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Native American/First Nations Woman Writer of the Week

NORA MARKS DAUENHAUER

Continuing on our trek through what remains of March, I offer you another Indigenous woman writer, Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer (1927-2017), a Tlingit writer from Juneau, Alaska. Born in Juneau, Dauenhauer grew up there as well as in Hoonah, Alaska with a father who was a fisherman and carver, and a mother who was a beader. Dauenhauer lived at times with her parents on a fishing boat and in seasonal camps. Being a member of the Tlingit tribe, her first language was Łingít, and she did not learn English until she was eight. 

Following her mother in the Tlingit matrilineal system, she was a member of the Raven moiety of the Tlingit nation, of the Yakutat Lukaax̱.ádi (Sockeye Salmon) clan, of the Shaka Hít or Canoe Prow House, from Alsek River. She was chosen as clan co-leader of Lukaax̱.ádi (Sockeye Salmon) in 1986 and as trustee of the Raven House and other clan property. She was then given the title Naa Tláa (Clan Mother) in 2010, becoming the ceremonial leader of the clan.

Dauenhauer earned a BA in anthropology from Alaska Methodist University in Anchorage. In the early 1970s, she married poet and Tlingit scholar Richard Dauenhauer and together they made significant contributions to preserve the Tlingit oral traditions in their Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature book series. Nora Dauenhauer became a Tlingit language researcher for the Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks from 1972-1973, and then became the principal researcher in language and cultural studies at the Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau from 1983-1997.

On the subject of preserving the Tlingit oral tradition and its importance, Dauenhaur said:

People are now beginning to take action for language and cultural survival, and my work is to help provide inspiration and tools for this through my writing.

Dauenhauer had several accomplishments, including being named the 1980 Humanist of the Year by the Alaska Humanities Forum. Together, the Dauenhauers were awarded the Alaska Governor’s Award for the Arts, two American Book Awards, and a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. In 2005, Nora Dauenhauer was the recipient of the Community Spirit Award from the First People’s Fund.

As a poet, Nora Dauenhauer published two collections, one of which we hold in Special Collections, Life Woven With Song, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2000 (the other is The Droning Shaman, Black Current Press, 1989). This book recreates the oral tradition of the Tlingit people through written language in a variety of literary forms, and records memories of Dauenhauer’s heritage from old relatives and Tlingit elders, to trolling for salmon and preparing food in the dryfish camps and making a living by working in canneries.

Author Photo is by Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

See other writers we have featured in Native American/First Nations Woman Writer of the Week.

View other posts from our Native American Literature Collection.

– Elizabeth V., Special Collections Undergraduate Writing Intern

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npr.org

Poet Amanda Gorman Reads 'The Hill We Climb'

The 22-year-old composed a poem that acknowledges the recent insurrection attempt, but turns toward hope. "While we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us," she writes.
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Amanda Gorman, a 22-year-old poet from Los Angeles, is following in the footsteps of Robert Frost and Maya Angelou as she takes the stage for President Biden’s inauguration.

But she’s also taking her cues from orators like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. — people who knew a thing or two about calling for hope and unity in times of despair and division.

Gorman told NPR she dug into the works of those speakers (and Winston Churchill, too) to study up on ways “rhetoric has been used for good.” Over the past few weeks she composed a poem that acknowledges the previous president’s incitement of violence, but turns toward hope.

“The Hill We Climb” reads, in part:

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith, we trust.

For while we have our eyes on the future,

history has its eyes on us.

Gorman, like Biden, had a speech impediment as a child. (Biden had a stutter; Gorman had difficulty pronouncing certain sounds.) She told NPR’s Steve Inskeep that her speech impediment was one reason she was drawn to poetry at a young age.

“Having an arena in which I could express my thoughts freely was just so liberating that I fell head over heels, you know, when I was barely a toddler,” she said.

For Gorman, a former National Youth Poet Laureate, her struggle to speak provided a connection not only to the incoming president, but to previous inaugural poets, too.

“Maya Angelou was mute growing up as a child and she grew up to deliver the inaugural poem for President Bill Clinton,” she says. “So I think there is a real history of orators who have had to struggle with a type of imposed voicelessness, you know, having that stage in the inauguration.”

There have only been a handful of inaugural poets; Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy were the only presidents in the past who chose to have poems read at their inaugurations. You can read all the previous poems here.

NPR

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tweetspeakpoetry
tweetspeakpoetry: “ Tweetspeak Poetry has come to Tumblr. Why? As you already know, Tumblr is a word place, an evocative art place, a thinking and daring and sometimes dreaming place. And definitely a bookish and poetic place. Tweetspeak is the home...
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Tweetspeak Poetry has come to Tumblr.

Why?

As you already know, Tumblr is a word place, an evocative art place, a thinking and daring and sometimes dreaming place. And definitely a bookish and poetic place.

Tweetspeak is the home of the famous (infamous?) Poetry Dare. It celebrates words with poetry prompts and articles on Poets & Poems and all kinds of posts on writing and the writing life. It is owned by the award-winning small press that has an Oprah-selected title to its name (T. S. Poetry Press). Tweetspeak exists to bring smart fun and beauty and the best in poetry and poetic things to the world.

So a better question might be. Why not come to Tumblr?

We couldn’t think of a single reason to live a Tumblr-free life (except that we might enjoy it too much and neglect the making of spaghetti sauce, jasmine tea, and the occasional naughty limerick—which even Sara Teasdale understood might be vital to the life of a poet).

Okay. So we’re here—

reblogging your beautiful art and photography and writing our own six-word poems to go along with them. Sharing quotes that strike us, right to the heart. Giving you links to bookish things and, of course, the best in poetry and poetic things. If we like a poem you write, or anything at all that you write, we might ask you for permission to publish your work in our unique poetry daily Every Day Poems, or at our blog, or… you never know (it has happened) in one of our books.

Come, tumble with us. We can stir the sauce later.


Photo by Angelo Amboldi, Creative Commons, via Flickr.

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AMERICAN PRE-ORDER

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Now through March 15, you can pre-order American Barricade, and if you pre-order American Barricade it will ship to you for free. Here are 90 words that Timothy Donnelly said about the book:

"American Barricade is a beautifully constructed and powerful lyric narrative that’s equal parts dysfunctional fairy tale and family tragicomedy. Schoonebeek offers a complex meditation on the imagination’s capacity to make up for reality’s privations and the psyche’s related drive to ‘build from its rubble’—the latter seeming, in Schoonebeek’s hands, like a compulsion to recreate the very conditions the psyche has struggled to escape from. Frequently disturbing, almost always darkly comical, and ultimately heartbreaking, American Barricade is a bold, ambitious, unforgettable debut from one of our most exciting young poets.”

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