Esther Belin in Conversation with Beth Piatote

This week, Esther Belin and Beth Piatote map out some unique qualities of the Navajo and Nez Perce languages. Piatote is a writer, scholar, and member of the Nez Perce nation, and she offers insight into the embodied experience of language revitalization. We hear her poem “1855,” which borrows language from—and interrupts—Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The year 1855 marks both the publication of Leaves of Grass and the signing of the treaty between the Nez Perce and the US, and Piatote’s poem highlights the relationship between Whitman’s vision of America and the confinement and genocide of Native people. Piatote says, “I’m a big fan of nineteenth-century literature. I love Whitman. I love Emily Dickinson. But I also recognize their specific project of making American literature and creating a type of settler colonial identity through art.” You can read “1855,” along with two other poems by Piatote, in the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry.