”

JS: The English language is transactional and often punitive. It appropriates and erases all of its roots. I think Diné poets are finding ways to use a language of absolution as a means for survival. To paraphrase Billy-Ray Belcourt, we have no first or second language. We only have English, and Diné poets have always shown how one can break open its horizon. Diné bizaad teaches us a longevity that English attempts to erase.

EB: Yes, I think in our acquisition of languages, we contextualize based on how we learned to use them. We translanguage because our languages emerge from the land—our interior landscape as well as the exterior. I have heard people talk about Navajo poems as thought poems, where the origin or root of the noun is connected to emotion, spirit, and philosophy—in this case Diné epistemology. How do you think about Indigenous language or epistemology when making poems? Where does Indigenous poetics play a role in your writing?

BP: I began writing poems because poetic forms are amenable to expressing sonic and grammatical concepts. The linguistic structure of our language is so different from English that alternative poetic forms are necessary to bring readers into the thought-world of the language. Concrete poems such as the word poems by Sherwin Bitsui and Orlando White are particularly inspiring in this way. For me, the poetic form is at the service of the language. And our language is so naturally poetic and profound that it’s a challenge to find the form that will convey the aesthetics of the language. I think about your “bundles are bundling” cycle, Esther, and how it creates a form that shows how the language acts, or performs. I think that the work Native poets and writers are doing through their languages is some of the most innovative and exciting work happening today. Our languages are so powerful—we must as writers be open to the forms the languages want to take and the worlds they want to reveal. That is the principle I am always following—how can I show the beauty and profound truth of our words?

EB: Beth, that’s so interesting about identifying with or being part of different genre communities. Generally, I often place all Indigenous writers into the genre-bending category—which makes so much sense because of our tribal languages. The more work the Indigenous language needs to bend into English orthography, the more Indigenous writers sharpen their poetics to reflect that sound and thought.

KB: I appreciate your comment on genre-bending, Esther. In recent years, as I think of Anishinaabe language poetry, I think often of something other than alphabets. This may be beyond our current focus, but we all experience many languages in our homelands and tune our senses to receive them. Living in relationship with a place, we become literate in new ways. When I am out in a kayak in the million acres of water and rocky islands in the Boundary Waters, I read the water marks on a rock and to me that is an Anishinaabe poem. Wave patterns and bird calls sometimes communicate and affect me in the same way poems do when they gesture beyond themselves or when the accumulated rhythms and sounds “mean” more than the mere words. The correspondence between Anishinaabemowin and the poems of water sometimes seem clearer than that between English and water. If we consider the way vocables can carry meaning in tribal songs, I think that aligns easily with natural sounds/songs.

EP: Poems in my forthcoming book, Blood Wolf Moon, continue to integrate both the phonetic spelling and the orthography, including a series of poems inspired by Quintero’s Osage Dictionary. The Osage words in translation conjure the poem for me. The poem is not what I expected to write as it draws from the past, the dream life, the unconscious, revealing sudden surprises. Seeing our language offers glimpses of the linguistic imagination of Osages generations before.

I am grateful to you, Esther, for publishing two of these Osage language poems, which incorporate orthography, phonetics, and English, in the Land Acknowledgments issue of Poetry (July/August 2022): “𐓨𐓘͘ ́ 𐓺𐓟  𐓱𐓘́𐓱𐓘𐓺𐓟/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter” and “𐓷𐓘𐓧𐓟́𐓺𐓟/Waléze/Stationery.”

EB: Thank you, Elise. Your poems were a special addition to that issue. You speak of literary sovereignty when you mention the multiple methods to create Indigenous sound/thought, using what we have available as writers. I applaud Osage writers who are writing within the fluidity of several orthographies, soundscapes, and poetics! Yes, we are imaginative, yes we exist in multiple linguals. Since Diné bizaad still uses the English orthography with numerous diacritical marks to recreate sound, there has been unnecessary conflict between language speakers because the words are written incorrectly! How do we move on from the captivity of our sound—the assault from diacritical marks? What role or power do we give diacritics?

DL: Elders have told me about Lenape (Delaware) culture and history, entwined with bits of remaining language. These inform my connection to history and place in my writings. First: Lenape contact with settler Europeans began in the 1500s—Spanish and English, followed by Dutch and Swedes in the 1600s—and much culture was lost. Documents of mixed sourcing and some oral tradition remain. I work with such imperfect remainders to parse some possibilities about the truth of our past. A Munsee (Delaware) scholar and friend shared with me his transcription of an orally transmitted account of the Gnadenhutten Massacre of 1782, in an English rearranged to reflect the speaker’s original tongue, much like I read in Luci Tapahonso’s poem “Hills Brothers Coffee.” In my documentary-lyrical poem, the central word of the conflict resides embedded in the relationship of friends and enemies: “When the Munsees got to Gnadenhutten, their White friends told them to wait in the church building. They said, ‘Stay, then we’ll meet you there. We will fix our friendship.’” The term “fix” here suggests a concrete repair and reconciliation, which was the opposite of what happened. The word is the crux of the passage, as it demonstrates the betrayal of Revolutionary militia who slaughtered ninety-six of their former neighbors. It suggests the original Munsee dialect reproduced in English, and it preserves a Native account of the genocidal war against Lenapes and related nations. This presents an Indigenous perspective most often lacking in colonial history/story. This is in my recent book House of Grace, House of Blood. In this collection of personal lyrics, text, and visual archives, I create an interrogatory and interactive genre of found/free-verse narration. The contemporaneous documents about the Gnadenhutten Massacre provide eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents as métier for reworking and recuperating histories. In asking questions of the documents, it brings past into present for reframing in Indigenous perspective—re-indigenizing the stories/histories and fragmenting the mono-authority of the English genre of historical recounting. This expansion of narrative view from one to many is crucial to my undertakings.

EB: Denise, I connect with that thought: “I work with such imperfect remainders to parse some possibilities about the truth of our past.” I struggle in my own English-language-driven methods to construct thought. When I engage in the thought construction process within Diné bizaad, I consistently sit among the “imperfect remainders.” This is where I move toward sound and absence of sound within poetics, within Diné bizaad, to seek that possibility of truth or knowledge from my own tribe’s epistemology. 

JS: Our ventures into language will always be cut short by the institution of poetry in this country because the measure of poetry is a very narrow, very white canon. There is no room for Indigenous poetics in US poetry because there is no room for Indigenous people in US futuring. The possibilities in the US (like its poetries) are tied to the displacement and erasure of Indigenous people here and across the world. I think the nouns in our Indigenous languages are connected to a personhood and that is disruptive to empire. When the emphasis is language itself in a poem, we realize how often written forms fail us. Indigenous languages and their poetics, however, have the capacity for failure—the nuances remind us that it’s okay to fail, to fail again, to keep failing. I think this is what keeps us working within a form that does have the capacity for us as people. There’s a beauty in failure, but we’re taught we must only succeed, dominate, manifest, conquer. Diné bizaad is a language of patience and cunning. It is quiet, in the distance, like a coming storm.