Beth Piatote, “Translating the Land Through Language.”

In a recent issue of Poetry magazine, Esther Belin describes the “reterritorializing” power of work by Native American writers working in their Indigenous languages, drawing out the language of the land through naming and poetics. In this talk, Piatote shares some of her current work in this mode, including original poems and translations of poems by Langston Hughes and Emily Dickinson. These works and translations highlight the insistence of the Nez Perce language to act with specificity and groundedness in place, and to transform relationships to place through Indigenous grammars. 

 

Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019). Her full-length play, Antikoni, has been supported by workshops and public readings with Native Voices at the Autry, New York Classical Theatre, and the Indigenous Writers Collaborative at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and her short play, Tricksters, Unite! was featured in the 2022 Native Voices Short Play Festival. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Poetry, World Literature Today, PMLA, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and other major journals and anthologies. She is Nez Perce and an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.