Oh, thank you so much.
I'm really honored to be here and be among friends, I think.
I've known you all for so many years.
And I feel like I'm with family.
And especially lately, working on the anthology,
"When the Light of the World was Subdued,
Our Songs Came Through."
I think Joy, and I, and Jennifer met for at least every 2
to 3 weeks throughout the year, preceding it's finished--
and finishing the work.
I mean, this is, as Bojan said, this is an enormous undertaking
to pool two centuries of work from poets, Native poets,
across the United States.
And it was in--
and the way I feel about it is that it's sacred work, really
especially our ancestor poets.
So I'm sometimes discovering new things in reading the book.
It feels like a discovery every day.
So again, I'm delighted to be here.
Today, while I was on the internet,
I received a call from the AIW for papers about "land
is our first teacher."
It's a conference that will go on in First Nations in Canada
next year.
Land is our first teacher.
And this was something that was built into our discussions
about putting the anthology together.
It's region by region by region, land by land.
And I've written a great deal about that.
Land is our first teacher.
Our first gardeners, women worked the land.
Our first mound builders, architects in the southeast
created spaces on the land for teaching and for living.
So land has meant a great deal to all of our tribes
and all of our people.
So it also continued to guide us in putting
this anthology together, almost like a guiding hand.
The land helped us bring this work into being.