Rita Wong: I’d like to start this conversation on poetics by situating myself. Currently I live on unceded Coast Salish territories, the homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Stó:lō First Nations, otherwise known as Vancouver (or Saltwater City for the Chinese). I was born in the traditional territories of the Siksika, Tsuu T’ina, and Stoney First Nations, now called Calgary. And my ancestors hail from Toisan, Guangdong province, southern China, part of the Pearl River watershed.
As a settler or unsettler working to respect Indigenous ways of knowing, being, seeing, and doing, I’m gently trying to learn Indigenous protocols and ask what it means to build a relationship with the Indigenous people and lands where I live as an uninvited guest. This process is reconfiguring my sense of poetics and language, grounded as it is in my fragmented Cantonese tongue and complicated relationship with English.
Since the Idle No More movement began in 2012, one of the things I’ve found inspiring about it is the idea that an Indigenous-led movement could have space for allies who want to stand with (not for) Indigenous peoples. Idle No More reminds me that words are not enough; words need to be related to actions, relationships, life. At the same time, I feel that language can play a key role in dismantling hierarchical, oppositional colonial patterns. Language can stretch us somewhere more fluid and crucial, somewhere watery and fertile. Yes?
Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm: Yes. I am Anishinaabe of mixed ancestry including Polish, English, French, and Potawotomi from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation and live at Neyaashiinigmiing on the Saugeen Peninsula, the traditional lands of my people, the Saugeen Ojibway Nation. My first language is English, though I know a little Anishinaabemowin, and a little of several other languages. I sometimes say I’m illiterate in several languages and losing more and more every day, but unfortunately, I am fluent in only one — English. My dream is that my children will be conversant in Anishinaabemowin.
The Anishinaabek have a great respect for the power of words. I was taught this in many ways. My Anishinaabe grandmother, Irene Akiwenzie, was a well-known public speaker, a storyteller, and a writer. I learned a love of language, words, story, poetry, and reading from her. My Anishinaabe grandfather, Joseph Akiwenzie, was a big, strong, gentle, soft-spoken man of few words. But when he spoke, everyone listened. Sometimes he didn’t even need to speak. He could walk in a room and we grandchildren would change our behaviour immediately if we were doing anything the least bit questionable. He could sit at the dinner table, look at something he wanted, and four different people would reach for it to pass it to him. He didn’t demand this. He just had a very gentle and loving kind of power. He was careful in his speech and rarely ever raised his voice. His first language was Anishinaabemowin and I grew up hearing him speak in the language. The rhythm and pattern of it was like a song to me, soothing and comforting. I also learned from my Elder and friend Basil Johnston, through visiting and working with him and by reading his books.
But what is the power of words? I have thought about this a great deal in my life and learned from my grandparents, including my Polish grandmother Anna Damm who had only a basic education and who chatted quite happily about the minutiae of life in her rather small world. From her I learned to see the small details and to appreciate the simple things, the small moments that propel our lives forward. I have also learned from many friends, mentors, and writers such as Haunani-Kay Trask, who re-taught me the value in ensuring that words retain their connection to heart and emotion after years of mainstream schooling had taught me that objectivity was foremost and essential; Patricia Grace, who taught me that words gain in power when you remember that “the world is where you are” and not to look outside of my world to find word and story; and Jeannette Armstrong whose contributions to the conversation with Douglas Cardinal in The Native Creative Process continue to inspire and challenge me. From her I learned that words are powerful because from the nothing, the emptiness, they have the power to transform thought into action and thus to have a real and significant impact on the world. From you, Rita, I am also learning: learning that a positive, challenging, and respectful way of being in relationship with the people who share this land is possible. It’s inspiring and motivating.
RW: And it’s mutual! I’ve learned so much from your work. The power of words is not something that my family talked about much, but it was implicitly understood. My parents studied Chinese literature in Taiwan (where they met as students before they immigrated to Canada), yet there was a vast silence in our family around what they’d studied — the typical pressures that immigrant families experience (the need to focus on surviving in English) led me to intuit rather than articulate many of the sensibilities and traditions they carry. Still, I’m grateful for what fragments they did pass to me, and for writers like Lee Maracle, SKY Lee, jamila ismail, Dionne Brand, Larissa Lai, Hiromi Goto, and more, whose work helps me to make sometimes surprising relationships between thoughts and actions, in the midst of so many contradictions and tensions.
KA-D: My limited understanding tells me that words are also sound and sound waves are motion and, looking at it in one way, they do not end, although gradually they do become undetectable. Imagine that power. So words, once spoken, not only cannot be called back but continue to exert a force in the universe, however infinitesimal, in a sense, forever. What does this mean in terms of looking at the universe in terms of dualities? What does this mean to our understanding, not only of words and language and sound but of silence?
Silence, in my opinion as an Anishinaabekwe, is largely misunderstood in mainstream Western society. My experience in that society tells me that silence is often misinterpreted as agreement, acquiescence, a lack of understanding or intellectual capacity, acceptance. Often, it’s not! Far from it. One thing I know is that Anishinaabek listen to and understand silences at a much deeper level. We’re fluent in it! Silence is also irrationally feared in Western society. As a result, there’s often an intense need to fill it. My dear friend, Maori writer Patricia Grace, once told me that she was interviewed and never had the opportunity to finish answering a single question. She’s a very thoughtful speaker and often will pause to consider what she’ll say before continuing. It’s a slower speech pattern than the “normal” Western patter, but not painfully so. As is usual for her, she would start answering a question, then pause slightly to reflect before expressing her next thought. Each time she did so, the interviewer would immediately jump in with the next question. When I think of it I often wonder what amazing insights that interviewer missed because she was too insecure to sit with the silence so that Pat could finish her answers. Not understanding and being able to “read” silence is the cause of a great deal of misunderstanding, conflict, frustration, and exploitation. It’s a form of dominance and fear-based aggression that is perpetrated against Others, those who must be “conquered” and exploited: Indigenous peoples, the land, waters, other beings, rocks and stones, even space. In reality, everyone, every being, every thing, is speaking to us, telling the story of its existence, asserting its place, seeking communion and acknowledging relationship.
Ignoring or denying or purposefully misinterpreting silence or “speaking for” the so-called “silent” Other therefore can be a form of violence. This sort of denial that silence has value is much like the way in which our land was declared “terra nullius” and seen as worthless and unoccupied prior to its “development”/exploitation and destruction. For me, these are linked.
RW: Your essay “We Belong to this Land” has been important to me, as you write, “[W]e find meaning and purpose as human beings, as Anishinaabek, as people of good intentions, in connectedness, in community. We are supported and sustained within a web of relationships. And it begins with the land.”1 Part of my work as a poet has been to listen to the chronic and immense damage to the land — the chemicals, the pollution, the mining of resources at a massive scale. It’s a damage that I’m implicated in, and one that I feel urgently needs to shift, specifically to stop taking without giving back. In many cases, the kinds of relationships I would hope for (land steward, citizen, autonomous being within community) have been systemically replaced by ones I didn’t choose (consumer, employee, etc.), yet much remains that is resilient, to encourage reciprocity’s return.
When I contemplate where we are in terms of global warming, I feel a deep fear, and a need to cultivate courage — through dialogue, connectedness, sisterhood. Language, and listening to the silences between words, is a way for that courage to happen, I hope. Whether or not they have any “use value,” my gut says that poems are worthwhile. Process, regardless of product, matters. A woman plants seeds. Some grow, some don’t — so much depends on wind, sun, rain, and chance.
KA-D: Poems are worthwhile! Yes, because of the process, which can have spiritual and ceremonial aspects to it, which can change the poet even if no one else ever hears or reads them, but also because of themselves. To me, poems can be song, prayer, invocation, ceremony. They are essential, distilled language; distilled words, reduced to their essence. They can be creative forms of activisim, that can have a powerful effect on the minds of those who hear or read them and through that they can cause real and immense change in the world. We are, after all, merely energy, beings of light, and so too are words and poems, especially when spoken — they become energy exchanged, acting upon us at a molecular level. We are in constant exchange with each other though we often forget or deny this. Those who seek to dominate gain an illusive and temporary power. Those who are impacted by their violence carry that — the escalating vi(o)lence, degradation, exploitation, lack of kindness, sense of entitlement, failures to be loving . . . all of this creates an energy in the world that we all carry. The choice is up to each of us and all of us. What kind of a world are we creating for ourselves and each other and our children? Anishinaabek are to think ahead seven generations when we make decisions. Imagine if we all did every time we made a decision about the lands, waters, animals, fish, minerals, trees. It would transform the world.
So, I don’t see my work as a poet as significantly different from the other things I do: the teaching, mentoring, writing, editing, communications, facilitation . . . or even adopting and raising my children. All are interconnected and reflect my values, cultural knowledge, learning, thoughts, relationships, ways of seeing the world, ways of being.
RW: Are there seeds you’ve been especially happy to see sprout? Or ones that you want to see in your lifetime?
KA-D: I’m happy with what I’ve planted. There is so much I’d love to see in my lifetime and I hope I can contribute to that fruition, including the revitalization of Indigenous languages, restitution for Indigenous peoples, protection and stewardship of our lands and waters and air, an end to capitalism (which has really just become a way for the few to dominate and accumulate), the demise of multinationals, especially pharmaceutical companies and Monsanto, and the re-creation of respectful relationships between Indigenous peoples and “settlers.” I would like to see a more loving world for my children and grandchildren and a return to communal ways of living. We’ve made life so unnecessarily complicated! Simplify is my new motto. To do that we need to cultivate courage, yes, and an attitude of gratitude.
Rita, your work inspires me. What do you want to see in your lifetime?
RW: I want what you just said. In the face of ongoing violence and injustices, the necessity for peace, for loving and reciprocal relationships, remains as vital as ever. Rather than seeing poetry, like ecology, become a casualty of colonial and capitalist systems that steal the earth’s inheritance from future generations, I feel it is our kinship — with each other, with all beings, with the lands, waters, and air — that will help make a future-in-common where poetry lives as part of our guts and grace. I want people to remember the joy and integrity in giving back to the earth.
1 Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, “We Belong To This Land: A View of Cultural Difference,” in Literary Pluralities, ed. Christl Verduyn (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998), 85.