I Am Dressed in My Language

Oh, see Sally. Oh, see Dick. Oh, see Jane. These repetitive sentences introduced me to reading. I learned that putting the sounds of the alphabet together made a word, made a sentence, made a paragraph, made stories, made poetry, made a book. My parents dressed me with two languages—Navajo and English—and sent me to school with new clothes and an American name. My brothers were there already, and I wanted to be a part of what seemed like fun. One day I walked to the stone Indian School building and peeked into the window of my brother’s classroom. I saw students moving around, and in the back of the classroom were toys and a play kitchen. I wanted to go to school so I could play with those toys. My brother saw me peeking in the window and motioned me away, like he was embarrassed of me, or maybe he knew something I didn’t know.

The next year I was put in a classroom without the play kitchen and toys. For the first few days the teacher gave us pictures to color, which was fun until a dark undercurrent struck. My classmates were Diné and most only spoke Diné bizaad, The People’s language. Our language had been used for thousands of years for teaching, stories, songs, prayers, and healing ceremonies. My father was a Code Talker who used it as a secret weapon against the Japanese combatants during WWII. Slowly our language was to be erased—in the classroom, on the playground, in the places where we ate and slept. The “Indian” in us was to be killed (figuratively and sometimes literally) in the government and parochial schools. Our senses of who we are—our identity and our language—were to be sacrificed to meet the government’s policy of coerced assimilation. 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; better to remain silent than speak our mother language and risk getting punished. I’m still haunted by the smack of the teacher’s yardstick that broke on my friend’s back in third grade, even though he didn’t remember it years later.

English became my shield and my passport inside and outside of school. I used it to translate for my classmates to protect them from the teacher’s rules and ruler. I used it in the border towns where my family and many of the surrounding Native communities shopped and were subjected to racism in the restaurants and businesses because speaking Navajo was a sign of “backwardness.” Having an accent was thought of as shameful. My grandmother, who was one of the first Diné teachers on the Navajo Nation, said to me, “ayóo hwiní yu”—speaking more than one language is a powerful ability. My family never forbade my siblings and me to speak Diné bizaad like some of my friends’ parents did. I’m grateful to my parents and extended family who taught me Diné bizaad as my first language and English as my second.

In school it was English-only, but tribal languages were everywhere outside the classroom. I was surrounded by Diné bizaad, English, Zuni, and Spanish languages. Navajo and Zuni DJs code-switched on the AM radio station that brought us “Navajo Hour” and “Zuni Hour.” They played our tribal songs and advertised products. On Sunday mornings the preacher punctuated his Navajo sermons with “diyin gaad,” followed by the congregation singing Navajo hymns that drifted throughout the little community where I lived and attended school. All this took place during the boarding school’s erasure and suppression of Native languages. Outside the schools, Navajo and English languages coexisted without repercussions. Navajo speakers still thought in Navajo, dreamed in Navajo, spoke Navajo. English hadn’t taken over yet; our tongues still belonged to us. Our sense of who we are as Diné is grounded in the land, language, culture, and our relationships to the human and nonhuman world. I observed and learned this from my family.

Recently, a Native speaker of her Chinook language said to me, “I didn’t know poems could be written in your Native language.” Her sudden realization that poems can be written in any language surprised me and echoed memories of how I didn’t write poems in Navajo for many years. When I wrote my first poems secretly in college I wrote only in English because I thought poems were supposed to be written that way due to my boarding school English-only indoctrination. During the Civil Rights movements, Vietnam War, and the American Indian Movement era, I read Chicano and American literature and marched against border town injustices, including the killing of a young Diné activist. I attended talks and poetry readings by Indigenous thinkers and poets that left a profound impression on me. They made me reflect on my internalized colonization and its effects on my Native community. That I could write as a witness of injustice—as a few Native poets and writers were doing at that time—was a powerful revelation that appealed to me. I was always surrounded by the oral tradition. My ancestors passed on traditional stories to my mother who passed them on to me in her car stories, which stimulated my first fiction piece. We were always telling and listening to stories about what happened at a particular place as we drove past it: what happened to a relative, all the ordinary and unusual incidents that occurred. From those oral stories came my earliest writing, but not until much later.

After I learned to read, my dear mother saw my interest in books and took me to the little border-town library where I checked out many books that I enjoyed reading. They were all written by non-Indigenous authors and none were stories about my community or similar to the stories my family told. In college, I sifted through the course offerings, and none focused on indigeneity except for the Navajo language class. I was looking to claim my language, and I was searching to find my place, one that spoke of my history, my existence, my epistemology. In 1969, N. Scott Momaday became the first Native writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his novel House Made of Dawn. Only a few Native authors and poets were getting their work published around that time. Erasure and invisibility became the twin impetuses for my first tentative steps to write.

I wanted to become literate in Navajo, so I enrolled in a Navajo language class and wrote my first poem in Diné bizaad. My poem found its own form. Instead of writing lines layered on top of one another, my words floated freely on the page, breaking Western constructs of poetic form, or at least I thought they did since I didn’t read much poetry then. I don’t remember what I wrote but there seemed to be an airiness to it, like words were feathers. My Diné instructor commented positively on my experimental poetry assignment. I had thought my poem into existence with Navajo thought. Using Diné bizaad to write my poem freed me to express my cultural identity. I was not a minority, not an Indian, not the colonizer’s stereotype. Poetry freed me from the mold of English-only. I returned to my Bitter Water clan grandmother who told me stories about male and female rain, my mother’s story about how a brother and sister transformed into prairie dogs because their parents neglected them, my father singing a riding song as we rode our horses home, and to all the voices, stories, and the land that surrounded me at home and at the Indian School where I once lived. My mother said I used to tell stories in Navajo about an imaginary family and she would make me perform them for our relatives.

I wrote only in English for many years, but English doesn’t center me the way the Navajo language centers me. English is a borrowed language from the colonizer and is a useful language to write and speak. When I write in Diné bizaad the sounds come from the center of what it means to be Diné. Diné bizaad bee yashti. Diné bizaad bee hadínisht’é. I speak in The People’s language. I am dressed in The People’s language. Poetry is built into the Navajo language. Diné bizaad is a spiritual language useful for stories, songs, prayers, and poetry. It is useful for healing and telling jokes. My mother’s scoldings always felt more severe in Navajo, while English felt more like a light scolding.

Some of the most beautiful poems in The People’s language are songs about entering a spiritual space where the speaker aligns herself with powerful features in the natural world. The word for mountain is dził, a natural land feature that is powerful and aesthetically beautiful. Jini, it is said, that in Diné stories of time immemorial, mountains were placed intentionally in this world to give guidance and protection to Diné. When one has strength, one is said to have the characteristic of a mountain. Ashkii ayóo bidziil. The boy possesses much strength. The Western mind doesn’t make these kinds of comparisons where the “I” is the subordinate. I think Diné closely and carefully studied the earth and sky and observed form, pattern, and stability in their interpretations. They interpreted the world through verbs, because life is always in motion. They sang songs and recited prayers as part of ceremonial healing from their astronomical observations. Looking at the world through this lens changes how we see the Earth—not as something to be sold and exploited, but giving and enriching, to be respected and cared for.

I put writing poetry in Navajo aside when I entered graduate school in the Midwest. I wanted to read the Western masters and learn their style and their techniques. Influenced by the oral tradition, I wrote prose poems. My creative writing instructor wrote in red ink on my poem, “There’s no room for metaphor in this poem.” I was homesick and thinking about home in the Southwest and spending the day with my family in the mountains picking piñons. I took the instructor’s comment to mean that I was not writing in the preferred Western poetic format. I was discouraged and could have dropped out, but I had been raised by independent women who didn’t let roadblocks stand in their way. Despite many challenges, I earned my doctorate, and my thesis became my first full-length book of poetry.

I’m interested in the intersection between Navajo and English languages. As a bilingual Native writer, I still write primarily in English, although Navajo words and expressions have greater meaning and depth in poetry which I can use. I’m at a point where I’m writing about my family’s stories, not because I’m nostalgic for the past. Much is still invisible. Accessing my family’s stories can be imagined using Diné bizaad. My mother was always telling me stories. When I was homesick, my grandmother sent me piñons, and my mother gifted me with a spiral notebook written in beautiful longhand, filled with stories about our ancestors who lived through some of the most turbulent Diné history—the Long Walk in the nineteenth century, the Livestock Sheep Reduction Program in the thirties and forties—and I add my own history with colonization in the Indian boarding schools, and the wars that sent my grandfathers, father, and brothers into combat. In my earlier work I wrote poems about place and oral history. Putting pieces together to discover the whole story, or part of it, is kind of like doing detective work. One of my mother’s stories is about a great-grandmother who left her husband with her newborn baby and walked forty miles home to her mother. Why did she do this? What was her journey like through the rugged terrain as she carried her baby? Imagining and writing her journey makes her story real and present. In a way, I’m trying to catch up to the past. I am rewriting my family’s history to leave a footprint for my children and grandchildren to know who their relatives were and what they did, that we were always present. Diné bizaad bee yashti. Diné bizaad bee hadínísht’é.