AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Esther Belin in Conversation with Beth Piatote

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Beth Piatote:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “1855”)

I celebrate myself

And what I hereby cede you shall hereby cede

Esther Belin: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Esther Belin, coming to you from the four corners of the United States. My conversation with Beth Piatote maps out some unique qualities about Indigenous language, as well as practices of language revitalization. Beth is a writer, scholar, and member of the Nez Perce nation. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and her poem, “1855,” which you’ll hear today, interrupts the American ideal presented in Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself.” Here’s Beth.

Beth Piatote: I am Nez Perce. And according to UNESCO, and I think accurately described, our language is endangered. And that means that there are fewer and fewer first language speakers. My uncle and aunt were first language speakers, but I have learned the language as an adult. Within our language community, there are probably less than 20 first language speakers. So there are particular challenges around revitalization. One is just dealing with the immobilizing effect of working in an endangered language. So whenever you’re speaking of a word, like danger, people go into like, fight or flight or freeze, like, your language is in danger, you are in danger.

Esther Belin: Sure.

Beth Piatote: So to be able to move beyond this position of danger, to move beyond sort of the enormous weight of, if I don’t carry this language forward, it’s going to die, some part of my culture is going to die, like it’s, it can be very, very difficult to enter into the work of language revitalization, because of the traumas that created language loss, linguicide, genocide. These are real histories that people are living with, in their bodies, in their families, in their generations. And how do we move out of that context? 

(MUSIC PLAYING)

So people have all of these different opportunities and reasons to be drawn to the language. Some people say, “Well, I just want my language to pray.” “I want my language so that when I die, I can speak with my ancestors.” “I want my language so I can speak with my ancestors now.” “I want my language to be a place that I can reside in, that I can go to that is outside of this English system.” “I want my language, because it’s beautiful,” all of these reasons. And “because I want to help carry my language to the next generation.”

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: There’s a lot of different really interesting things that are resonating, you know, when I hear you talk about these things. And I mean, you can’t really talk about language without also understanding like the breath.

Beth Piatote: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: Especially hearing it from the Navajo, we call it like the wind, right, having the wind inside of you, and using it to heal. And especially around the idea of just teaching a language. It’s so much more than just identifying things.

Beth Piatote: Mm-hmm.

Esther Belin: It reminds me of, during the pandemic, my mother-in-law, who’s retired Navajo language and culture teacher, she conducted Zoom lessons with all of her grandkids on language. It was so much more because it was, how to use this word in this context. And I think the beautiful thing about the Navajo language is that there’s a very specific order, but the order places you as the speaker, so you know where you are kind of in the worldview of things, right? Your relationship with objects, your relationships with people, with the land. You know, it’s so much more, and it’s such a natural fit for poetry. So I love that you’re using, I love how you’re using that as a vehicle.

Beth Piatote: Yes, exactly. The breath and the movement of air. Like that’s exactly—when you said, when you started talking about Navajo, the idea of wind actually just came straight to my mind, because that’s how it sounds to me. It’s just like gentle breezes. It’s such a gentle sounding language. I could just like listen to it all day. 

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Beth Piatote: It’s so beautiful. But about the sound, I also think that when I hear Navajo, I think of the Southwest. Like there’s something that is so expressive of place, and the grammar comes out of the place. And I feel like it’s the same way with our language in our community, which is in the Pacific Northwest, sort of North Idaho, Eastern Washington and northeast corner of Oregon and into Montana. Those are our, you know, basic homelands. So, one thing, we don’t have infinitives really. There’s no way to say, “to make” or “to do.” We have a verb, that’s a root that is “make,” but you can’t just have an abstract—there always has to be someone doing it somewhere somehow, in some direction, for someone else, in some timeframe.

Esther Belin: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Beth Piatote: You know, like, you don’t just have infinitives.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Beth Piatote: One thing I was gonna say about sound is, yes, I feel it’s very important to restore the song ecologies of our homelands, from which our land came, and our language came from this land. So the word for “crow” is [Nimipuutímt word]. That’s such a simple example. But there are ways in which the sound of the language is about the sound of the place.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: The place needs to hear our language. It longs to hear our Indigenous languages. And that’s part of the ecology, that’s part of what makes the plants and the waters and everything in our homelands healthy, is the vibration of the language, you know, sharing that vibration in that space. One of the things that is beautiful and charming and fun about Nez Perce is all the sound effects. We even have a word for the sound of a butterfly opening and closing its wings. The word for “thud” is [Nimipuutímt word]. It’s way more fun to say and more descriptive of like, you know, a thud.

Esther Belin: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Yeah. 

Beth Piatote: So these sound effects were embedded in speech, and they were always embedded in stories. So part of this is also about recovering a literary tradition, and studying our sort of old stories for their literary devices. And that’s something I did for a long time before I tried to write myself, was just study these stories. And that’s been the main way that I’ve learned the language.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: But now, in the last few years, I’ve put much more effort into speaking. And this is another opportunity that we have in performance and in poetry is the emphasis on performance. On uttering the poem and it not just existing on the page.

Esther Belin: You’re just, listening to you, I think Nez Perce and Navajo are very similar. We have a lot of onomatopoeia as well. You know, our word for “crow” is gáagii. And they’re also regional, I think we’re large enough in that we have a few different regional dialects, for Navajo, for saying things. And we’ve also incorporated Spanish into our vocabulary as well for certain things, like for butter, money. We didn’t have words for those. So we’ve sort of Navajo-ized (LAUGHS) some of those words that have that Spanish root. It’s really interesting, because I think that’s kind of what we do already with poetry as Indigenous poets, especially you, your work, where you are intentionally challenging form. It really just brought me to tears when I read your poem “1855” is so moving. You know, challenging who many people consider this frontier poet, this true American, Walt Whitman, and battling his words poetically. It was so important. I just, I wanted people to almost say like, “We need to celebrate this poet.”

Beth Piatote: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Esther Belin: Because that’s one of the struggles I have working within Indigenous Studies and within Native American studies. I don’t feel like people truly understand the significance of understanding all the history, understanding not only knowing our history, knowing the colonizers’ history, and then getting to a viewpoint, a perspective, where we can effectively articulate and challenge in very, very creative, fantastical ways, right? I mean, there’s so many nice qualities in that poem, where I was just in awe of the poetics, but also just so grounded in the fact that I felt it as a celebration. I didn’t feel it as a bitterness, a wounding. I felt it as, you know, “Here’s your point of view, and now, here’s mine.” I would love for you to read the poem for us, and to talk a little bit about some of the motivations, and the final product, how that all came together.

Beth Piatote: Oh, Esther, thank you for those beautiful words. That means so much to me. And that recognition of the kinds of knowledge that Indigenous writers are bringing to their work. I agree with you, it isn’t appreciated. And I think that, that actually, my experience of reading Walt Whitman was always with—well, not always, but there was a point at which—maybe this is a common experience for Native people is, you’re learning American history, and you always have your own history there beside it. And I feel like, in a way, we can almost identify each other by these moments in 19th century history. So I could say, “Here’s my Tsalagi, my Cherokee friend,” or I could say, “Here’s 1838.” Or I could say, “Here’s my Cheyenne friend,” or I could say, “Here’s 1864.” So, like, I’m referring specifically to massacres and wars. 1838, ’39 was the Trail of Tears, and the movement of the five tribes out of the South into Oklahoma. 1864 was the massacre at Sand Creek. 1855, there were treaties signed all over the Pacific Northwest, and that became part of this, a significant part of this poem. 1868 was the Long March where the Navajos were removed to um,

Esther Belin: Bosque Redondo.

Beth Piatote: Bosque Redondo. 1898, massacre at Wounded Knee. We could go on. Every tribe has experiences of massacres and removals. And those dates upon which those things, you know, occurred are constitutionally within us.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: And so, encountering other aspects of American literary history, of American history, they are always in conversation. And always having to make sense of them. You know, it may take years to figure out how to bring something forward, to put them in conversation for others. And so this was exactly what I was thinking about. I’m a big fan of 19th century literature. I love Hawthorne. I love those guys. You know, I love Whitman. I love Emily Dickinson. But I also recognize their specific project of making American literature. So, creating a certain kind of subject—individual subjectivity, creating a certain kind of relationship to land and place, creating a type of settler colonial identity through art.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: So, here was my question, reading Walt Whitman. Well, the thing that I was living with, with Walt Whitman, is the fact that Walt Whitman’s exuberance and celebration of the individual of the masses, of the multitudes, of the plentifulness of an American identity, Whitman’s forging of a particular kind of subjectivity was only possible because at the exact same time, Native people were being confined and killed. And so, 1855 the year that Leaves of Grass came out was the year that there were treaties signed all over the Pacific Northwest that confined Native people. So I wanted people, I wanted American literature readers to think about the relationship between Whitman’s exuberance, and Whitman’s American subjectivity, and the confinement and genocide of Native people.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: And the ways in which the treaty becomes part of our subjectivity. I cannot think of myself as a Nez Perce person without thinking of the Treaty of 1855. It is now part of my DNA.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

John Richetti:

(RECORDING PLAYS)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Section I

I celebrate myself myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood … (FADES OUT)

Beth Piatote:

(READS POEM)

1855

I celebrate myself

And what I hereby cede you shall hereby cede,

For the country relinquished by me as good is relinquished by you

I loafe and convey to the United States

All the right, title and interest ... in my country, occupied and claimed,

I give and grieve ... meeting on spears of summer grass

I celebrate myself

And what I hold in reserve for my exclusive right and occupation

Shall be available from time to time

to the President, at his discretion, to be surveyed into lots

I acknowledge my dependence and promise to be friendly

I pledge and agree ... not to shelter or conceal offenders

but to deliver them up to the authorities for trial

(FADES OUT)

So what I did was I took the very iconic opening of Leaves of Grass, “I celebrate myself,” and I rewrote that one stanza several times, and I just started placing the exact text from the Treaty of 1855 into the text, so that people could feel what it was like to move away from exuberance and into confinement, to move away from endless freedom and into incarceration.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: Lose their sense of the wide-open frontier, and see the containment of Native people. But then the poem shifts, and it also recognizes that in those very coercive circumstances, our chiefs did their best. So I celebrate my miyó·x̣at, my chiefs, right. They did our best for us. They reserved our first foods, they reserved as much land as they could, they fought for us, they did their best, and we honor them, and we love them. But then at the end of the poem, I just move away from both Whitman and the treaty, and just speak of our relationship with the land and our ancestors existing in the land with us, forever, forever. And so, you know, ultimately, I want Whitman and the treaty to go away and just be in that place with the language and with the land and our ancestors.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

I celebrate my miyó·x̣at

Who bore losses that we would not bear,

For nú·nim waq’í·swit that is nú·nim tito·qaná·wit

kúnk’u

I hold and cherish Article III

I protect and love our usual and accustomed places, our exclusive right

to take fish, to hunt, to gather roots and berries,

and pasture our horses on open land

I celebrate nú·nim wé·tes, our land:

Ka nú·nim wé·tes hí·wes nú·nim wé·tes kúnk’u

And our land is our land forever

I love and enlarge my soul

’ené·setwíse ’i·nim titó·qan, wax̣ nú·nim wé·tes; timí·pn’ise Wai·latpu

I love my people, and our land; I remember the Place of Rye Grass

We are one with our land

And our land is our ancestors’ land, always

All the land they are lighting, the land is shining bright

forever

nú·n wisí·x ku’stí·te nú·nim wé·tes

ka· nú·nim wé·tes hí·wes nú·nim ’anoqónmanm wé·tes, kúnk’u

hi’laká’wisix la’ámna wé· tesne, wé·tes hi’laká’wisa

kúnk’u

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Beth Piatote: Qe’ci’yew’yew’. Thank you, Esther.

Esther Belin: Wow, thank you. So as I’ve been working more and more with Indigenous writers, and looking at the way they’ve been writing, not only in English language, but in their own language, it really made me think of this idea of re-territorializing the language. Similar to what you were saying before about this timeline of all these significant events. And I think we have that same timeline with language. Where, you know, there was this complete, you know, forced coercion of it, denial that it’s in us, and it’s sort of tainting who we are as people. And now we’re really using it in a way to revitalize, and again, to gain ground, to really gain this land back, if you will, with language. And really acknowledge its influence. You know, one of the things I kept thinking of, and I think of it with, when I read Emily Dickinson as well, is the statement that you mentioned earlier. They were really only able to gain ground, perhaps because of what they were seeing or hearing about, with Indian tribes losing that access. You know, Walt Whitman is praised for, you know, being this great person to speak of democracy and diversity. I mean, I always think, it was only possible because he saw what was happening to the country. And so we’re influential again, even in the silent, because of this war that was really happening in the country. So it’s so interesting when people praise him in that way. And I always think, “No, I mean, there was war happening,” like, you know, we were still very much at war in the West, and people were dying, and you know, slavery and vicious battles were happening.

John Richetti:

(RECORDING PLAYS)

… coalmen, comrade of all who shake hands and welcome to drink and meat,

A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfullest,

A novice beginning yet experient of myriads of seasons,

Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion,

A farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker,

Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest.

I resist any thing better than my own diversity,

Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,

And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

(The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place,

The bright suns I see and the dark suns I cannot see are in their place,

The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.)

Esther Belin: When I read reviews of books, or poetry written by Native American writers, it really bothers me how people don’t really try to understand the context within and what the poet is really trying to do. It’s not just the poetics on the page, it’s so much larger. There’s so much of a ground, an action happening, when Indian writers actually write. And I love that.

Beth Piatote: You know, Esther, that’s all so beautiful. And, you know, one of the things that we talk about with Indigenous language revitalization is how the language can bring you into alignment with the consciousness of the earth. And the definition of a speech community. So often in linguistics, as speech community is the humans who speak the language. But in Indigenous contexts—this is a generalization, but I think it’s pretty true. There are many members of a speech community. The speech community includes the birds and the fish and the land and the water and the stars. And the ancestors. So, one of the reasons why I think this poem came out powerfully, is because I was in my homeland.

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: I was working with the language, I was working with other speakers, and I was also working with the other speakers in the land. I was more aligned with the consciousness of the place and of our homelands forever. Like, where does language exist? It’s not in our minds, it’s in our whole selves. Writing has to come through the body. So it matters where our bodies are. It matters where our hearts are. The ways in which our language is aligning our relationships to space. And so, Esther, in our languages, you can’t just exist abstractly. (LAUGHS) You can’t just occupy some space. 

Esther Belin: Mm-hmm.

Beth Piatote: You have to be in relation to other living beings. It’s impossible (LAUGHS) to not exist that way.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Beth Piatote: I’m so glad you brought up Emily Dickinson again. I’ve been doing this little set of experiments translating very short poems by famous American poets into Nimipuutímt, into Nez Perce language. And this goes to your idea of re-territorializing. And that idea has so many dimensions to it. It is part of Land Back. It is part of redress. It is part of recovering ourselves and our relationships, and our order of the world, our grammars. Our grammars tell us that this is how we are to relate to the world, to ecology. This is how we are to care for each other. So you’re right. All of this is about re-territorialization, about land back, about recovery of relationships, grammars of being. So, the lovely little poem that I chose from Emily Dickinson is called “To make a prairie.”

(READS POEM)

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

So I wanted to bring this into Nimipuutímt, into Nez Perce language. And right away, I was confounded. We can’t say “to make.” So I use the roots “make” with a reciprocal prefix. They make each other, right? For them to with each other make up prairie. That’s how it would be in English. In order for them to, with each other make a prairie, you need a clover and one bee. Okay. So clover. We don’t have clover! (LAUGHS) So right away, there’s this challenge. So I was like, well, what would translate into clover? What’s an important pollinator in our homelands? So I chose this flower that’s called [Nimipuutímt word], which is Meadowlarks basket cap. It’s a very important pollinator in our prairies. And it requires a native bumblebee. And so we have a word for that: [Nimipuutímt word], native bumblebee. And so, just in the first line, I changed this sort of abstract, “To make prairie you need a clover and a bee,” and the bumblebee is essential for this particular flower because the flower hangs upside down. So the bees have to be able to vibrate. You know, I think vibration is so important, because vibration is also speech, right, or dancing, or dancing. So just in trying to translate this sort of settler vision, in this beautiful, beautiful poem, this perfect poem (LAUGHS) by Emily Dickinson, it becomes Indigenized and it becomes play space. So basically, I brought out the Zumwalt Prairie in this poem, and brought out our grammar and our understanding of what it takes to make a prairie. It takes a native bumblebee, and it takes this plant that grows in our prairies. (LAUGHS) And it takes two working reciprocally. That’s just one line. I think that there’s the possibility for re-territorialization is very deep. And so I just really appreciate you bringing forward that concept.

Esther Belin: I love that idea. We are whole and we’re made to be part of a community, like you said. You know, this concept of land acknowledgments. You know, people who identify within this country as Americans or US citizens, you know, it comes in so many ways, it can be a privilege, it can be a badge of honor. It can be divisive, it can be invasive. But regardless, we’re all sharing the same space. And really to understand, how do we interpret that space more in a way that, that we can have roots there, you know, because I feel like even people who are immigrants to this land or living in a space that’s not, they don’t have a natal connection to, they can still acknowledge these things through the language, through the caretaking and the stewarding of their immediate space. And that just laps over into how we communicate with people, the art we create, and the worldview in which we choose to interact with each other. So, I thank you for this time. It’s just been so refreshing right now, and it’s been really encouraging for me as an Indigenous writer to hear your ideas and your thoughts and also just to really know that, you know, your energy and the hard work that you guys are doing out there in Nez Perce really feeds me and the work that I’m doing with Navajo writers and in my little corner of the US as well. A’he’hee.

Beth Piatote: Oh, qe’ci’yew’yew’. It means so much for a Nez Perce person or for other Native people to pick up a journal and see their own language. It’s so precious. It’s so beautiful. And it’s brave to make the decisions that you made for this issue. This is such an honor and such a beautiful experience. Thank you. Qe’ci’yew’yew’

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Esther Belin: A big thanks to Beth Piatote. Piatote is a Nez Perce writer and author of TheBeadworkers: Stories, out from Counterpoint Press in 2019. You can read three poems by Piatote in the July/August 2022 issue of Poetry, in print and online. A special thanks to PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania and to John Richetti for his reading of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” You can hear the entire poem, all 52 sections, on the PennSound website. And if you’re not a subscriber to Poetry Magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 11 book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)