Taŋka Tanka

Neither of my parents spoke English as children. When my mom was six years old and my dad was seven, they were sent away to boarding schools in Oklahoma and North Dakota. It was there that their original languages faded away, replaced by someone else’s mother’s tongue. By the time I came along, my grandma told me that I needed to learn English, and learn it well, so when I grew up I would be successful. She didn’t say anything about being a poet.

It is a different environment for a Dakota poet, culturally and linguistically, than, say, for a Latina who incorporates Spanish into her poems. Her readers may be discomfited by the language shift, but Spanish is the second most-spoken language in the world. Dakota is on the endangered list. So, the first time I used Dakota language in a poem, I was hesitant about the response it might receive. As a language learner, who was I to be writing in Dakota?

Toked yauŋ he
aŋpetu kiŋ de ake
uŋspemakiya
hekta oko waŋciyake
k’a caŋte mawaṡte.

It was a simple poem: five stanzas, twenty lines. Within those five stanzas, the thirteen Dakota words are not translated. Just thirty-one syllables, the usual amount for a tanka poem, a form that originated in Japan in the seventh century. It is older than haiku. Nobles in the Japanese Imperial Court would compete in tanka contests, and lovers courted each other with tanka poems. Sounds a lot like how Dakota culture might have been in the seventh century.

Today, not many people can speak or read our Dakota language. There are many learners who, much like me, dream of a time when they can carry on a conversation with the few remaining fluent grandparents in our communities or write with confidence in our language about anything under the sun.

Caŋkahupażo
numpa waŋwicabdake
caŋtewaṡtepi
eciŋeṡ witaiŋ k’a
kata ed iwaŋkapi.

I love my first Dakota poem now. I read it without hesitation 
almost everywhere I go, especially when there are second-language learners in the room. It does not matter if they are learning Dakota or Japanese, Spanish or English. What does matter is that everyone can be encouraged to use the language they know to say something meaningful. Encouraged to be playful with language, the way we were as small children first learning to talk without fear. Sometimes it begins with as few as thirteen words. Sometimes it begins with a song.

Maka siŋtomni
Dakota wicohaŋ kiŋ
oteḣike ye.
Damakota maṡipi.
Mnihed mic’iye kte ye.

Learning our Dakota language will be a lifelong journey for me, so I use it every day, in every way I can, including in my poetry. It is now part of who I am, a woman who cherishes her language, who continues to try harder to be a good human being and a good poet, and who does what she can to resist, to challenge that “endangered” label.

In Dakota, taŋka means “big.” In Japanese, tanka means “short song.” A sequence of one hundred tankas is called a hyakushuuta. My goal is to write a hundred tankas in Dakota. There will be songs and jokes, stories and histories, love and tears. Maybe even five or six tankas about a little black dog. It will be a taŋka tanka.