I had someone, an interviewer ask
me, probe me a little bit about why I write
so much about my daughter.
And I felt really embarrassed.
Because I already knew I write about her.
She appears in quite a few of my pieces.
So I was embarrassed because I didn't
want to seem completely obsessed with her
or maybe lacking material to work with.
[LAUGHTER]
But I will say that also in this work, particularly she in a way
represents or symbolizes the next generation,
our young people and the responsibility
that we have to them.
So this is a little bit, another piece that she appears in.
"Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as mother,
to teach what it is to be Lakota.
There in the question, what did I know about being Lakota?
Signal panic, blood rush, my embarrassment.
What did I know of our language but pieces?
Would I teach her to be pieces?
Until a friend comforted me--
"don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together."
Today she stood, sunlight on her shoulders, lean and straight,
to share a song in Diné, her father's language.
To sing, she motions simultaneously with her hands.
I watch her be in multiple musics.
At a ceremony to honor the Diné nation's first poet laureate,
a speaker explains that each pupil has been given their own
language to reach with.
I understand reaching as active, emotion.
He offers a prayer and introduction
in heritage language.
I listen as I reach my eyes into my hands.
My hands onto my lap.
My lap is a quiet page.
I hold my daughter in.
I rock her back, forward, to the rise
of other conversations about mother
tongues versus foster languages belonging.
I connect the dots, I rock in time
with references to a philosopher."
This is actually Derrida, but he didn't write that.
[CHUCKLE]
"A master language thinker, who thought of his mother too.
Mother to child, and child to mother relationships.
But as this philosopher's mother suffered the ill effects
of a stroke, he wrote, quote, "I asked her if she was in pain.
'Yes.' 'Then where?'
She replies to my question, 'I have a pain in my mother.
As though she were speaking for me,
both in my direction and in my place.'"
His mother who spoke in his place for his pain,
and as herself for her own did this as one and the same.
Yet, he would propose understanding the word mother
by what mother is not.
The difference, forward back I lift my feet.
My toes touch ground, as I'm reminded
of the linguistic impossibility of identity.
As if any of us can be identical, ever.
To whom?
To what?
Perhaps, to not.
I hold my daughter in comfort saying,
iyotanchilah michuwinku.
True, I'm never sure how to write our language on the page
correctly.
The written takes many forms.
I don't know if any of you know Lakota,
but there's a million ways to write.
Any given word seems like they're still
hammering out that certain things, in any case.
Yet, I know she understands through our motion.
Rocking in this country of so many languages,
where national surveys assert that native languages are
dying.
Child speakers and elder teachers
dwindle, this is public information.
But her father and I don't teach in statistics.
In this dying, I mean.
Whereas speaking itself is defiance,
the closest I can come to difference.
Whereas I confess, these are numbered
hours spent responding to a national apology which
concerns us, my family.
These hours alone to think without my hope.
My daughter understands wholeness for what it is,
not for what it's not.
All of it, the pieces.
Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]