September 13, 2024
Retreat 2024 at Minnesota Center For Book Arts
By Indigenous Nations Poets Staff
Háŋ! Háu! (Dakota) Chinchokma! (Chikashshanompaˈ)
In June, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts welcomed the 2024 Indigenous Nations Poets Fellows. There Fellows participated in a Power of the Press workshop where they created two unique letterpress prints that featured Indigenous languages. The project was part of Indigenous Nations Poets #LanguageBack initiative which focuses on supporting poets writing in and with their traditional languages. One poster shares expressions of gratitude in Dakota, Fino’ CHamoru, Mohican, Diné Bizaad, Tsalagi, Anishinaabemowin, and Ōlelo Hawaiʻi. The second poster contains the words for language in Diné Bizaad, Osage, Fino’ CHamoru, Dena’ina qenaga, and Anishinaabemowin.
Returning Fellow Melanie Merle reminded us how inter-art activities make explicit connections across time. “Seeing our languages in print, I had the sense we were stepping through time. At the time those presses were initially in use, our languages were excluded from them. So to see our languages move through the press was powerful.”
Melanie emphasizes how the process of selecting words that worked within the letterpress’s constraints (10 characters or less, Latinate script), meant that the participants spent an entire afternoon exploring the possibilities contained within a handful of words. “The focus on [individual words] reminded me how important it is for people to take more time attending to language in a world that’s full of talking but not listening."
Returning Fellow Kalehua Kim found that the activity represented, “a physical embodiment of a connection to an oral tradition.”
In exploring how Ōlelo Hawaiʻi could be represented by the letterpress, Kalehua found that she “reclaimed a part of myself while connecting my language to the languages of my peers and colleagues in In-Na-Po.”
