“Seeds to us they offered”: Diné Poets on the Indigenous Language of Poetry

i.

“I am homesick/I am teaching myself/to pray,” writes Diné poet Jamie Ayze. The home for which Ayze longs is a cultural home; the prayer is one voiced in the ancient language of the Diné people. Danielle Shandiin Emerson writes of “Diné bizaad, a prayer we recognize but can’t translate.”

Two words separate these poets from the fulfillment of their longings: genocide and linguicide. Their tribal nation, like those across this Turtle Island called America, has suffered more than half a century of colonial control. Policies of assimilation, such as Indian boarding schools, deliberately targeted Indigenous cultural and linguistic practices.

Yet, for these and other poets in this issue, their longings for stolen elements of language and culture do not settle into elegy. Although they express lament and loss, they ultimately build a claim of continuance. As Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation Laura Tohe writes, “English hadn’t taken over yet; our tongues still belonged to us.”

Listen. In these pages you will hear poets speaking still and again ancient words, speaking the teachings that sustain culture.

ii.

As Indigenous writers, we are here against all odds. As Muscogee Creek poet Joy Harjo writes, “who would believe/the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival/those who were never meant/to survive?” But survival has become survivance and Indigenous nations continue. Our arts, too, continue to flourish. Indeed, those arts, including poetry, have nourished Indigenous peoples throughout the ravages of colonization. Salish painter and printmaker Jaune Quick-To-See Smith claims, “One can be subjected to many inhumane conditions, but, for the survival of the soul, the mind is always free through art.”

Yet, as these Diné writers’ poems demonstrate, the history of colonization lives in our bones. Chris Hoshnic writes, “I resemble a language.” When Shaina A. Nez writes of “reciting the pledge of allegiance in Diné bizaad,” she asks, “are we the girls at war?” Laura Tohe describes the imprint of her boarding school experience: “I was five years old and was bearing witness to the punishment inflicted on my monolingual classmates when their tongues struggled to pronounce English words. Silence took over and covered them like a blanket.... I’m still haunted.”

The reverberations of US government policies continue. We are assimilation’s children—inheritors of both beauty and heartbreak, of lands and languages linked in longstanding relationships, of land and languages stolen in an effort to destroy our relatedness.

And though we are assimilation’s children, we are also the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren—the blood relations—of determined and triumphant survivors. Survivors who gave us stories and songs and sacred ways of being. Survivors who nourished us with laughter as well as food. As the work collected here demonstrates, we continue to carry these inheritances into our living and into our writing. As inaugural Navajo Poet Laureate Luci Tapahonso writes, “Our language reminds us of the legacy that connects us to the past and instills that legacy in this present time.”

iii.

As Indigenous writers, how do we story our languages? How do we feed these heritage languages and the language spirits? What indelible essence does the language carry? How do we navigate the black holes created by historical losses? What distinguishes our understanding of and relationship to our Indigenous languages? Do we conceive of song language or ceremonial language as different or as a natural extension of everyday language? Can we, or how can we, communicate the dense, layered reality and animacy of tribal tongues in a language like English that functions primarily through static nouns?

Some writers in this folio discuss these important epistemological and ontological questions—the qualities of the Navajo language that set it apart. Others embody their intuitive understanding via the palette, music, and performance of the words—via the images, breath markers, and architecture of the page—the visual presentation of the songs, invocations, or poems. In her essay, “Word Made Real,” Natanya Ann Pulley considers metaphorical language and its relationship to the thing itself, saying, “I love the idea that something is made of only itself and exists despite our language that tries to hold it down.” More striking still is the important distinction she makes when characterizing Diné bizaad: “Words don’t make things happen. Words are things happening.” A concrete poem such as “Female Rain” by Doug Gonzalez demonstrates this leaning toward poetic embodiment. Likewise, Manny Loley analyzes the concept of saad (words or language), the ancestral metaphysical beliefs that teach “how speech/intention could shape realities,” and how the two come together in a Diné poetics that transforms and restores balance. Shaina A. Nez, too, offers a key comment about her language inheritance: “our language emphasizes abundance much more than/the United States can afford     much more than/war language     much more than our recognition.”

As Indigenous peoples, most of us understand language as an ancestral gift—from both our human/tribal community or nation and arising from the nibi/water, aki/earth, noodin/air—from the alive places we make our homes. Therefore, in a reciprocal relationship, using that gifted language we honor Anishinaabemowin, Diné, or other Indigenous language. We work in the language to sustain the culture, to thrive as Indigenous people. This is our giving back; this giving back is our responsibility.

In practice, the dynamic of making poetry as an Indigenous writer involves a negotiation between the meanings, intentions, and philosophical or spiritual underpinnings of speaking—when speaking itself is a political act. What we call “voice” in poetry emerges from the complicated colonized spaces we navigate.

Potential impacts of the opening of language intensify when we code-switch, move between, or employ multiple languages. They intensify with the innate allusion and embedded history at work in Indigenous language use. Each word from an Indigenous tradition becomes an act of resistance, an emblem of resilience.

Sometimes this resistance and resilience is marked by tribal humor. Tongue in cheek, Cynthia J. Sylvester writes, “I learned enough Navajo to know who I am, when to come and eat, and when someone is insulting me.” Cheyenne Dakota Williams uses the persona “Not So Rez Girl.” And in her thoughtful essay on Diné poetics, Pulley declares, “Sometimes I think I could never be a scholar because I fall too hard for metaphors.” This playfulness characterizes the work here—perhaps as an antidote to the longing and recognition of loss.

Equally prevalent in the poetry is an intense awareness and engagement with the intricate details that characterize Diné reality. Jake Skeets’s poetry pulses with his attentiveness to the everyday as he engages each of our senses. Using the imperative mood, he offers directive: “look/... see hushed sage/needle bush/red brome” or “taste/... a gender a wild rice a book/tongue/copper mines chemtrail a squall line.” But we also find expressions of hope or determination for a Diné or an Indigenous future, as in Skeets’s final direction: “then, dream/... dream time unspooled from its barbed wire/its border wall/its pipeline/its blockade.”

iv.

Circumstances similar to those experienced in the Americas have led to the decline of Indigenous languages around the world. Recognizing the urgency of this situation, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2022 through 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) recently launched a #LanguageBack initiative because we recognize the way language learning and teaching through poetry supports both the sovereignty of tribal nations and our survivance as Indigenous peoples and protectors of the planet. Because Indigenous languages carry important teaching—environmental, spiritual, and subsistence teaching (among others)—using the language in poetry can also carry that Traditional Indigenous Knowledge into the world at this time of climate crisis, when our planet desperately needs it.

In her book The Droning Shaman, Nora Marks Dauenhauer speaks of “Trapped voices,/frozen/under sea ice of English.” I write of “tongue hungers” and “this blood caress of gone.” For many Indigenous writers, there is an absence, a hunger or ache where their Indigenous language should live. As Danielle Manygoats claims: “prayers sleep among the ashes.” Yet she, too, claims continuance when she writes: “The language belongs to her/... Brown roots, Brown trees./Family lineage ripens into clans,/And sheep continue to graze.”

In this gathering of Diné poets, you will also find the Navajo language itself—still intact and working as it has for centuries. When Nia Francisco writes of the seeds received and carried by this generation, she writes first in Diné bizaad and then translates her stanzas into the newer language of English. Her engagement with language also involves the physical act of connection—she prepared her submission by hand, meticulously adding all the intricate diacritical markings that signify inflection and word relationships. The poem handwritten on lined notebook paper—a tactile and measured process, the weightiness of thought given over to the precarity of words. Francisco’s poem also embodies the act of speaking when it replicates the litany of a tribal chant, repeats and repeats like a drum or a heartbeat the word niidliinii (we are). Eight times Francisco claims the continued presence of her Diné relatives. “Nihí ba’da’áłchiní niidliinii,” declares the first line in the stanza—“We their offspring we are.” “‘Álastsii doo nínit’i’ii niidlįh.” claims the last line of the poem—“Seeds that do[es] not cease we are.”

The writers here and Indigenous poets across Turtle Island, each in their own way, persist. We chant continuance, chant belonging, sing Native Peoples and our languages alive.