Reclaiming language through Indigenous Women Poets

[admin]

The JWECC and Poetry Club of UMass celebrate resilience, culture and the power of Indigenous women through literature.

If you’re asked, “Name a woman” — who do you think of?

Some people may say their mom, sister, friend or mentor. Others may say Marie Curie, Nichelle Nichols, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, Catherine the Great or Emily Pike. Either way, they are women who made an impact.

The Josephine White Eagle Cultural Center (JWECC) hosted Celebrating Indigenous Women: The World Was Perfect, in Goodell Hall with the Poetry Club on March 13. The event focused on honoring Indigenous women in literature, with award-winning poet and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Abigail Chabitnoy.

Liza Price, the vice president and public relations manager of Poetry Club, said poetry is a tool for storytelling, cultural preservation and resistance in Indigenous communities and that Indigenous women’s poetry often reflects deep connections to land, culture and community.

Through confronting historical erasure and celebrating cultural resilience, poetry helps these Indigenous women reclaim language and identity, Price said.

Joy Harjo was the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States and an influential voice in contemporary Indigenous poetry, according to Price. Harjo wrote notable pieces such as “Once the World Was Perfect” and “An American Sunrise.”

“I wanted to open up with [“Once the World Was Perfect”] because it reflects themes of resilience, community,and storytelling, which are very prevalent throughout most of the women that we’re going to be seeing today and the ones that they write.” Price said.

The impacts on one community can be seen in other communities, Price said. Individuals can connect with these narratives even if they have not shared these experiences by empathizing with poets and their work.

“Indigenous female poets provide really unique perspectives on themes like survival, connection to land and ancestry, spirituality and identity,” Price said. “Which are things that I think all people kind of connect with, but you’re seeing it through such a specific historical lens.”

Harjo’s “work overall [is] all about reclaiming Indigenous narratives, and trying to call remembrance to what has happened. I think that’s a very beautiful lesson, and I think all of her body of work is so smart,” she said.

Layli Long Soldier, a Oglala Lakota poet, responds directly to the failures of the U.S. government when it comes to their “apologies” to Native communities in her work, according to Price.

Soldier focuses on language, historical erasure and the complexity of contemporary Native identity. Her piece “WHEREAS” criticizes the U.S. joint resolution acknowledging “the official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes.”

“She’s not in a lot of her work talking about the oppression, but rather the failure to make up or apologize adequately for it, which is a very specific contention,” Price said.

“I think that she made the very intentional decision to open it with this image of a direct conversation to give the feeling of, ‘this is an actual thing that we discuss regularly and this is something that I confront with these blue-eyed men,’” Price said. “That conversation kind of distills into her frustrations bubbling up and her not physically confronting them, and that’s the main argument of the poem.”

Soldier will be on campus during the Fall 2025 semester as a member of UMass Amherst’s Master of Fine Arts for Poets and Writers program.

Natalie Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize winning Mojave American poet and language activist emphasizes themes of love, desire, cultural identity, addiction and environmentalism in her writing. In 2021, her book, “Postcolonial Love Poem,” won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Her poem, “My Brother My World,” tells the story of her brother’s struggles with addiction with metaphors showing the complexity of the sibling relationship.

“There’s no one single correct interpretation to any point,” Chabitnoy said. “I think that’s the biggest disservice to poetry that we do in high school is this idea that we can read as a class and all come to the same understanding of what a poem means.”

“If you wanted to understand this poem further, don’t necessarily read it in the lines that the poet initially said,” Chabitnoy said. “Read it sentence by sentence.”

Linda Hogan, an American poet and environmentalist writes on issues such as environmental and eco-feminism, the relocation of Native Americans, historical narratives, including oral histories.

Tiffany Midge, a poet and editor who is half Russian and half Lakota creates her work through humor, identity and challenging stereotypes in poetry. Her use of humor as resistance and cultural critique makes her pieces, such as “My Heart At Chuck E. Cheese,” particular to certain audiences.

“She has a very dry humor that I would say she definitely gets from the Russian side of her,” Price said. “But she is using it to challenge stereotypes that we have towards Native American communities, as well as to talk about really painful things in this dry humorous way.”

Humor offers a way of healing and creates parallels between histories of multiple cultures.

Price discussed her family’s history with Stalinism: “Because I feel that as something my family has overcome, as something that still impacts us today, it is my place to control that narrative, it is my place to make humor about it, as that’s how people heal.”

“I rarely like to generalize about Native Americans because over 500 languages, over 500 tribes, over 500 communal viewpoints, let alone individuals within,” Chabitnoy said. “But humor is actually one that cuts across a lot of indigenous people. A lot of Indigenous people actually use humor quite often … Someone once told me if a Navajo auntie doesn’t make fun of you, she doesn’t like you.”

Through their work, Indigenous women confront historical erasure and build language, traditions and connections across communities. “Poetry is also a vessel for preserving language traditionals and personal stories … If we think of things as means of transporting messages, poetry is a vessel for greater understanding in the same way that a voice is a vessel for language.”

Voice and language for Indigenous poets may have an upgrade with recent technological innovations. In November of 2024, Michael Running Wolf, founder of Indigenous in AI, is building speech recognition AI models to preserve endangered Indigenous languages in North America.

“Using AI to revitalize languages is fascinating, and then as a poet, I would be interested in playing with the language that is recovered,” Chabitnoy said. “I don’t think AI has any place in poetry. I don’t think it can do what poets do.”

“It’s how it gets used,” Chabitnoy said. “Language is kind of one of those ones that is really key to who we are as a people and because it is so telling about how we view the world. … Language reveals such a different unique perspective on what it is to be said … it tells so much about the culture that I think if I’m skeptical that AI could restore a language, but if it could restore the language and the vocabulary, I think we would look at it as a tool like any other.”

https://dailycollegian.com/2025/03/recl ... men-poets/