[APPLAUSE]
[SPEAKING IN O'ODHAM]
Natalie Diaz.
[SPEAKING IN O'ODHAM]
So it's my pleasure to welcome my friend Natalie Diaz.
And we're very happy that she joined us
this afternoon in our seminar.
And also, on behalf of the O'odham Nation,
we welcome you to O'odham land, where
we have this very beautiful facility and a beautiful moon
hanging out there this evening.
So let me do my job here and so we can get to Natalie's work.
So I initially met Natalie when I heard about the work
that she was doing on the Mojave language
because that's an area--
language reclamation and language maintenance-- that,
of course, I've been involved in as part of my work
here at the university.
So it was very exciting to hear someone working on Fort Mojave.
But before I get to that part, to the Mojave language
at Fort Mojave--
but before I get to a little more about that,
let me just begin by saying that in reading around
about Natalie, I chose some of her writing
about herself to share with you as part of her introduction.
So Natalie writes as coming from the Indian village also known
as Fort Mojave.
She lived there with four brothers and four sisters
in a two-bedroom house.
She is born to a Native mother and a Spanish Catholic father.
She continues to write, "we held to many truths at once.
Each seemed to strengthen the possibility of the other
rather than cancel it out.
In my house, we never had to choose
between the numerous parts of ourselves.
We were all those things at the same time,
sometimes in noisy collisions, sometimes in an easy weave."
So it sounds like a typical family.
Natalie is also nearby as an enrolled member
of the Gila River Indian community near Phoenix.
She earned her BA from Old Dominion University,
where her skill as a basketball player
took her on a full scholarship.
Natalie played professional basketball in Europe and Asia
after undergraduate career before returning to Old
Dominion to earn her MFA.
Natalie has had her work appear in numerous places,
including Poetry Magazine, Narrative, Drunken Boat,
the Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and Crab Orchard
Review, just to mention a few of them.
As a young writer, her book, When My Brother was an Aztec,
has received critical acclaim.
Some of her honors as a result of this publication
include awards from Nimrod/Hardman--
Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Narrative Poetry Prize,
a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts Council Foundation
Artist Fellowship, and probably the frosting on the cake
is her recent fellowship given out
by Princeton University, which is the Theodore H. Holmes '51
and Bernice Holmes National Prize,
which is awarded by Princeton University's
program in creative writing.
So that's a wonderful honor.
In addition to her poetry, Natalie, as I mentioned,
is also involved in language reclamation efforts
for the Mojave language.
In her PBS interview, Natalie speaks
about the high school-age population and the importance
of understanding that being Mojave
is something that they always will carry with them, no matter
where they might travel.
Building the self-awareness of who they are
is an important part of language reclamation.
With the high school-age population in mind,
Natalie, along with Professor Jon Reinhardt
from the University of Arizona's English department,
have a collaborative project entitled Partnership
for Indigenous Knowledge and Digital Literacies,
funded by the National Science Foundation.
This is a project employing new technologies
for documenting the language, as well as producing
digital language material by and with high school students
at Fort Mojave.
So she's a very busy person.
So would you please welcome Natalie Diaz.