[APPLAUSE]
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for coming out and celebrating poetry and images.
I want to just say a little bit about the book,
and then I'll read some poems.
And then Stephen will talk about his photography
at the end of the presentation.
Stephen Strom contacted me at--
forgot what year it was.
2004 or something, 2003, about writing this book.
And so I said yes very quickly, because Canyon de Chelly--
or as we call it in the Navajo language, it's Tséyi,
and that means "deep in the rock."
And it's up near Chinle, Arizona on the Navajo reservation.
If you've never been there, I would encourage you
to go and spend a day there.
It's very beautiful.
But Stephen invited me to be the writer for this book,
and I quickly said yes, because I think
it's a very beautiful place.
I grew up on the Navajo reservation
just on the other side of the mountain from it,
and I think I only visited the Canyon maybe once when
I was in college.
But after I left the reservation,
I made it a point to visit it many times.
So I wrote the poems for this over two seasons
that we traveled into the Canyon with Steve and his wife Karen
and a friend of mine.
And while Steve took the photographs,
I wrote down some ideas and talked
to some of the people that lived in the Canyon.
There is a longer history of the Canyon,
and I wanted to make note of that
when I was writing this book.
In 1864, the Navajo people that lived in the Canyon
were forced out of there by Kit Carson
and removed to Fort Sumner, what is now in New Mexico.
And they were imprisoned there for four years.
And in 1868, they signed a treaty
which allowed the Navajo people to return back
to the Navajo homeland.
And there are a lot of stories about what
took place during that era just before the forced removal.
I remembered some of the stories that my grandmother told me
about what happened to some of the people
as they were leaving, and I wrote
some of that in this book.
But I think that the main point I wanted
to make in writing these poems is
that the spirit of the Navajo people is resilient,
and it's still strong.
And I wanted to reflect that in the poems.