Indigenous justice has been a topic of conversation for centuries, and this year, writers Tacey M. Atsitty, Becky Pelky and m. s. RedCherries brought the conversation to the Unbound Book Festival. These writers shared their insights at Serendipity Salon and Gallery as part of a panel on April 19.
The authors played with elements of time, voice, history and personal narrative to tell their stories.
Pelky’s book “Through a Red Place” utilized historical archives from her research. In it, photocopies of historical documents, journal entries and textbook pages sit side by side with poetry. Pelky included a postcard her great-grandfather, who was a student at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, wrote.
“There’s a way in which I think it lets my ancestors and other people almost speak for themselves, not quite, but there’s some echo,” Pelky said. “To have his actual handwriting and his words in the book felt important to me like that. I wanted to be inclusive beyond myself.”
RedCherries described her writing style for her poetry book, “mother,” which includes an unnamed narrator and multiple voices within the story. She noted that having the unnamed narrator was not completely intentional, but rather the way the story flowed for her. Publishers and editors alike told RedCherries that this was a confusing way to structure her book, but to RedCherries, this was how it needed to be.
RedCherries emphasized the importance of readers recognizing that as an Indigenous woman, she was not writing about her people as a whole but rather her personal stories.
“I think with Native literature, there is this assumption that each native person is a monolith of all Native America,” RedCherries said. “I preface everything saying that I’m just one person from one tribe of many tribes across this land, and so I’m not representative of anything or anyone except for myself.”
Storytelling is woven into Native culture, and these writers have embedded their experiences into each story. Before written stories, Native tribes passed down their culture through oral storytelling. Each story is passed down from generation to generation, and sometimes those stories are written down.
Atsitty introduced herself in Diné Bizaad, the native language of the Diné (Navajo) tribe, conveying a deep connection to her heritage. For Atsitty, the land played an integral role in her work, as it connected her to memories of her home. Atsitty grew up in a canyonous desert landscape before moving to New York for her Master of Fine Arts at Cornell. Those canyons were replaced by densely populated cityscapes with trees and the narrow valleys of river water between beautiful mountainous landscapes, called gorges, became her escape. It was when Atsitty left home that she became more connected to the land.
“As I got to know more intimately the land there and know the stories of the Cayuga and the other tribes in the Haudenosaunee, it caused me to reflect back to the land back home, the canyons back home, and the stories that had been told to me,” Atsitty said.
Atsitty, RedCherries and Pelky use their prose to convey their own native heritage. For them, Indigenous justice is forever ongoing.
“It’s always going to be a moving target,” Pelky said. “It’s a little bit like a mirage…What is justice for 500 years of attempted genocide, right? You just can’t. But that doesn’t mean we stop sort of trying to work towards it because it’s part of our survival to continue to do that work.”
Edited by Alyssa Royston | [email protected]
Copy edited by Amelia Schaefer and Natalie Kientzy | [email protected]
Edited by Emilia Hansen | [email protected]
Edited by Alex Gribb | [email protected]