Anthony Webster Lecture: “I don’t write Navajo poetry, I just speak the poetry in Navajo:”

This talk considers the imagined future publics of Navajos who write poetry in a variety of languages, and especially in Navajo, and how these poets have responded to a certain dominant language ideology of standardization that has crept into Navajo views about writing Navajo. Such views can stifle or discourage grassroots literacy practices in Navajo because they judge them against a standardizing view of writing. This seems to have led to the emergence of poetry composed and performed in Navajo on YouTube. Here there is no written poetry in Navajo, but rather poetry as an aural/oral phenomenon. This mode of expression re-imagines a future public for Navajo based not upon the standardizing institutions of ethnonationalism, but upon a kind of ethical listenership in which belonging is defined through acts of poetic communion.