Ahé’héé for your continued interest in this blog!
This post is the third part of a series on etymology1 of words/wyrds2/saad, word-making, and tongues and lingoes. The first two parts were on the power of words and the power of words in world-making/building.
And speaking on building via language, these days I’ve been spending my reading time in the works and words of Paula Gunn Allen (I’m calling her PGA and claiming her as my lesbian literary great aunty who smokes too much) and her colleagues. Of her work, I’m reading these titles at the moment: The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Beacon Press, 1986) and Weaving the Legacy: Remembering Paula Gunn Allen (West End Press, 2017), I’ll admit I’m reading this mostly to hear what Dr. Deborah Miranda says about PGA, Miranda is another elder Queer literary genius I’m currently obsessing over. Weaving the Legacy is a collection of essays and stories celebrating Paula Gunn Allen, as a friend, mentor, and scholar. Weaving the Legacy makes apparent how much PGA’s work and guidance meant to many BIPOC scholars who grew up in circa 1990s academia. This cohort cut their teeth in this crucible (during this time even PGA was attacked by her senior colleagues, including her male Native counterparts for her work on Indigenous feminist literary critique) and offered up a new way of analyzing Native American literature. This is also around the same the term Two-Spirit was being developed and adopted into Indigenous lexicons. There were two very important movements happening within and outside of academic circles during this time. These two movements: a continued development of Indigenous literatures via critiques by writers like PGA; and a community movement also led by an Indigenous woman, to name ourselves. Both movements were happening simultaneously, and both had the intent on making our worlds better and safer places for us to live. Both movements also developed language and tongues that protected us, made us feel seen, and utilized knowledge once spurned by academia. Yet, the language(s) borne out of these movements is being used today in scholarly circles and in the streets. I’m also dipping in and out of PGA’s critical works in Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons (Beacon Press, 1998), where she asks, “who’s telling this story, anyway?” in her explanation of boundary-making in discourse. I see these texts as a means of wayfinding or maybe even a map for movements taking place right now. This history reminds us that words matter. They aid in seeing/dreaming/building. I want to know this history because I want to make meaningful words that when strung together reveal a new world, a new way of living/being.
PGA’s critical work built a language for scholarly analysis of Indigenous literatures. Her work exemplifies how Indigenous knowledge can steer how scholars talk about the very communities whose slow tongue is studied (and appropriated). Now scholars use Two-Spirit as a universally accepted and understood term for speaking about the Indigenous 2SLGBTQIA experience in academia and beyond. This is what I love to see! As I research and write this very blog I’m increasingly interested in how we now use a term like Two-Spirit, and how the community around this term has developed and changed since the 1990s. This is what I mean when I talk about how words are crucial in the processes of naming our worlds and placing ourselves in our world3. This change can be seen and measured in our literature, here I’m thinking of the influence of writers like Sherwin Bitsuie, Joshua Whitehead, Natalie Diaz, and many others.
Building up our “slow tongue”, as L.H. Stallings says is as much about how we resist (that the language itself is built out because of the resistance to the harmful ways we have been documented, written about, and spoken of) as it is about how we talk about our joy and how we think about the world around us and how we talk/think/dream about ourselves in the world. I’m also interested in the process as much as I am in the language, because: words! I’m interested in how we use our own tongues to describe, dream, and analyze the world around us, too. It seems to me that if we follow the language, the history of it, the trajectory of it and its words we have a map of how to resist and survive into the future. Word-making, I believe makes this possible, by word-making we declare ourselves present, we sing love songs with these words we make. Radmilla Cody’s word-making made being an Afro-American/Diné person safe(r) and made a space for this community to be legible and accepted.
PGA’s knowledge and understanding of Indigenous feminism in the creation and organization of Indigenous lives is foundational to her work. Her critiques of Indigenous literatures are a wonderful example of where and how PGA utilizes her knowledge. PGA reminds the academy that, overwhelmingly Indigenous cultures were at the very least matrilineal, if not matriarchal, and not organized along male lineages. Her work also lends a theoretical language for how to analyze Indigenous literatures from an Indigenous lens that is not male-centered or partial to the written word. And most importantly, PGA says we can’t fit ourselves into a place like academia and I agree, but I also say let’s make a new world where we are seen and accepted and safe.
Keep an eye4 out for the next installment where I will discuss declarations, how we use our tongues to declare our humanity, our presence/existence now and into the future!
1 Merriam-Webster defines etymology as “the history of a linguistic form (such as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transition from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language.” I should have been a linguist. Just sayin’! But this kind of study is where world-building can be observed over time via usage of words (some words go out of style but make a comeback like cool or sick.
2 Paula Gunn Allen (PGA) uses this spelling in her Wyrds/orthographies section in Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons (1998). Orthologies refers to the conventional spelling system of a language.
3 See parts 1 and 2. 😊
4 I want to give a s/o to the brilliant Libby Coyner for the graphic for this post, shown here are two of my teachers: Paula Gunn Allen and L.H. Stallings. Ahé’héé’ Libby!
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