Beatrice Szymkowiak | February 2022

Beatrice Szymkowiak

The introduction of print culture displaced the centrality of oral culture, which was of course the vessel of indigenous custom, memory, history, story, and more. The printed Bible became a powerful and authoritative force, dominating spiritual life. This shift also disempowered Chamorros who then had to struggle to learn to read and write in an entirely new education system. On the other hand, Chamorros also end up mastering print culture and using written words to our own ends and advancement, and even to question the colonial authority itself.
           —Craig Santos Perez¹

One of the first actions of Western colonizers was to rename everything: land, landscape, people, fauna, and flora, and to impose their language over Native languages. The printed text—by naming, appropriating, ruling, establishing boundaries—was a tool of colonization, and remains an agent of settler colonialism. To oppress is to press upon. As the Western printing press has put words to paper, it has forcibly pressed Indigenous languages into Western translation and transcription molds, or it has driven them to near or complete extinction. Print is a very physical manifestation of colonization. Books are maps drawn in Western ink, wordscapes op/pressed by colonizers.

Considering this history, an exploration of how some contemporary Indigenous poets use the body of printed texts to denounce settler colonialism, to decolonize language, and to rewrite linguistic landscapes, is essential to better understand how printed texts have constituted a tool of colonization, settler colonialism, and imperialism—all driving forces of the Anthropocene.

In a Western society visibly failing, the perspectives of Indigenous writers, who demark themselves from Western constructs and dismantle their mechanism, who break down the limits within which Indigenous people have been circumscribed, appear all the more pertinent, and definitely should make us reflect.

Looking at “texts-sources,” which I define for this exploration as external texts that poets insert and manipulate within their work, one can discover the power of the written word in protest, manipulation, and re-appropriation. Examining the visual organization of poetic texts on the pages including typographic and punctuation marks, opens the conversation on how typography and topography can be entwined. In observing how poets negotiate the tensions between Indigenous languages and colonizing languages, pushing against Western translation and transcription molds, we can be presented with a greater understanding of the challenges and successes faced by Indigenous poets, as they contribute to rewriting the linguistic and literary landscape.

This essay mainly focuses on works by Craig Santos Perez and James Thomas Stevens. However, in the final considerations, the essay extends to works by Joan Naviyuk Kane, Orlando White, and Sherwin Bitsui.

DENOUNCING COLONIZATION THROUGH INTERTEXTUALITY

The poet Craig Santos Perez, Native from Guåhan (Guam), and the poet James Thomas Stevens, member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, both demonstrate the multiple effects, facets, and intricacies of colonization through their use and manipulation of external texts within their poetry.

Craig Santos Perez has written a poetry series, from unincorporated territory, that now comprises four collections. The analysis will concentrate on the first three installments, which are representative of the series: [hacha] (2008), [saina] (2010) and [guma’] (2014).

The series presents itself as an excerpt: from unincorporated territory. Throughout the first three collections, poems are similarly fragmented into excerpts, and introduced by “from” or “ginen” in Chamorro. Some of them like “tidelands” or “aerial roots”/“(sub)aerial roots” span all three books. The fact that Perez’s work is presented as excerpts points at the effects of colonization, which abstracts peoples from their lands, histories, cultures, and their languages. The source has been lost as a whole, and through his work, it seems the author is trying to re-integrate into one body of words all the fragments of the Chamorros’s difficult history and shattered identity, to incorporate all that was unincorporated. These fragments come from different sources (governmental texts, tourist brochures, Catholic texts, Chamorro legends, personal histories, etc.) and are juxtaposed and woven throughout the three collections to stress the effects of the multiple colonizations (Spanish, Japanese, American, military, touristic, religious, etc.) suffered by the Chamorro people.

The poems “from all ocean views” in [saina] are examples of such textual juxtapositions. Each is composed in two parts: one part is pieces of tourism brochures made into lunes. Lunes are American haikus, the poetic form from one of Guåhan’s colonizers (Japan) appropriated by another of Guåhan’s colonizers (USA)—how ironic, like the tone of theses lunes:

“cause even dying | cultures have | a wild side to
                                                                      flaunt”²

The author always apposes to this first part an echoing definition of Guåhan, made of Guam news network excerpts, and showing the mistreatment of the Chamorro land by capitalist disregard and solely for financial gain. This definition is introduced by “‘guåhan is” in bold, which emphasizes the will to define/redefine Guåhan. The single quotation mark preceding “guåhan is” doesn’t have a following closing quotation mark, as if the definition of Guåhan was incomplete, or as if it was still being written. Single quotation marks are also used to signify quotation within quotation, which cast doubts on who is actually defining Guåhan. One can notice as well that the body of the definition after the introduction “‘guåhan is” is printed in half-tone ink, literally showing that exploitation by capitalist settler colonialism is only a pale version of Guåhan, and that it can’t define it whole; however, it can’t be totally erased.

“‘guåhan is owned by premier hotel resort subsidiary japan-based ken corporation owns golf course hotel nikko Sheraton laguna resort hilton resort spa pacific islands club hyatt    regency 38 percent of all hotel rooms on island all purchased since 2005 spent $100 million past two years major renovations since military build-up announced”³

In the last excerpt “from all ocean views,” no definition follows “‘guåhan is.” The definition is amiss, underlining the possibility of a new definition.⁴

As stated in “from sourcings” in [saina]: “no page is ever truly blank”.⁵ The texts-sources used in Perez’s work, whether they originate from the colonizer or the colonized people, are the basis, from which Guåhan can redefine itself by opposition or reclamation, by not only what Chamorros have, but also by what they have lost. Perez re-shapes a word map of Guåhan by carding, spinning, and weaving fragments and remnants of texts. In doing so, as the poet explains in an interview with Kathleen Washburn, “[his] work attempts to articulate all that remains unincorporated about our understanding of Guam and Chamorro culture in national, transnational, and postcolonial histories”.⁶

In his poem “Alphabets of Letters” in A Bridge Dead in the Water (2007), the poet James Thomas Stevens furthers the exploration of colonization mechanisms and effects, as well as the denunciation of colonization, by reflecting on the primary texts themselves. First, his poem is presented as “a New Primer for the Use of Native or Confused Americans.” Primers were schoolbooks used to teach children how to read. His poem enacts the experience of young Native Americans exposed to the first printed text imposed on them: the schoolbook. This first book to which Native Americans were subjected, would take away their languages, their cultures, their identities. It would alter them—etymologically, make them other, like these two lines suggest:

“Let me teach you the new word for you.
Let us teach them the new word for themselves”

One use of italicization is to mark unfamiliar foreign words. The italicized words here underline the process of alienation: colonization (through schooling here) has literally estranged Native Americans from their own existence.

In the body of the poem, Stevens lists some of these “little books taking root,” which are all early prints of the 18th century, aiming at “civilizing” and evangelizing Native American children.⁸ These “little books” represent the colonization and settler colonialism that have been spreading since.⁹ They may have changed shapes and transformed into “little leaflets” dropped over Iraq; they still serve a colonizing mindset and Western propaganda.¹⁰ Stevens includes one of these “little leaflets” in the body of his poem to demonstrate how they operate like primers used to, thus linking the imperialism of the early history of the United States to the corporate and military imperialism of the contemporary United States. This link is underlined throughout the poem, especially when the author juxtaposes the supply lists of early colonizers and the list of suppliers of the present US government.¹¹

Two other texts-sources in “Alphabets of Letters” date from the 18th century and, brought together, denounce how the Western printed word has served imperialism and settler colonialism from the origin of the United States. The first text is a quotation from Joseph Brant, famous Mohawk chief, who was forced to go to English school and who became Anglican. In this text, Joseph Brant links civil code and criminal laws (the mandating words) to imperialism:

“In the government you call civilised, the happiness of the people
    is constantly sacrificed
to the splendor of empire; hence your code of civil and criminal
    laws have had their origins.”¹²

A quotation from John Locke follows just after, that warns about the ill-intended use of words:

   If we could speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative applications of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the Passions, and therby mislead the judgement; and so indeed are perfect cheat…¹³

When one recalls that Locke’s political theories deeply influenced the Constitution of the United States, one can only question the intents behind the words establishing the United States, or the (ab)use of these words. It consolidates the idea mentioned earlier in the poem that “nothing/in print is a neutral document.”¹⁴

In “Alphabets of Letters,” Stevens uses primary texts in parallel with contemporary texts to denounce the use of printed texts as a tool of colonization and settler colonialism, and to debunk imperialistic propaganda from the origins of the United States to the present time.

DECOLONIZING THE TEXTUAL LANDSCAPE

 

Native American poets, including Perez and Stevens, have organized their texts on pages in an attempt at denouncing colonization and settler colonialism and at decolonizing language. Thus, they have initiated a re-shaping of a textual landscape imprinted by settler colonialism.

 

The organization of Stevens’s poem, “Alphabets of Letters” appears disorderly like an “Alphabet out of Order,”—significant expression located in bold at the beginning and at the end of the poem.¹⁵ The poem is a collage of primer-like texts, speaker’s narratives, headline-like texts, quotations, lists of supplies, etc. This mix expresses the scattered narrative of colonization, the ubiquity and multiplicity of its facets. The rhetoric of colonization is constantly evolving, switching from one deception to another, for example from “popi?h plots” to “oil &c.”¹⁶ However, the use of specific traits of 18th-century fonts like the “?” or the capitalization of some nouns in passages related to contemporary imperialist rhetoric, demonstrate that behind the different discourses, the intentions are still the same: “The indigen as obstacle. You will be removed” or “Alaska. Iraq. You will be removed.”¹⁷

It is significant as well that Stevens’s poem takes the shape of numerous lists: phonic lists including words related to the colonizer’s rhetoric, lists of books aiming at colonizing, supply lists of early colonizers, list of viruses, list of body parts translated in Mohawk, etc. Listing or cataloging is a process of appropriation: colonizers list what they own, (re)name them, and (re)arrange them in the order that befits their goals. Native Americans are subjected to an order that is not theirs. Hence the alphabet imposed on Native Americans will always be out of order and bearer of “warrings and warnings,” like all the written and broken treaties.¹⁸ Thus, Stevens suggests rather, to trust “the text of touch.”¹⁹ Would that mean encountering each other beyond the rhetoric of words, through the language of our bodies, the texture of our skins? However, by listing “the words for the parts of your body,” and by reciting the “alphabets beneath your skin,” the author casts a doubt on the possibility of escaping the alphabet and the rhetoric of colonization.²⁰

The organization in Perez’s work textually enacts the effects of colonization, to better deconstruct and subvert those effects, thus initializing a process of decolonization. This enactment is enhanced by the removal of punctuation and the use of typographic devices. For example, in the three books [hacha], [saina], and [guma’], all the pronouns referring to the Chamorro people are in between brackets, visually showing how colonization excerpted Chamorros from their own land, culture, and language. In the poems “from aerial roots” in [hacha] and [saina], open brackets precede Chamorro words in bold font. These words are followed by colons that introduce English lines, associatively prompted from these Chamorro words, and interwoven with the author’s personal story, and the Chamorro culture of sailing. Here is an example from [saina]:

“[pápakea : “saina” I say
how does the sakman cut waves—
how do I cast my cut tongue
from the tongue-
tide—”²¹

These open brackets without counterpart appear to make the Chamorro words and the lines they introduce visually look like roots—perhaps the roots of the Banyan tree. These roots are aerial, and can fuse together to form new trunks as a poem from “from sourcings” explains in [saina].²² They may represent the possibility for Guåhan to re-define itself—even if it is through the English language, to grow back from its roots. Perez subverts here, the typographic marks (brackets) often used to transcribe Indigenous languages, and decolonizes language by defining words through his own culture.

Another interesting typographic device in Perez’s work, is struck-through text. The poems “from tidelands” in [saina] contain excerpts from the author’s testimony to the United Nations Special Political and Decolonization Committee. The testimony is always struck out. That is: the author’s and his people’s story is struck out. However, the fact that the strikethrough testimony is still readable insists on its persistence, and makes visible the oppression by the colonizing nations. The author uses this device again in the poems “ginen ta(la)ya” in [guma’], in which the names of fallen American Pacific Islander soldiers are struck out, underlying the dichotomy between their sacrifice and their oppression by the nation for which they died:

                                                                                                 “[2006]

[U.S. army Pfc. Kasper Allen Camacho Dudkiewucz, ²³, of Chalan Pago was killed in   Iraq, when the Humvee in which he was the gunner was involved in a vehicle collision]”23

Finally, Perez uses a lot of tildes between stanzas or lines within the three collections. The wave-shaped punctuation marks recall Guåhan’s topography, surrounded by water. One could infer from Perez’s work that water is a significant element in Chamorro culture. In an email interview, the author states that he “use[s] typography as keys or navigational guides and markers.”²⁴ The tildes seem to mimic the waves that guide the traditional Chamorro boat, the sakman, back to the ocean, or the Chamorro people back to their own culture. By re-appropriating and re-purposing typography, Perez contributes to printing Chamorro culture and language out of colonization.

OUT OF (ENGLISH) PRINT

The printing press can be seen as a tool of colonization that has circumscribed Indigenous languages into translation and transcription molds, and as such, has driven many languages to near or complete extinction. When Indigenous poets write, they may negotiate between their Indigenous language (of which colonization has decimated the number of speakers, writers, and readers), the colonizer’s language (English), and a literary community and publishing industry dominated by English.

An exploration of how Indigenous poets denounce the alienating consequences of colonization and settler colonialism, includes Craig Santos Perez and James Thomas Stevens, as well as Joan Naviyuk Kane, Orlando White, and Sherwin Bitsui. From denunciation, these Indigenous poets initiate a move toward counteracting the altering effects of colonization, and resisting threat of dissolution.

In his aforementioned “Alphabets of Letters,” Stevens brings the reader to the origin of the colonization of Native American language by the English language: the primers—the alphabet at the service of imperialism. The long poem starts by the alphabet, followed shortly after by a passage in Mohawk language and in italics. This passage is interrupted by English words not in italics but in bold, and embedded in Mohawk words. These English words visually enact the start of colonization. If one only reads the English words, one can read: “they meet they friends original people it is said could not speak a word of the way of the original people. Silence.”²⁵ English here, works to reduce the Mohawk people to silence. Taking away the language of peoples, is taking away their stories, their culture, and their origins. It alters who people are, transforming them into a quotation of “themselves.”²⁶

In [hacha], Perez denounces the altering effects of colonization through language, especially in the poem “from lisiensan ga’lago.” The poem is fragmented in several excerpts throughout the collection. Each excerpt features a box, resembling an ID tag, as a reminder of colonization. As Robert F. Rogers explains in Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam, “lisiensan ga’lago” (dog tag in Chamorro) were ID tags that Japanese forced Chamorros to wear when they occupied the island during World War II.²⁷ Each box contains some words used in the excerpt, and what seems to be their translations, as the colon format ‘word: word’ suggests. The boxes differ more or less following the excerpts.

Three boxes offer “translations” of Chamorro words into English words. The words read as significant to the relationship that Chamorros have to language through colonization, for example: “fino ‘haya : native words / fino ‘lagu : foreign words.”²⁸ One of these three boxes (see below) only contains Chamorro words with negation, to emphasize the dispossessing effects of colonization:

taiguaha : having nothing
taiguia :
tailagua :
tainini : no light
taipati : no shore
taisongsong : tainaan : no name
taifino : no language²⁹

 

One notices the absence of counterpart for some of the words, as if there were no equivalent in English or their meanings were lost—negated to the extreme. The ninety degree-rotation of the box adds a disorienting effect, to show that colonization uproots people. In addition, one box is empty, as if the Chamorro words and/or their meanings had been “forgotten,”³⁰ or any translation was impossible. Another box offers “translations” of English words into Chamorro, which seem to underline what colonization brought into Chamorro language and culture, for example “blood : haga.’”³¹

In “from lisiensan ga’lago,” Perez’s use of Chamorro/English “translations” (or lack thereof) works to demonstrate the colonization of and through language, and its effects. The author uses a colon format suggesting that the boxes contain translations, however, he never confirms that they are actual translations, which confronts the reader with the foreignness, confusion, and disorientation that Chamorros endure. As Perez explains, in an interview, “the introduction of print culture displaced the centrality of oral culture, which was of course the vessel of indigenous custom, memory, history, story, and more…”³²

More broadly, the series from unincorporated territory by Perez visually reflects the colonization of language. Throughout the series, Chamorro language—with or without ‘translation’— always appears fragmentary and/or isolated between brackets, marking “the contours of a drowned / anguage” in the ocean of colonizers’ languages (“from Lisiensan Ga’lago,”).³³

In the poetry collection Hyperboreal (2013), Inupiaq poet Joan Naviyuk Kane writes mainly in English, except for a few Inupiaq words in her poems or titles, and two notable poems in Inupiaq. However, the Indigenous words in Hyperboreal are not drowned by their sparseness among English words. On the contrary, the lapidary, sonic, and elliptic style of the author induces a different effect. In a collection written mainly in English, the words in Inupiaq appear like noticeable veins in a chiseled rock. As the Inupiaq language is agglutinative, English by contrast looks very divided and disjointed, which visually adds to a feeling of loss expressed in the poems of the collection. By being written, by being sounded out, Inupiaq words seem to resist “The Dissolve of Voices”—title of one poem from Hyperboreal. This poem underlines the alienation (or literally alter-ation) caused by colonization, while emphasizing the will to persist and reclaim land, culture, and language through the enumeration of Inupiaq words of places:

“A love absolute of places unknown to me:

a?na?uksram izrizrvia ipkanaqtuat, aniraaq,
miziktaagvik, uavat, kassanait, qini?a.wik.

In a warm room we were altered, alter
together: beyond this, comprehended for a plural.”³⁴

The absence of translation here enacts the untranslatability of the Inupiaq experience. Similarly, if the two poems in Inupiaq “Maliktuk” and “Ilu” are both directly preceded by an equivalent in English (“Procession” and “Innate”), the English/Inupiaq pairs are never presented as translations of one another. This decision of not presenting them as translations leads the reader to the conclusion that the poems in English and the poems in Inupiaq are two different entities. The presence of the Inupiaq language in the collection demonstrates that it is resisting the threat of dissolution. Interviewed on the use of her Native language in her work, Kane spoke against “rhetoric of language loss,” emphasizing that each “language learner” represents a “potential speaker.”³⁵ There, she suggests, lies a responsibility to use her Native language, and to resist its exoticization.

In both his collections Bone Light (2009) and Letterrs (2015), Diné poet Orlando White has chosen to confront the imperialism and foreignness of English, not by writing in his Native language, but by deconstructing and exploring the alphabet imposed by colonizers. In the introductory poem “To See Letters,” in Bone Light, White expresses through a personal story the violence that imposed the alphabet on Native Americans:

“He shouted: “Spell them out little fucker! I am going to hit you if you don’t.”³⁶
“When David hit me in the head, I saw stars in the shape of the Alphabet”³⁷

By dissecting the printed text to the bone marrow of letters, ink and typographic marks, White opens the possibility of re-embodying it through Diné language and inflections, as the poem “Nascent” in his susequent collection Letterrs suggests:

“Pronunciation marks are proof / of one’s own
   cultural sentience”³⁸

Diacritical marks here, seem to represent the distance between Native American languages (for the author, the Diné language) and the standard language of the colonizer: English. These marks allow the expression of Native American voices and sounds, and the cultures embedded in them. However, they also signify the loss of languages forced into foreign print, and of cultures based mainly on orality: “Within text there is extinction,” observes White in the poem “Unwritten,” in Letterrs.³⁹

Through his poetic process, White dissects the printed text, its letters and diacritical marks, to reach the essence of language, which is body (Bone Light), which is sound (Letterrs). In an interview by Melissa Buckheit in Drunken Boat, White explains: “I feel that sound is what breathes movement into the verbs of Diné Bizaad, it also has many diacritical marks. And I think each high tone, nasal tone, glottal stop, and slash are visual representations of movement.”⁴⁰

In both his collections, White brings the reader to this moment of origin, when the alphabet wraps itself around sounds and when “a letter on the page affirms the being person” (in “Nascent”)⁴¹. The “person” here is Diné, and the alphabet will now carry the mark of his own voice and narrative. White brings the reader to this place from where words originate: sounds, breath, breathing body, this physical place that precedes the alphabet and informs it—through the angry fist of a stepfather, or through the gentle hand of a mother carefully tracing letters and smiling. Throughout his work, White reveals the physicality of printing: letters pressed upon bodies, but also letters bending under the irrepressible force of these breathing lungs and voices, as the poem “Ats’íísts’in” suggests:

The way a word tries to breathe inside
a closed book; the way a letter shivers when
a page is turned. Because underneath sound
there is thought. Language, a complete structure
within the white coffin of paper. If you shake it
and listen, it will move, rattle like bones on the page.⁴²

Orlando White breaks down the printed texts to their most basic elements and breathes into them the movement of his own Native language. He shakes the structure of English texts to make them rattle with the sound and thought of the Diné language.

This movement of the Diné language also drives the long poem-book Flood Song (2009) by Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui. Flood Song opens with the Diné word for water “tó” dripping down the first page like drops of rain announcing the storm to follow. As its title promises, Flood Song is a flow of words that “map a shrinking map,”⁴³ a landscape in motion through time, an intimate map of a Diné individual inscribed in the larger history and experience of his Nation. It is a flow of words in English—the language of the colonizers that decimated the author’s people, stripped them from their land, destroyed their culture, and forbade, over a long stretch of time, the use of their language. However, this flow of words is like a movement forward, a transformative movement that re-organizes the English language, and imprints it with Diné images and linguistic traits.

 

As Sherwin Bitsui explains on the blog Flyway, “Navajo is very imagistic and descriptive and also very verb driven.”⁴⁴ Flood Song is a verb-driven poem. Verbs abound, and often start the lines. Verbs in present tense and gerunds emphasize flow and movement. Past participles emphasize stagnation, flooding, and drowning. Prepositions of location also crowd the poem, and accentuate movement: outward, northward, toward, out of, underneath, above, under, etc. They point in all directions, like waters rising, submerging, and flooding all. The most significant prepositions are “from” (sixty-nine occurrences) and “into” (forty-seven occurrences), which bring the idea of a transformative movement from past into present, the continuous effects of colonization and the constant battle against them.

The movement of the poem resides in the word layout as well. Bitsui accumulates prepositional and gerund phrases in his sentences, which give a sense of uninterrupted flow and of ineluctability: “underneath dancers flecking dust from their ankles to thunder into rain.”⁴⁵ In Flood Song (2009), the sentences act like water. They flow in enjambments of lines, sometimes long, at times shorter, with space in between, or not, with no indentation, or often with cascading indentations like waterfalls. For example:

“billowing from stratus
                to cumulus
                               to nimbus
                                             to drought”⁴⁶

Words are carried away in this flow. They emerge, disappear, and reappear farther, like flotsam. They echo or repeat themselves. They associate with words, disassociate, re-associate with other words—constantly creating new images. They are elements of permanence and of change at the same time, in this continuously transforming landscape. There is a particularly significant series of words populating the whole poem: “finger,” “thumbnail,” fingerprint, thumbprint, nail, fingernail, paw print, footprint, handprint.⁴⁷ All these words appear in several occurrences and evoke the very first print: the finger we press in the sand, the touch. Flood song, like White’s work, brings us back to the physical origin of the alphabet, of the printed texts. The flood of English words is riddled with Diné fingerprints—traces, touch, identity. This flood is a transformative movement, imprinting the English words with Diné language and thoughts. The author is perhaps prompting people to press their hands in the sand once again, to leave their marks, as “no more questioned the sand anymore.”⁴⁸ It is significant as well that one of the very seldom words in Diné in Flood Song is “ni?chi ”,which“ is wind breath”.⁴⁹ Diné Bizaad breathes through this flood, informs its movement— a movement of re-creation:

“saying… nihi yazhi, nihaaneendza,
                                                   nihi yazhi, niha aneendza.

                                 our child, you have returned to us,
                                              our child you have returned to us.”⁵⁰

CONCLUSION

Today, with the violent rhetoric of hatred, where exclusion is legitimized once more, when printed texts (on screen or paper) are used to manipulate opinions and information in order to serve corporate imperialist purposes and authoritarian agendas, the works of Craig Santos Perez, James Thomas Stevens, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Orlando White, and Sherwin Bitsui are crucial. They expose and deconstruct the mechanisms by which the printed texts have been contributing to colonization, settler colonialism, and imperialisms. This process of decolonization happens in this intricate and paradoxical place, where the printed text is an agent of colonization but also allows knowledge of colonization’s crimes; where the text is manipulated for imperialistic purposes, but allows access to information and resistance; where it stifles and shuns Native languages, but allows their persistence and diffusion. Perez, Stevens, Kane, White, and Bitsui locate themselves at this complex edge. By using and manipulating texts, and by inscribing their Native languages onto the literary landscape, these amazing poets write their own land, culture and people, “into visibility and existence,” (Perez) and prompt reflection on the continuous effects of colonization, settler colonialism, and imperialism.

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Beatrice Szymkowiak is a French American writer. She obtained her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. She is the author of RED ZONE, a poetry chapbook. Her work has also appeared in many magazines. She is currently a PhD Candidate and a Research Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

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Notes