Chelsea T. Hicks Wants More Indigenous Poets to Write from Their Own Languages

In this interview, Catapult’s head instructor, Gabrielle Bellot, talks with instructor Chelsea T. Hicks about Indigenous poetry, colonialism, languages, the process of “rematriation,” and more.

Later this month, Catapult is delighted to offer a bold new course from Chelsea T. Hicks aimed at Indigenous writers—particularly those working with ancestral languages rather than the languages of colonizers. The class will attempt to examine the complicated links between Western and Indigenous poetic traditions, and it places special focus on the role of women in Indigenous families and histories; one exercise will involve students having the option of bringing a family heirloom connected to their mother, grandmother, or anyone else in their matrilineal heritage, which they can then respond to in their writing.

By reading a variety of work and using such personal, multilayered exercises, the course will offer students a special opportunity to not only receive feedback on their poems, but to deepen their understanding of their heritages and how these connect to the wider world they are writing in. In anticipation of the class, Catapult’s Head Instructor, Gabrielle Bellot, speaks here with Chelsea about Indigenous poetry, colonialism, languages, the process of “rematriation,” and more.

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Gabrielle Bellot: What do you think about the state of representation of Indigenous voices in poetry—particularly in American poetry—today? Where are we, and what do you think needs to happen next in the world of American poetry to better center Indigenous voices?

Chelsea T. Hicks: American literature is beginning to include Indigenous voices in poetry and in literature. I think of Joy Harjo as our poet laureate now, and Natalie Diaz winning the Pulitzer prize last year. I recently gave tributes to N. Scott Momaday and Linda Hogan, poets whose work makes the current increase of Indigenous visibility in poetry possible.

Harjo and Jennifer Elise Foerster’s When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry gestures toward the breadth and diversity of Indigenous poets, as does Heid E. Erdrich’s New Poets of Native Nations. These books help establish, on the record, that Indigenous poets still come from living cultures, and that we are not anachronistic.

Many Indigenous poets have centered complex Indigenous representation, activism, and land rights. Tommy Pico’s book-length poem in the form of a text message, IRL, widens the concept of what’s considered prototypically Native content, and Nature Poem asserts that Indigenous voices do not have to be land-based.

Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem grapples with how Indigenous people fit into the wider world today, but centers Indigenous ways of knowing. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas highlights the way that the American government is gaslighting Indigenous nations by refusing them access to treaty land. Long Soldier elegantly establishes that Indigenous land and rights are deserving of more attention than insincere apology.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the nuances of each poet’s rhetoric, one commonality is that this poetry is all written and published primarily in English. Now we must write in and translate from our own languages. As we live in diaspora from our own tribal homelands, it seems we also live without our languages. Poets are working to revitalize them, including Diaz, who works with the Mojave language.

And, as we become editors and publishers, our poetry will increasingly reflect our responsibility to land and language. In this way, we can become our own gatekeepers. Indigenous editors and publishers can best understand Indigenous messages and present these to the American public. For instance, I am happy to see the first Indigenous woman-owned press, Abalone Mountain Press in Phoenix, founded by Diné poet Amber McCrary.

Those who are writing in their Indigenous languages and providing translations are leaders of Indigenous poetry. Writing in Indigenous languages gives jobs to translators and provides support for these languages by giving them a literature, as Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has done in Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert.

This work—of language revitalization, translation jobs, and re-connection with Indigenous worldviews embedded in those languages—takes Indigenous poetry in the Americas beyond acknowledgement, recognition, and necessary activism, into land-stewardship leadership. I am very hopeful to see Indigenous poets writing in our own languages with the worlds that these languages carry.

Traditional forms, such as rites and rituals, may inspire and inform poetic practice, but I admire highly contemporary work such as Natalia Toledo’s poetry because of its aggressively modern, uninhibited quality. We need to speak boldly and inventively, using whatever we have to express our strong messages with and in the power of our languages.

GB: Tell us about an Indigenous poet whose work you find exciting and why their writing speaks to you today.

CTH: The poetry of Zêdan Xelef, of the Êzîdî community in Iraq, speaks to me because of the commonalities between extermination policies targeting his community as they flee genocide in their homelands, and the history of Indigenous Americans fleeing massacre in the past and still kept off homelands today. I think it is important to find commonalities around the world on various lands, to establish the urgency of land-protectors’ worldwide claims that we must stop assimilation and ongoing oppressive colonial life. I feel inspired to use what we have to preserve our cultures as we work to return to our own lands.

Our Wahzhazhe homelands are centered in Missouri, and when I go there, I hear people saying they are from St. Louis, or any other colonial city’s name. But everyone comes from a first land, and denying the responsibility for our first motherland leads us to let that land waste. Land becomes vulnerable without a protector. How do we expect to continue life on earth if there is no responsibility toward the land as our relative?

Xelef’s very immediate poetry comes after the seventy-fourth time there has been a massacre of his people. His writing is informed by study of ancient oral traditions, but written in contemporary modes of expression, according to whatever inspires him. I like the freedom in his writing and the way that he is not concerned with emulating the style or venerating the literary traditions of his oppressor. By writing now about the real facts of Êzîdî life, he shows that colonialism is not over at all; we are undergoing colonization now, and it will not end until our oppressors stop extracting the land and the people who still live in culturally-informed connection to it.

We—each of us—are the only advocates of our own motherlands, or as the case may be, our own grandmother, great-great or great great great great great great great grandmotherlands. This is the purpose of rematriation: To save our lands, which are our own bodies. When we die, we become flowers and plants and water and earth. The spread of empires have benefitted from narratives of destruction and of end times, but trading that narrative of destruction for one of responsibility can provide healing and life.

Those who are writing in their Indigenous languages and providing translations are leaders of Indigenous poetry.

I often feel like I want to give up in this. My iko went to an Indian boarding school and she did not have much of her ancestral cultural practice still available to her. I have had to reconnect to my own tribe to an extent, building on the work my parents did, and learning my own language as an adult. Why, I sometimes wonder, are we asked to survive and hold on to these cultures? My other grandmother, who is of New Orleans matrilineally, discourages me from Wazhazhe cultural practice and identification, I think because she is so familiar with racism and its strictures and consequences. “You’ve gotten a lot of trouble just for being an Indian,” she tells me.

The reason I continue is because I love my culture and I have always felt my ancestors on my shoulder blades, since the first time I danced in our I^loshka ceremonial dances beside my iko with women in our family. My iko and my maternal grandmother both grew up Catholic and they became friends. I am motivated to continue for the future and to make life safer for all, after hearing their stories and knowing the violence that both of my grandmothers endured.

So, we are also still fighting despair, and I think Zêdan’s work is important and inspiring because it depicts the challenge of continuance and culture-bearing, of having to keep going amidst so many challenges. And still trying to find some kind of defiant joy in that.

GB: In the exciting description of your upcoming poetry workshop for Catapult, you mention the idea of “rematriation.” I’d love to start by hearing more about what the term “rematriation” means to you, how it differs from the more common term “repatriation,” and why it matters to you as a poet.

CTH: In Wahzhazhe tradition, we come from the stars. I am from a patrilineal tribe, but the earth is our home, healer, and teacher. I belong to the Gentle Peacemaker Clan of the sky division, but the earth as a mothering force gives us the balance that we need now, when the extraction of resources and violence are desiccating the planet and its people. We are part of earth. We are organic forms, and if we do not take responsibility for the parts of the earth from which we emerged, and which are our bodies, what will happen to us?

I want everyone to know the joy of being held by the first mother, as my friend the poet kai rosenfield says. I do not think it is right for people to be orphaned and have to appropriate because they are bereft of understanding of the earth and where we come from, simply in the name of westward expansion and ongoing colonization. Everyone deserves to go to their ancestral homeland and look at it and weep at least once. If this becomes a connection to a continent, or to a cardinal area of that continent, I believe this is a good place to begin.

The greatest challenge I see to writing in Indigenous languages is the syncretizing of Christianity or other colonial belief systems into these languages, co-opting the worldview toward the colonial project of displacement and westernization, with the provided moral excuse or justification of Christian faith. I see practicing Indigenous Christians as hiding in safety and survivance, but this faith practice compromises our distinctness when its concepts are embedded into our languages. Our old world views are now considered taboo. It’s very difficult to re-educate and re-form our minds ancestrally, and to then be able to represent our current experience without this ongoing infringement on our colonized minds. I think that the solution is in the land. We can have conversations with land, and it has messages for us too. Decoding those messages involves our languages. (Annauk Olin’s work at MIT on the Iñupiaq language provides examples of how.)

Indigenous language is one way to strengthen our offering toward American land and people here of all backgrounds, to model for them the stewardship each must seek of their own motherland and mother tongues. We can do this with poetry. Our languages and their offerings for land and relationality are what make us leaders in protecting where we came from, so that we can survive, so that everyone on this land can live.

Additionally, to allow the languages to live, there is an emphasis on children and reproduction. These are our future ancestors, who benefit from our rematriation. Within Indigenous tribes, politics can further challenge a language’s revitalization. The ongoing erasure of Indigenous people in media and television encourage identification with intertribal identities, which rarely reward language-learning or revitalization, instead favoring the pursuit of a homogenized (but at least acknowledged!) pan-Indian existence. This means those cultures lose culture-bearers to urban spaces, and our languages are left to languish.

I believe that more Indigenous contributions to media, such as Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs, do help tribal people to become more active participants in their own cultures, by first mourning what we don’t have and addressing the despair of erasure. If Indigenous people cannot shoulder being culture-bearers, those with enough understanding of their own traditions can lead by being our own literary gatekeepers. There are too many white writers not doing the work to reconnect to their own ancestral cultures, and as a result they are blocking space needed for Indigenous people on our own homelands who are both healing and not healing, all in hopes of being able to make our own contributions. Terese Marie Mailhot’s poetic memoir Heart Berries is a landmark publication in reflecting the complexity of Indigenous healing, and providing a mirror that shows all the challenges we face in doing this work, and what it will take to carry on our cultures and languages on our own terms, anyway.

GB: A few weeks into your class, your students will get the chance to explore their connections to their matrilineal heritage—that is, their family history through their mothers, grandmothers, and other women down the line. I’d love to hear a bit more about your own connections to the women in your family history and how your own matrilineal heritage has influenced your work.

CTH: It started with my paternal great-grandmother Julia Arenia Tayrien’s fan, when my iko gave it to me to dance and pray. On my mother’s side, my grandmother belongs to the Massel family of New Orleans. Her mother was the daughter of a “Mulatto” man and an Arcadian woman. I may never know the exact details of my family’s cultural origins, given the United States’ census system’s erasure of entire cultures into their racist systems. I have started small, by reading New Orleans Blackcreole writers, and looking to honor my ancestors by venerating them.

I believe rematriation should be slow. Organic connections do spring up. I believe that my ancestors will lead me to where they need me to be as I establish an attitude of respect and learning toward my origins. I also believe that people can exist in different relationships toward their ancestral origins. On my mother’s side, I stand in a place of allyship and education, not seeking out culture-bearing roles I am not prepared for.

It’s very important to be humble when re-connecting. If I do good work and build trust, my children can continue that community connection.