Thank you, Diana.
Thank you so much for having us all here today,
and Bojan for the introduction.
I'm really excited about this Institute
for Inquiry and Poetics.
I think the idea of reframing our future
through imaginative language is--
well, it's what we need to do.
So thank you for all the work you're doing towards that.
Absolutely.
It's been such a pleasure to participate
in the making of this anthology, and to talk a bit
today about the anthology within the framework of belonging
and how language can bring us to that kind of belonging.
So I'm going to read some poems from the anthology
that I feel really connected to because they
are about belonging when you're somewhat
in an in-between space, which I think
all humans are, but particularly in this country, Native people.
And just on a personal level for me--
since I am daughter of a military diplomat growing up
mostly in Europe--
I spent more years in Europe than I did the United States.
I kind of grew up in the borderlands of identity.
My father's family has a deep Dutch New York
history dating back to the Revolutionary War,
as well as German ancestry.
I lived in Austria as a kid, so I
was really able to connect to that German culture
and language.
My mother's family is rooted and centralized
in Oklahoma's Muskogee history, which I was connected to
during the summer when my sister and I were sent home to the US
to live with our grandparents and cousins.
So I grew up understanding about this conflicted
national and cultural identity.
I also grew up understanding that homeland
is a place of loss, as much as it is a place to be found.
My family's stories of our ancestors, on all sides,
were always a part of our identity,
and I'm grateful for that connectedness.
So when I began writing seriously,
I sought my own literary ancestors,
the concept Joy Harjo has graciously named and encouraged
among all of us.
I grew up reading, as many of us probably did,
Norton anthologies and learning the literary traditions
of the United States as a realm occupied primarily
by Englishmen with a few upper-class women
dotting the periphery.
I did not find my literary ancestors
in Whittier or Bradstreet, Whitman or Thoreau.
So when my mom gave me Joy Harjo's book of poetry
as a young teenager and told me, this
was a poet from our same nation, I
knew the story of American literature
was incomplete as I had learned it.
I knew there were other Muskogee writers, other Native women
writers.
There were so many literary ancestors hidden in the poems
under the palimpsest of writers who had erased them.