Thank you.
It's an honor to be here, and virtually too,
in Tucson, though I'm not--
I'm also right now at the Muskogee Creek Nation
Reservation.
But anyway, it's great to be here.
And I think about this anthology,
it's many things to many people, and especially
for Native peoples.
But it says-- even the existence of it
says that we belong to American literature.
We are part of American literature.
We are the roots.
You'll find the roots of American poetry
here in these pages.
I'm going to begin, and even the beginning, at the beginning,
in the introduction, we say, we begin with the land.
And that's true for everyone.
We acknowledge that as Indigenous peoples
because our cultures are still--
we did not turn our backs.
We were so embedded here.
We were appointed keepers of these particular lands.
But it's hard to figure out where to start.
Every time I open the anthology, there's something else
that, even though we've edited it,
we've read, and at one point--
at one point during the final editing process,
LeAnne, Jennifer, and I read the whole book aloud.
Because, ultimately, language, whether it's--
the roots are oral, out of the oral tradition.
And poetry is essentially oral.
I think of books of poetry as, really, oral events.