Tag Archive for Native American

Joy Harjo, 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States

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For Immediate Release—June 19, 2019

Joy Harjo, published by W.W. Norton and Wesleyan University Press, represented by Blue Flower Arts, has been named Poet Laureate of the United States. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She is the first Native American to serve as US Poet Laureate.

Read the full press release from the United States Library of Congress here.

Harjo’s American Book Award-winning In Mad Love and War was published by Wesleyan in 1990. Other books include the pedagogical work Soul Talk, Song Language: In Conversation with Joy Harjo, edited by Tanaya Winder; and theater work Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses, with contributing editor Priscilla Page.

“Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry—‘soul talk’ as she calls it—for over four decades. To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.”
—Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress

Contact:
Stephanie Elliott Prieto
EMAIL: selliott@wesleyan.edu
PHONE: 860-685-7723

Announcing “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light”

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Unique perspectives on the roots and reaches of contemporary Native Theater

“This play clearly illuminates the collective grief, disconnection, and suffering many indigenous people experience because of the brutalities of colonization. But more importantly, Joy’s voice gives us strength, by reconnecting us to our ancestors, to our guardian spirits, and to each other.”
— Victoria Nalani Kneuhbuhl, Pacific Island author and playwright

 

Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page will be at Yale University March 5th, 4PM. 

Joy Harjo’s play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is the centerpiece of this stunning collection that is also comprised of essays and interviews detailing the roots and the reaches of contemporary Native Theater. Harjo blends storytelling, music, movement, and poetic language in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. The collection is accompanied by interviews with Native theater artists Rolland Meinholtz and Randy Reinholz, and it includes essays on Harjo’s work by Mary Kathryn Nagle (an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee nation, playwright, and attorney) and by Priscilla Page (of Wiyot heritage, a writer, performer, and educator), who looks at indigenous feminism, jazz, and performance as influences on Harjo’s theatrical work.

Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Her seven books of poetry, which include such well-known titles as Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, In Mad Love and War, and She Had Some Horses. These titles and her memoir Crazy Brave have garnered many awards. Priscilla Page is a writer and dramaturg as well as a senior lecturer in the department of theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

March 5, 2019
136 pp., 6 x 9”
Unjacketed Cloth, $40.00 978-0-8195-7865-5
Paper, $15.95 978-0-8195-7866-2

Announcing “How to Dress a Fish”

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A vision of identity at the intersection of language, history, and family

“This essential and captivating debut will draw readers into intersections of history, memory, exile, and return. Abigail Chabitnoy’s poems are tender and direct—they restore worlds, mend fragmented histories by revealing our human longing for land and for memories embraced in language.”
—Sherwin Bitsui, author of Shapeshift

 

In How to Dress a Fish, poet Abigail Chabitnoy, of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent, addresses the lives disrupted by the Indian boarding school policy of the US government. She pays particular attention to the life story of her great-grandfather, who was taken from Alaska to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. In uncovering her own family records, Chabitnoy finds that reconnection through blood and paper does not restore the personal relationships that had already been severed.

Abigail Chabitnoy is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat. Brut, Red Ink, and Mud City.

December 11, 2018
152 pp., 6 x 9”
Paper, $14.95 978-0-8195-7849-5
Unjacketed Cloth, $30.00 978-0-8195-7848-8

Announcing “Music and Modernity among First Peoples of North America”

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Revisioning Indigenous musicology

“This volume provides an exciting collection of diverse, multigenerational Indigenous and settler perspectives on Indigenous musical modernities. Case studies considering multiple topics and genres are thoughtfully interwoven to provide models for continuing the much-needed work of decolonizing Native North American ethnomusicology.”
— Charlotte Frisbie, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

 

Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States explore topics that range from powwow, Native Classical, and hip-hop to television soundtracks and experimental music in Music and Modernity Among First Peoples of North America. Working from the premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music.

Contributors: 
Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk
Victoria Lindsay Levine
Gordon E. Smith
Anna Hoefnagels
Christina Leza
Elyse Carter Vosen
T. Christopher Aplin
John-Carlos Perea
Byron Dueck
Jessica Bissett Perea
Dawn Avery
Dylan Robinson
Beverley Diamond
Trevor Reed

About the Editors
Victoria Lindsay Levine is professor of music at Colorado College and is the author of Writing American Indian Music, coauthor of Choctaw Music and Dance, and co-editor of This Thing Called Music. Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō) is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University and is the co-editor of Opera Indigene and Arts of Engagement.

February 5, 2019
360 pp.  6 x 9”
Paper $26.95, 978-0-8195-7863-1
Unjacketed Cloth $85.00, 978-0-8195-7862-4

Vizenor on silent communication, puppets, and Dummy Trout

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From the novel Native Tributes, by Gerald Vizenor:

Dummy Trout surprised me that spring afternoon at the Blue Ravens Exhibition. She raised two brazen hand puppets, the seductive Ice Woman on one hand, and the wily Niinag Trickster on the other, and with jerky gestures the rough and ready puppets roused the native stories of winter enticements and erotic teases.

The puppets distracted the spectators at the exhibition of abstract watercolors and sidetracked the portrayals of native veterans and blue ravens mounted at the Ogema Train Station on the White Earth Reservation. The station agent provided the platform for the exhibition, and winced at the mere sight of the hand puppets. He shunned the crude wooden creatures and praised the scenes of fractured soldiers and blue ravens, an original native style of totemic fauvism by Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu.

The puppets were a trace of trickster stories.

Dummy was clever and braved desire and mockery as a mute for more than thirty years with the ironic motion of hand puppets. Miraculously she survived a firestorm on her eighteenth birthday, walked in uneven circles for three days, mimed the moods of heartache, and never voiced another name, word, or song. She grieved, teased, and snickered forever in silence. Nookaa, her only lover, and hundreds of other natives were burned to white ashes and forgotten in the history of the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894.

Dummy stowed a fistful of ash in a Mason jar.

We recently asked Gerald Vizenor, author of , to tell us a little more about his interest in hand puppets and why he used puppets so prominently in this latest book. This was his response.

Some people gesture with their hands and fingers as they speak, and these people are the hand talkers. I am fascinated by the hand gestures of direction, or scenes in stories. They pinch words, praise words, smooth, and reverse words with the turn of a finger. Some of my relatives were hand talkers, and the gestures are not the same but remind me of the moves of hand puppets. My first interest in hand puppets started with native dolls in museums, made of straw and cloth, and the stories that went along with the figures.  

Later, as a soldier in Japan, I was inspired with the great Bunraku puppets. These puppets were visionary, transformation characters in traditional scenes, and the puppets created an incredible sense of presence through gestures, sound and story. The Bunraku puppets are not controlled with strings, but with the hands of a master, and the gestures and costumes are elaborate and traditional. The string and hand puppets are more common around the world, especially in Europe, and some puppet moves are more innovative than others. The Guignol is a famous hand puppet in France.  

I am interested in any manner or style of puppets, the creative motion of fingers and figures to convey emotion, and convince the audience that there is a spiritual association between humans and puppets, something similar to a totemic association. Puppets are not the mere imitation of human gestures, but rather the spiritual motion, or natural motion that creates a sense of presence.

Laura Hall, my wife, and I twice attended an international puppet festival that is held every other year in France. The brilliant imagination of amateurs and master puppeteers from around the world create great puppet shows at the Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières, France. My interest in puppets took another turn with the appreciation of the flea market hand puppets made with found objects, buttons, thimbles, plastics, tin cans, brushes, and bones. I was moved by the creative power of the hand puppets made with discarded material by the Paul Klee, the expressionist and surrealist artist. He created marvelous hand puppet creatures to amuse his son, but not as works of art.  

Dummy Trout, the silent puppeteer in two of my recent historical novels, was an actual native person, and she was a marvelous hand talker. Her facial expressions and hand gestures almost created the sense of a puppet. Dummy, a wicked nickname because she apparently spoke a very early version of either Cree or the Anishinaabe language, and natives teased the manner of her speech since they did not understand the words. The only real dummies were the crude nicknamers. Dummy lived on the White Earth Reservation in a tiny cabin, and teased me with delightful hand talk. She died alone about fifty years ago. I imagined her hand talks as a hand puppet, and then created a similar character that carves the heads and hands of hand puppets from fallen birch trees.  

Most of the hand puppets in my novels have polished heads and hands carved from wood, and resemble notable figures, such as Léon Blum, Gertrude Stein, Adolf Hitler, and Guillaume Apollinaire. And in the same novels one character creates hand puppets with trash and debris, a bone, vegetable, or a rusty cigarette tin such as the hand puppet President Herbert Hoover in Native Tributes.

I have imagined hand puppets as visionary figures with a sense of presence in theatres, and in literary scenes of my historical novels. Carved and debris hand puppets appear as characters in two of my recent novels, Native Tributes, and Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade. My hand puppets play crucial roles in literary scenes during the Nazi Occupation of Paris.      

There are no birth certificates, photographs, or other documents about the woman who inspired Gerald Vizenor’s puppets. Nonetheless, Vizenor is sure that “‘Dummy’ probably arrived at the White Earth Reservation in the thirties, because the first stories about her seem to go back to the early forties.” “Dummy” was remembered by Sharon Enjady-Mitchell Anwaachigekwe, along with other members of a large ceremonial and adopted family. 

Gerald Vizenor will be at the Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, Wednesday, September 26th at 7pm. He will read from his new historical novel, Native Tributes. In this sequel to Blue Ravens, Vizenor maintains his masterly perception of oral stories, creating a dynamic literary tribute to his community and  relatives, who have become visionary artists during the Great Depression. Book signing at Birchbark Books (2115 W 21st St.) to follow the reading. More information about the event can be found here.

Announcing “The Long Journeys Home” by Nick Bellantoni

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The moving stories of two Indigenous men and their repatriations

In The Long Journeys Home, Nick Bellantoni tells the tale of two men who, in death, found their way back home.

Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia (ca.1792–1818) and Itankusun Wanbli (ca.1879–1900) lived almost a century apart and came from different indigenous nations—Hawaiian and Lakota. Yet the tragic circumstances that led them to leave their homelands and to come to Connecticut, where they both died and were buried, have striking similarities.

In 1992 and 2008, descendant women had dreams which told them that their ancestors wished to “come home.” Both families started the repatriation process. Then Connecticut State Archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni oversaw the archaeological disinterment and forensic identifications in returning these men to their families and communities. The Long Journeys Home chronicles these intergenerational stories, both examples of the wide-reaching and long-lasting impacts of colonialism.

Nicholas F. Bellantoni is an associate adjunct professor in the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut and Emeritus Connecticut State Archaeologist at the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.

September
260 pp., 15 illus., 3 maps, 6 x 9”
Cloth, $28.95
978-0-8195-7684-2
ebook, $24.99 Y,
978-0-8195-7685-9 History / Biography

The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund
at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

    

Gerald Vizenor continues his WWI saga with “Native Tributes”

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Historical novel about Native American veterans who march in the post-WWI Bonus Army during the Great Depression

In Native Tributes, sequel to the critically acclaimed Blue Ravens, author and scholar Gerald Vizenor tells the story of restless Native American veterans of WWI and their fight to reclaim their rights during the Great Depression.

In the summer of 1932 brothers  Basile and Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu travel from the White Earth Reservation, MN, to Washington, DC, to protest with the Bonus Army–a group comprised of thousands of military veterans demanding the bonus pay they’d been promised for WWI service.

General Douglas MacArthur brutally forces the veterans from the National Mall, and the Beaulieu brothers move to an encampment of needy veterans in “Hard Luck Town” on New York City’s East River. They meet other veterans who refuse to be defeated by the sorrow of the times.

In New York City, the brothers also visit the Biblo and Tanner Booksellers, a gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz, the Modicut Puppet Theatre, and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Aloysius, the painter of Blue Ravens, finds inspiration in the Modernist work of Arthur Dove, Chaïm Soutine, Marc Chagall, and others.

Native Tributes is a journey of liberty that escapes the enticement of nostalgia and victimry, and reveals life in its barest form.

Gerald Vizenor is the author of more than thirty books of nonfiction, literary criticism, fiction, and poetry, such as Blue Ravens, Treaty Shirts, and Favor of Crows. He attended college on the GI Bill after serving in the United States Army for three years, mostly in Japan, and studied at New York University and the University of Minnesota. Vizenor is a citizen of the White Earth Nation.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s preface to “Counter-Desecration”

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Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and the late Marthe Reed, is a work of collaborative eco-activism and a call to action for readers and writers.

 

Contributors (including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, Hoa Nguyen, Jennifer Scappettone, Cheryl Savageau, Rusty Morrison, Bhanu Kapil, Christopher Cokinos, etc.) call on humanity to end this era of environmental and spiritual destruction, beginning with this clear and provoking preface by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke.

This glossary delivers terminological impression of shifts in language and in consciousness fostered to address the perilous state of today. Continually fed now since Euro-invasion, intentional attempts at extinction/slaughter of the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples (estimates say that 75 to more than 100 million people rapidly perished at the hands of the Euro-invader and his diseases) undoubtedly spurred the initial methane surge of the Anthropocene. This is, immediate and dire, an enduring era of environmental injustice, survivance under unequal protection from colonial, imperial resourcing, with political sabotage by collective lessening of efforts to combat climate change. Now, in the Sixth Extinction epoch segment, we strive to locate lingual succinctness in attending to the multitudinous expression with participatory means to discern and disseminate information necessary to better the state of the world for all peoples and all lives dependent on our shared planet. Moreover, we strive to employ as vernacular this nomenclature and vocabulary in idiolect of intentional lexicon while gathering activist effort for gross intervention, reclamation, renewal, revivance, and restoration, by whatever means necessary to keep this world inhabitable and whole beyond what damage has already diminished its complete viability.

In imagining a book that would clarify the new ways that we respond to the call our earth, her oceans, and the surrounding atmosphere surely sing, Counter-Desecration brings sustenance and power with terms made in collective remedying. From dysoptics to echolocution, reciproesis to terrotic, the countenance of communication encounters the need of a global population on its mettle. Torpor (the rest state required of an activist) and vivitocracy (a social mind-set built on the idea that all life deserves equally to exist) bring a sense that our collective strength and support of the planet might still replenish and recover her ability to continue, and thus we along with her, or at least give a sense of the hope for future life here. This book allows us fortitude and wisdom to secure what means we might to continue to cherish and to equip us to protect our planet with concise and meritorious language and action: a generous undertaking for which I am exceptionally grateful and believe indispensable for writers, speakers, readers, and researchers working for vital cause and solution.

—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke