Kimberly Blaeser, Molly McGlennen, and Margaret Noodin on the Collaborative Process
Anishinaabekweg, Piecing Ourselves Together
The three of us have done different kinds of collaborative work over the years and recently expanded to include creative work in these endeavors. As we write together as Anishinaabe women, we build more than a poem. As we inflect our exchange with bi-lingual code switching and ideas arising out of Indigenous knowledge systems, we reinforce tribal language sovereignty and continuance. Our braid-like collaborative process also teaches and strengthens us as we learn from one another and stretch ourselves poetically. We delight in the play and the surprising turns the writing takes. The poems voice and enact a kind of tribal flourishing.
These poems were constructed in conversation both online and over the phone. We used email and Google docs to keep a record of the building of the poems. However, in the way the collaborative building came together, it feels for each of us as though these poems have been piecing themselves together for a very long time. Certainly, the three of us have been in conversation around the ideas that fill our poems since we all met one another many years ago.
Each poem began with one of us providing an opening line or lines. If the author of the line(s) had an intention about where the poem might go, it likely fell away very quickly! Once another of the poets added to the opening, it broke open with other possibilities. We generally responded in turn by adding new sections after what had come before, but sometimes we would rearrange or insert into the previous lines. We also posed thoughts, questions, or encouragement, and this fed the poem.
In one moment, Kim mistook an addition by Molly—“Anyone could read this”—as a statement about the poem. It was, but was also meant to be the next addition to the growing poem. We are “meta,” especially when we write together. This sometimes includes the intentional threading of Anishinaabemowin into lines. We are creating poems about creating poems in Indigenous language. Why? Because Ojibwe concepts live just a little differently in the Anishinaabe language. In the song of poetry, they also feel different on the tongue. This may be the most thrilling aspect of our collaboration: what we each discover from the storehouses of knowledge Anishinaabemowin holds, and what holds when we fuse that knowledge in English.
As the Ojibwe is woven into the poem, it highlights differences in sounds, metaphors, and meaning between Ojibwe and English. If we talk specifically about these poems, for example, “meshkadoon” carries the very Ojibwe consonant cluster “shk” which is not a part of English. It also is a verb meaning “to exchange something,” and the added suffix “-naawaa” makes clear “they” are exchanging something. The noun “ikidowinan” also has a verb at its center, “ikido,” meaning “to speak,” which becomes the noun “words” but retains the essence of speech as Ojibwe readers think of the many ways it could be conjugated to describe communication.
We have different fluencies in Anishinaabemowin. Margaret teaches the language and writes her own poems first in Ojibwe; Molly and Kim use the language in these exchanges as they do in their own poems following their knowledge and understandings. Just as we welcome tinkering with English lines that might bring the poem to a more rewarding place, we welcome Margaret’s knowledge of the subtle distinctions in Anishinaabemowin.
At times in the poems, the Ojibwe is a translation which precedes a direct translation in English. For example, “ningii-bazhinenmin” does mean “we have barely escaped,” but the Ojibwe makes clear it is an exclusive “we” that echoes other suffixes and implies a closeness between some of the characters that does not extend to the readers. At other times the Ojibwe is never directly translated which creates a different kind of distance intended to inspire curiosity. When some look up Bagonegiizhig they will find this is the name of a particular constellation which appears to create a hole in the sky, and is also the term sometimes used for an eclipse. But this name also invites readers to consider the way indigenous phrases and ideas offer alternate histories. For instance, it is the name of an Ojibwe orator, political activist, and member of the Mississippi band who lived between 1825 and 1868.
We encourage readers to visit Ojibwe.net and the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary to hear the language and enjoy an introduction to the lexicon and ontology of the Ojibwe people.
None of us takes the poem over. We pause each time one of us bends a line back over the length of what has already been written. We need each strand to make the braid strong. Our collaborative-creative process certainly illuminates our shared conviction that poetry is a place of discovery—of not only our relationships to the poems, but also of our relationships to one another.
Poet, photographer, scholar, and fiction writer Kimberly Blaeser is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation in northwestern Minnesota. Blaeser worked as a journalist before earning her PhD from the University of Notre Dame. She is currently a Professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MFA faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe...
Molly McGlennen is the author two collections of poetry, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits (Salt Publishing, 2010) and Our Bearings (University of Arizona Press, 2020), and a monograph, Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women's Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). She is an associate professor at Vassar College.
Margaret Noodin is a professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature (Michigan State University Press, 2014), as well as What the Chickadee Knows (2020) and Weweni (2015), which are collections of poetry in Anishinaabemowin and English, both from Wayne State University...