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Judith Santopietro was born in Córdoba (Veracruz, México) in 1983, though she was also raised between Ixhuatlán del Café and Boca del Monte, native communities in the Altas Montañas to which her family belongs. There she first heard stories about nahuales, chaneques, flying women, and other extraordinary beings from the Mesoamerican world. Her mother tongue is Spanish; neverthe- less, she has learned Nahuatl for political reasons and to honor her foremothers who dreamed and lived in that language. Judith holds a Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and has carried out research residencies in the Sierra de Zongolica and Tecomate (Veracruz), the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (Texas), and the University of Leiden (The Nether- lands), as well as in New York and Bolivia.

She has published the books Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010) and Tiawanaku. Poemas de la Madre Coqa (Hanan Harawi Editores, 2017) —the first version in Spanish—, as well as the essay “Migran- tes nahuas celebran a Santiago Apóstol: un ejercicio de comunalidad en Nue- va York” (Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, 2017/ Leiden University Press, 2016). She was awarded the Lázara Meldiú National Poetry Prize in 2014 and was a finalist for the International Literary Prize “Aura Estrada” in 2017. She has published in the Anuario de Poesía Mexicana 2006 (Fondo de Cultura Eco- nómica), Rio Grande Review, La Jornada and The Brooklyn Rail, and has also par- ticipated in numerous festivals, including PEN America’s World Voices Festival in Nueva York, 2018.

Her passions are the project Iguanazul: Literature in Indigenous Languages, photography, participating in traditional rituals and dance, birdwatching, and leafing through her rice paper book of poetry from the Tang Dynasty in Chinese ideograms. Currently, she is writing narratives of migration about indigenous communities in the US.

Excerpted from Tiawanaku. Poemas de la Madre Coqa

© Judith Santopietro

English Translation © llana Luna

About the translator

Ilana Luna is a nomad at heart, and has lived on both coasts of the U.S. (Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, California); Miramar, Bs. As. Argentina; Mexico City and currently calls Phoenix, Arizona home, where she is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at Arizona State University. She has been a mother, a lover, a poet, singer, novelist, educator, activist, cooking enthusiast, and translator for the last two decades. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and came into her unrepentant and intersectional feminism at an early age, culminating in an undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, where she was born. She is also a life-long cinephile, and writes about women filmmakers in Latin America (and the world). She is the Programming Director of Femme Revolution Film Fest in Mexico City, and has written Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (SUNY Press, 2018). Among many loose publications of poets and essayists, she has also translated several books of poetry, including Juan José Rodinás’ Koan Underwater (Cardboard House Press, 2018) and Giancarlo Huapaya’s sub verse workshop (Lavender Ink, 2019).

More about Judith Santopietro

Tiawanaku. Poemas de la Madre Coqa. Print. Bilingual Edition

© By Juan G. Sánchez Martinez

© Translated by Lorrie Jayne

Brus Rubio Churay is a Murui-Bora artist from the Amazon region. He was born in 1984 in the community of Pucaurquillo, located in the basin of the River Ampiyacu, in Loreto, Peru. In his work, natural dyes and acrylic come together on canvas and ‘llanchama,’ the fibrous bark of the ojé tree. In “Our grandfather guiding the children”, the ancient territory / jungle carries the children, keepers of water and dance. Trickstery and joy emanate from the earth in a maze of barks and branches.

Whether in Miami, Havana, or Paris, the jungle reveals its boa eyes. Rubio’s sight captures the invisible. The world of men fills only a bare snippet of the canvas. Though the waterfront and the beach unfurl all of their human strength, the beings that sustain the image are, and are not, women and men, but the beings who inhabit the canvas alongside tourists, and songs and dances that accompany Salsa.

Between the city and the jungle, the Murui-Bora gods of this universe are not mere mythical episodes from a book. They are the curious gaze of Buinaima himself before the indelible structures of a contemporary city. What in the world have men done with the Tree of Abundance? Could it be true that they divide the platters of macambo and petroleum as if there were no consequences?  The skeletons of the devourers devour themselves.

Rubio explains in his bio:

“My creation reflects a great cosmic happiness because it is inspired by gods and important mythic people, by festivals and rituals, by the tasks of farming and cooperative work (minga), by the magic and beauty of fish and animals, by the song, vision, and sacred work of my ancestors. All of this is part of my existence, of my way of thinking, feeling, and looking at the world.”

“(…) My paintings also address social, historical, and political themes that affect my people and Amazonia in general, such as environmental contamination, the crimes of the rubber barons against my ancestors, corruption, and the outside agencies that impose development programs without understanding the local reality.”

Considered as a whole, the work of Brus Rubio allows long silences for daydreaming (but not for romanticism or exoticism.) The viewer goes from the known (let’s say a leaf) to the orange skin of a jaguar made of falling leaves. Suddenly, colorful butterflies alight upon the Milky Way while the Mother bathes beneath the stars. Eroticism and love linger, buzzing above the waters.

More about Brus Rubio

Artist website: https://www.brusrubio.com/

© Original poems, excerpted from Father | Genocide: New and Selected Work, 2009-2019,  a new book-in-progress by Margo Tamez

If you prefer to read the PDF, click here

Dá’íhééneezį’é

dádn’áo. 

Daádííjí. 

Dádíí

dáá’koh jeekíí dádidlohgoh beeshá’íí’áná

I am thankful
when the sun rises.
This day.
Just this day
the woman danced until sunset.

✷ 

Yénáaałniiná 

Ílatsoi 

Yénáałni

wos’haaałts’

mit’ii

bits’ísí

Ts’ídáshá’íí’áo

nááyiiskáo dáá’koh

t’áji’yé 

ndádaadeezáná

gokíyaa’í bich’í’yégoh

After a while
 
hummingbird
she remembered
 
dislocated shoulder
her spine
her body.
 
Just at evening
the next day
the movement back
was begun
toward their country.

✷

Gokíyaa  

shighah

shighazhááí

Sháná’ńgeeh 

this country
is my home
my little house.
 
bring it back for me.

✷                                                                                         

Shángodńnał ? 

Dáhichagoh 

ókaanándah 

ghwóch’ííłdéłná 

Will you save me
a place?
Though they cried
and pleaded,
they were abandoned.

✷

Father replays the funeral in Dream #28

Published in Poets.org. Eduardo Corral, curator.

Shame             forces             what we denied into luminosity.

In dream       my father tells me               my mother’s grieving      

prevents          momentum.

He’s projecting thoughts to a screen          for me to read.      

I’m at his private film  of captivity.

He’s watching us.    We’re hunched over       heaving the sorrow vomit.

Father stands before me

time without fear    suspended and apart

unafraid of anything   one way or another.

“When did they cut it?”                                                       he wants to know 

pushing the thought into space                   between my eyes.

Raising his pant leg    where the mortician

smoothed and stretched the salvage skin     Father used for padding 

his below-knee amputation                         

hovering   inches above the ground                                   glints in his eyes.

He doesn’t remember the amputation                                     

in the bending.

Father shows me his whole leg.                    Scars

mended and smooth.

He is an uncut body again.  Like before the bending place.

Only the graft scars on his thighs remain.

He projects: “I feel my leg here Margo  my foot still itches here” Father

points: “in this empty space”     he twirls his fingers a slow    spiral.

I nod to him:               “I see. I’ll remember this for you.”

Artist Statement

At a very young age, I suffered a severe hearing impairment brought on by a runaway fever, poverty, and the intergenerational effects of colonization. At the time, there wasn’t the capacity to know if there was mass interest in the effects of the industrial chemical colonization of the air, land, water, and food systems in which I was raised in southern Texas and in the Texas-Mexico bordered region.

Early on, I made linkages between the settler society’s broad disrespect for and war against the Earth and the aggression we experienced as the local, non-recognized, Indigenous peoples.  I didn’t have the language for this then; though, I was gaining intuitive knowing about how the oil-cattle-cotton and extraction economies trickled down toxicity to my body and how illness resulted.

Being Indigenous, poor, from non-recognized Ndé Dene peoples of Kónitsąąíígokíyaa, (aka: Southern Plains Lipan Apaches from the Big Water Country; unceded Aboriginal Title lands in current-day Texas), this also meant that my experiences, understandings, and critique of these interconnections were also linked to difficult histories spoken, or expressed nonverbally, amongst adult family members. Poetics of repressed memory, knowledge, and anxiety about our subjugated and invisible class (non)identity and (non)recognized political personhood raged into the 20^th century:

through new Indigenous battle-grounds

waged inside cramped rental houses,

low-wage neighborhoods, school yards,

job sites, compulsory CCD catechism

classes, athletic indoctrinations, Sunday

mass, and public schools with White teachers

and rulers, and rule-line paper, and ruling glares.

through compulsory Brownie and Girl Scout

regimentation, yellow school bus rides, armed check points,

vehicle searches, identity papers, incomplete homework,

after school detention, signed yellow slips from home,

parents feeling contained in the rule-lined signature line

for their compulsory signing without consenting, that I

am a bad person for telling our people’s version of history,

compulsory silence in classrooms, compulsory seating order

at the back, with another Native and a Black girl,

curfews, canned corn, old tortillas stuck in

frozen wax paper, Halloween stereotypes, hard leather shoe

blisters, jumped by a gaggle of white boys managing

the settler racial architecture of space and place.

First grade in the occupied territory of unceded Lipan Apache homelands,

South Texas.

My work relates my life-long interest in language, history, archives, memory, and Ndé Dene peoples’ resistances and refusals to disappear and go away. My work also engages where and how Ndé Dene peoples have become conditioned into submission to settler supremacy, and where the colonizer’s methods embedded into the colonized.  My work, as a truthing instrument, leans toward healing and revitalizing, by way of uncovering the hidden in order for truth to emerge; in order to purpose that which has been hidden and negated to be a vehicle for recovering Ndé Dene peoples’ spirits, well-being, and futurity beyond the non-persons we are imagined to be by colonizers which includes Indigenous peoples. Difficult knowledge and peace building have been core to my art, thinking, and process.

 “Difficult knowledge and peace building have been core to my art, thinking, and process.”

By recognizing that genocide—for Ndé Dene peoples—has intricately involved diverse actors and polities, Indigenous genocide in southern Texas has demanded that poetry ascend to different places and strongly opposes genocide being used as a metaphor, or a generic, abstract descriptor. Genocide is an area of research, developed amongst contemporary Ndé Dene scholars, specific and located within groups of my family and kinship society, my immediate ancestors (embodied in the last four generations, between 1872-2019), as well as specific to sites/places of terror, crisis, violence, atrocity, brutality, indignity to the human body, and organized erasure in Kónitsąąíígokíyaa.

In my work, I engage different ways of knowing (epistemology), historicizing, ethics, and valuing to inform my methodology and creative methods to imagine and construct poetry which gives form and voice to non-recognized Indigenous nations. I reference my research on the state, state actors, bystanders, and specific Indigenous polities, organizations and institutions which have contributed to the process of obstructing Ndé Dene peoples’ access to justice. Poetry is a vital form to address histories and voices relegated as disposable and abject.

The cultural, physical, social, and political personhood of peoples of Kónitsąąíígokíyaa is persistently denied in US society into the present. Being deeply involved in three legal cases, between 2007 to 2013, which firmly rejected the state’s normative myth-making regarding US and bystander complicity in perpetuating genocide acts in Ndé Dene peoples’ unceded and Aboriginal Title lands (Texas) during the violent border wall conflict (2007-2009), I find poetry a useful and dynamic tool for stimulating imagery, animating truth-telling, making space for non-western language and knowledge systems, and igniting fire underneath the sedated and numbed consciousness of US-American society.   

As a researcher and scholar, I am an archive builder, curator, and papers manager for two branches of Ndé Dene peoples’ historical documents and culturally related objects. In my current projects am making crucial links between Ndé Dene peoples’ difficult knowledge and state power as warehoused within officially sanctioned archives as an important subject for, (currently updated figures), 400 non-federally recognized Indigenous nations whose political personhood and land claims cases are subjected to multiple forms of human rights violations committed in the US today with the sanction of the federal government, state actors, as well as numerous federally recognized political actors today. This is untenable and is a major motivation in my production in and across poetry, visual arts, language activism, theory, and Indigenous rights advocacies.

The subject in these poems shared with the Siwar Mayu online publication is persistent genocide denial, negation, and obfuscation. As well, I’m interested in exploring the roles and memory of bystanders, beneficiaries, and obstructers to the Ndé Dene peoples’ experiences. I’m exploring Ndé Dene historical memory of complicated emotions connected to being forced by the state and its legal institutions, to helplessly witness the US and other tribal polities take control over unceded Ndé Dene peoples’ homelands. My engagement in Ndé Dene language recovery is a crucial act of honoring my ancestors—the genocide survivors and the non-survivors—and a loving act of reclaiming Ndé Dene peoples’ political, cultural, spiritual, and physical belonging with Kónitsąąíígokíyaa, our customary and traditional homeland. By doing so, the poems re-energize the Ndé Dene peoples’ self-determination and larger belonging amongst the Dene Nation. In poetry, the Ndé Dene peoples ascend to identity beyond the legal subjugated status of ‘Apache’, which is the legal synonym for the settler state’s normalizing genocide as an act of settler state sovereign impunity and immunity from accountability, redress, or recognizing responsibility. These things are hinged and interlocking; not separate. 

“The memories of Ndé Dene peoples remain within me through my deep familial bonds and connections with a significant and large kinship society which spans Niguusdzán (North America).” 

The memories of Ndé Dene peoples remain within me through my deep familial bonds and connections with a significant and large kinship society which spans Niguusdzán (North America). By recovering and decolonizing the legal archives, and re-purposing Ndé Dene language revitalization, I (re)visit intimate familial places in Lipan Apache (Ndé) homelands, in South Texas, eastern New Mexico, and northeastern Mexico. My ancestors’ spatial time-bending emplaces a pictorial language, helping me decipher historical violence felt by Ndé Dene of Texas. 

My poetry acknowledges and draws attention to the lingering impacts of historical trauma which saturate Ndé Dene storied landscapes still obscured by aggressive settler colonial erasure. Spirit memory as sentience, landguage, place, despair—the collective internalization of Indigenous spatial exile—influence my understanding of my peoples’ refusal to settle for the abjection we’re experiencing still today as a result of the genocide politics of perpetrators and bystanders. These poems, echoing post-memory of Ndé intergenerational genocide survivors, explores how historical memory of violence disturbs linear settler literary, history, and narrative structures which have denied Ndé Dene peoples our lived experiences, knowledge, and homelands—even after death. My poetry, inter-ribboned with Ndé Dene peoples’ perspectives of herstory and law, emphatically position different realities, existences, and outcomes which the Ndé Dene peoples will into being.—Margo Tamez

MORE ABOUT MARGO TAMEZ

Poetry by Margo Tamez

Margo Tamez: Native American Writers