It's amazing how a festival like Sundance can fatigue one's investment in communication, in particular my own. After my week in Park City, I came home with what seemed like a big cloudy seal swimming and growing larger in my head with each passing day. The cloud did not ooze out my head until last night, when suddenly, I found myself driving aimlessly around Tucson, wanting so much to photograph the florescent lights of gas stations until, collectively, they would start a fire in my heart again.
I sipped coffee and read a few pages from a book at Denny's instead. The Southside can be very humbling. I actually see Native families there and it feels like home again.
Apparently it snowed at my family's place on the rez. A foot of snow to be exact, and I can already feel the green returning to the land. The sheep will be happy and we are happy because the sheep will be happy. Sounds very sinister . . . you think?
So many of our elders are leaving and it sometimes makes me stop to realize that a way of living and seeing is leaving with them too. I remember sitting with my grandfather several years ago at another family's residence, clan relative perhaps. They were talking about how the were unable to communicate with the youth in nihi zaad (our language). I was aware of it then also, knowing that I too had placed english at the center of my tongue and kept Navajo somewhere inside my cheek like old gum that still had some flavor left in it. Over time, my Navajo had dimmed and I uttered a mixed language, code-switching nouns for other nouns. People laughed at my mixed bag of words and sounds, my anglicized accents on certain Navajo words, my english pronunciations not any sharper either. I was hanging on a branch of air, dangling if you will, between conflicting notions of who I thought I was and who I wanted to be. Culturally, I was the barbed-wire fence stretching between the Reservation and the rest of America.
It was until I choked on words at the edge of my grandfather's bed after he returned from the hospital one evening that I knew I had to return to my own tongue. I couldn't say these words or feelings in English or rather, I couldn't express my feelings correctly or with any impact to my elders or grandfather unless I pulled moved Navajo back to the center of my tongue to root next to the English that flowered there. It's still difficult at times to find words, as anyone who can speak two languages knows, that are right at times, but I am happy that I can speak to my grandmother and aunts and other members of my tribe with some sort of clarity now. Somewhere in the act of finding words I feel that I find new and interesting ways of seeing new things, sounds, sensations. They all become poems to me.
I hear from a lot of Navajos that are my generation that say how difficult Navajo is, how they try but they simply can't speak it. I say, you can, you can, you must! Its not terribly difficult as we make it out to be.
I sipped coffee and read a few pages from a book at Denny's instead. The Southside can be very humbling. I actually see Native families there and it feels like home again.
Apparently it snowed at my family's place on the rez. A foot of snow to be exact, and I can already feel the green returning to the land. The sheep will be happy and we are happy because the sheep will be happy. Sounds very sinister . . . you think?
So many of our elders are leaving and it sometimes makes me stop to realize that a way of living and seeing is leaving with them too. I remember sitting with my grandfather several years ago at another family's residence, clan relative perhaps. They were talking about how the were unable to communicate with the youth in nihi zaad (our language). I was aware of it then also, knowing that I too had placed english at the center of my tongue and kept Navajo somewhere inside my cheek like old gum that still had some flavor left in it. Over time, my Navajo had dimmed and I uttered a mixed language, code-switching nouns for other nouns. People laughed at my mixed bag of words and sounds, my anglicized accents on certain Navajo words, my english pronunciations not any sharper either. I was hanging on a branch of air, dangling if you will, between conflicting notions of who I thought I was and who I wanted to be. Culturally, I was the barbed-wire fence stretching between the Reservation and the rest of America.
It was until I choked on words at the edge of my grandfather's bed after he returned from the hospital one evening that I knew I had to return to my own tongue. I couldn't say these words or feelings in English or rather, I couldn't express my feelings correctly or with any impact to my elders or grandfather unless I pulled moved Navajo back to the center of my tongue to root next to the English that flowered there. It's still difficult at times to find words, as anyone who can speak two languages knows, that are right at times, but I am happy that I can speak to my grandmother and aunts and other members of my tribe with some sort of clarity now. Somewhere in the act of finding words I feel that I find new and interesting ways of seeing new things, sounds, sensations. They all become poems to me.
I hear from a lot of Navajos that are my generation that say how difficult Navajo is, how they try but they simply can't speak it. I say, you can, you can, you must! Its not terribly difficult as we make it out to be.
Labels: Randomness
