Thinking in Subversion

Abstract

Sometime in 2001 I received an invitation to participate in a group poetry reading and panel on multilingual poets at a regional Modern Language Association conference. Being a member of the Onondaga Nation, raised on the Tuscarora Reservation, I am sure I looked attractive to the selection committee, but I immediately replied that I had no poems in either Onondaga or Tuscarora, beyond occasional words or phrases in the middle of poems composed otherwise entirely in English. I did, however, offer that it sounded like an interesting possibility and that I was willing to give it a try. Beginning to work on the piece, I realized that a poem composed primarily within a lexicon of animal and plant names, numbers, vulgarity, and meteorological conditions was not likely to be very interesting, but that was what I had at my disposal. It was a frustrating realization, remembering that at one point in my earlier life, I had been relatively fluent in the Tuscarora language; but as with so many elements of our lives for which we have no common application, like the complicated rules of long-dormant childhood games, the ability to use Tuscarora had fallen into some sort of appendix in my brain, atrophied to the point of sound memory. I had lost the ability to think in the language, beyond the occasional useful idiom.