Laura Da’s new poetry collection, Instruments of the True Measure, moves its reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland. This collection proves how truly entwined the words poets craft and their personal experiences are. Laura Da’ spoke with us about her inspiration for these poems, as well as how an unexpected turn in her life led to a new form of poetic energy.
“Writing the poems and essays for Instruments of the True Measure started as a natural continuation of the poetic obsessions that have always motivated my work: history, identity, alienation, family, and place,” she says. “As such, this book has direct connections to my first book, Tributaries. Seeking to learn more about my Shawnee ancestors by way of their movements across the land, I became very taken with multiple American histories of surveying, geography, and cartography. I was struck with the ways forms of measurement became such a crucial and destructive tool of colonialism. This became a foundational element of the book.”
“About mid-way through my work on this book, I swerved. Out of the blue, I fell very ill in 2015 and ended up on dialysis until I received a transplant in 2018. I can track the change in my voice and style clearly from a more muted, objectivist tone to a more searing and lyrical connection between the traumas of the present and the past. There is a juxtaposition between my established process of obsessive research leading to image and narrative driven poems with a raw new poetic engagement with personal pain, fear, and sense of exile. I dig in with these poems and I see this book now as an artifact of my own desire to survive and mark my own place here.”
Below, find the poem titled “The Point of Beginnings” from Laura Da’s collection. This poem opens Instruments of the True Measure with themes of birth and the power of the natural world placed within the definition of geodaesia, rendering them inseparable concepts in the context of the poem. Carrying the weight of American history, this poem launches a collection that is deeply concerned with Shawnee lives and the forced removal and frontier violence which they endured.
THE POINT OF BEGINNINGS
Geodaesia: The art of surveying and measuring— footpath stamped and deer path trampled.
Wily agents of creation
foliated under great pressure;
white-banded rock embedded
in absolute time’s alluvial fan.
The first creeping
act of range
is the infant’s change of heart
from open to closed
upon the initial intake of breath. Thence with the meanders of the river.
Laura Da’ is a poet and a public school teacher. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, won a 2016 American Book Award. In 2015, Da’ was a Made at Hugo House Fellow and a Jack Straw Fellow. She lives near Seattle with her husband and son.
Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River by Beth Rose Middleton Manning documents the significance of the Allotment Era to a long and ongoing history of cultural and community disruption. It details Indigenous resistance to both hydropower and disruptive conservation efforts. With a focus on northeastern California, this new book highlights points of intervention to increase justice for Indigenous peoples in contemporary natural resource policy making. Today Middleton Manning answers five questions.
What inspired you to embark on this project?
Generally—a lifetime of love of the land coupled with a deep commitment to justice. More specifically—my work with the Maidu Culture and Development Group (MCDG) beginning in 2001, and later the Maidu Summit Consortium and Conservancy beginning in 2004. Mentors and friends in the Maidu community took the time to take me around their country, welcome me to their ceremonies, gatherings, meetings, and events, and talk with me about struggles to access and protect their homelands.
Back in about 2002, MCDG board member Lorena Gorbet showed me a map she had made documenting the status of the lands under hydroelectric projects in the Maidu homeland. Many of these lands were former Indian allotment lands. I began assisting with the project to find out how, specifically, these lands transferred out of Maidu hands. I traveled to local, regional, state, private, and federal archives containing Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management (then, General Land Office) records, and found documentation of over 600 allotments in Plumas and Lassen counties. Some of the files contained more details, including extensive correspondence about the land, and photos of the lands. I was deeply moved by the stories of Maidu and other Indigenous (Pit River, Paiute, Washoe) resistance and ingenuity in the face of oppressive paternalism by the Indian Agents and greed by the corporate developers. Outside of this research and conversations with community members, I had not learned about this struggle before, or about the role of allotment lands in the seizure and development of rural California. It seemed almost as if history was repeating itself in the early 2000s with the utility company settlement and recommended divestiture of some of these headwaters lands in Maidu country. Lands around or near the reservoirs and other hydroelectric operations were recommended for conservation but Maidu allotment history and contemporary Maidu presence and care for the land were not mentioned in the settlement or process. As members of the Maidu community advocated for the return of these areas of the Maidu homeland, I was able to provide supportive information on specific histories of Maidu lands seized for timber or hydro development and now targeted for conservation, to support their return to Maidu ownership.
This book has been called a must-read for wilderness advocates. Why do you hope they’ll read it? The history of post-contact land use and management is deeply intertwined with institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusion. One must look deeply at the history of land use planning, and how it reverberates into the present day, so as not to perpetuate institutionalized injustices. Locking lands up in industry can be similar to locking lands up for conservation or wilderness preservation if Indigenous peoples are excluded. Indigenous peoples must be leaders and partners in land planning and land stewardship. The work to protect land must correspond to the work to bring justice to the ways Indigenous people are being and have been treated, in terms of exclusion from planning and jurisdiction within their own homelands. This leads to better projects as well as to building “a future of justice“ as my friend Farrell Cunningham (yatam) wrote in the Maidu Summit Land Management Plan for Tasmam Koyom/ Humbug Valley.
You point out that during your course work for your PhD in Environmental Science Policy and Management you weren’t required to take any Native Studies courses. Why is this problematic? Every inch of the world is an Indigenous homeland. That means that every place has sacred sites, food growing or gathering sites, burials, medicinal gathering sites, and other important places. It also means that there is a tradition of knowledge of specific places and the species found there. By not highlighting Indigenous homelands and Indigenous stewardship in the study of environmental science, policy, and management, we are disregarding millennia of Indigenous scientific knowledge and practice, and perpetuating a colonial process that disregards Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous struggle, Indigenous survivance, and Indigenous leadership in land and water planning and stewardship.
Where do you hope the conversation among conservationists and tribal communities goes next? I would like to see more equitable collaborations between Indigenous people and conservation entities, with deferral to Native expertise, joint leadership or deferral to Native leadership, fair compensation to Indigenous partners, revenue sharing in grants and agreements, and collaborative planning.
What are you working on now?
I am working with a colleague on an article on tribal participation in the carbon market, with a focus on the experience of one Native nation in California that has really opened the door for increased Indigenous participation and leadership in cap-and-trade projects. While the carbon market may be seen negatively as a form of commodification of ecosystem services, tribes are creatively using cap-and-trade systems to achieve tribal goals, within a framework of protecting and reacquiring homelands. This is particularly important in California with the statewide mandatory cap-and-trade system, which includes the participation of two Native nations in California, and other nations in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Maine, and Arizona. I am also interested in other tribal-led applications of environmental policy, legal, and financial tools, such as tribes’ creative use of new market tax credits (NMTCs) to buy back traditional lands. While they are more often used for low-income housing projects, NMTCs have been used by at least one tribe in California to facilitate a land purchase. I also continue to be interested in Native-led conservation initiatives, especially Native land trusts, and use of conservation easements and land trust structures by tribes in California and beyond.
I also recently received a small Diversity Innovation grant to develop an area of teaching on the Indigenous Caribbean. The Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis has a unique hemispheric perspective, but there is currently no teaching on the Caribbean. My paternal family is from the Caribbean, and I have done some work on conservation of cultural heritage sites with Garifuna organizations in St. Vincent. I will be working with an incoming graduate student with interests in Indigenous and African relationships in the Caribbean to develop a course on the Indigenous Caribbean, with a focus on contemporary politics and land stewardship.
I also have a project with a senior graduate student in NAS working on the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) between the University of California (both the central Office of the President and individual campuses) and Native nations in California.
Finally, I am engaged in two regional collaborations with climate scientists throughout CA and the greater southwest. I hope to collaboratively develop research and implementation projects that foreground tribal collaboration and tribal leadership in climate change analysis, adaptation, and mitigation.
Encantado is a poetry collection which weaves a myriad community of individuals together through detailed windows into their lives. Inspired by the real and imagined stories around her, Mora brings us to the heart of what it means to be a chorus of voices together.
About her writing process, Mora says, “When I give an idea or scene or emotion quiet and time, a draft of a poem can emerge from a place inside. I’m both listening and pondering. All my grandparents were born in Mexico as was my dad. That fact is part of my inheritance, my wealth, but I write as a human ultimately to share with my fellow humans.”
Below is one of the poems and personalities in Pat Mora’s forthcoming collection. Both playful and profound, “Gilberto” examines themes of aging while capturing the nostalgia of a youthful past. A sense of reverence for the changes that passing time imparts on individuals envelops the poem, creating a space where resistance and acceptance beautifully coincide.
GILBERTO
Grace now, my scruffy canine compañeros.
We old dogs must show the way.
We savor mornings and day-old bread
in ways young pups don’t understand.
When I was a boy, I’d climb
at dawn to an arroyo
that tasted of mint,
water so clear and cold
it hurt my teeth, so sweet
I’d laugh out loud.
I was a mountain lion,
eyes red, body sleek, lean, agile,
poised to pounce,
gnaw impatiently on life.
Now my ankles and knees
teach me to taste my days,
slowly. I make pronouncements
only you heed, but
I still burn, shake my fists,
consoled by my own voice.
Pat Mora is an award-winning author of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. Her previous books of poetry include Agua Santa: Holy Water, Adobe Odes, and Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints. Among her awards are Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, Honorary Membership in the American Library Association, and she was a recipient and judge of a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mora is the founder of Children’s Day, Book Day, El día de los niños, El día de los libros. A former teacher, university administrator, museum director, and consultant, Mora is a popular speaker who promotes creativity, inclusivity, and bookjoy. She’s the mother of three adult children, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In the new volume Ten Thousand Years of Inequality archaeologists Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith, along with other leading archaeologists, provide analysis of ten millennia of wealth disparities in the ancient world. Today, they answer our questions about the nature and implications of wealth disparity in the distant past.
Why did you embark on this project?
Timothy A. Kohler
TK: I have a habit—not sure if it’s good or bad—of reading as widely as I can, including lots of things that are outside of archaeology. That’s brought me into contact with books like The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker (2006) and Ian Morris’ 2010 book Why the West Rules—For Now. Over the years I’ve also had interesting contacts with a number of economists, most of whom I met through the Santa Fe Institute: people like Sam Bowles, John Miller, and Brian Arthur. All this gave me motivation to study wealth inequality (and the wider problem of how wealth gets created). Then at some point I ran across Mike Smith’s 2014 publication with good ideas about how we can measure abstract quantities like wealth in the archaeological record, even without texts. That provided a method. When I want to understand a new measure I try applying it to a dataset set I know well, so I decided to see what would happen if I looked at wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient in the archaeological record of the Dolores Archaeological Project, which I was lucky enough to be involved in from 1979–1985. The result was a short report in Current Anthropology in 2016. By that point Mike and I started collaborating.
Michael E. Smith
MS: I have been interested for a long time in the nature of social inequality in ancient cities and state-level societies. This goes back to my undergraduate senior honors thesis, which asked the question of whether houses of different wealth or status levels at Teotihuacan could be distinguished on the basis of their artifacts. Most of the fieldwork throughout my career has been addressed—at least in part—at issues of wealth variation within and between Aztec settlements. I experimented with using the Gini coefficient in a 1992 publication, and then let it drop for a while. In 2012 I revisited my earlier work and added some new cases and published a paper (2014) on wealth inequality at Aztec sites (the paper Tim mentions). Then in about 2013 Tim and I had a short meeting with Sam Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute. Sam is a leading economist on the issue of social inequality in society today. He was branching out to study inequality in the past, using the Gini coefficient, and he encouraged Tim and me to do more work on the topic. We decided to see who else was working along these lines, and we organized a symposium at the 2016 SAA meetings on ancient inequality. That led to an advanced seminar at the Amerind Foundation, which was the basis of our book.
When we say “ancient wealth,” what do we mean?
MS: “Wealth” refers to valuable resources, both the possession of such resources and access to them. Today inequality is measured in money: both income and total wealth. Most ancient societies did not have money (or if they did, we have little information on the wealth of most individuals), but a variety of material remains do reflect the wealth of individual households. Of the various such remains (e.g., portable artifacts, burial goods), the strongest measure of household wealth is the size of the house.
TK: We’ve both been influenced by an important series of papers (with a large number of co-authors) that came out in Current Anthropology in 2010 on “Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies.” These papers identified three main types of wealth: embodied (for example, number of offspring), relational (for example, number of trade partners or allies), and material (for example, acres of fields, size of herds). One reason we settled on house size as our preferred measure (other than the fact that it can be measured for many sites) is that it seems to integrate aspects of all these dimensions.
How do archaeologists describe and measure who is wealthy and who is not?
TK: Over the years archaeologists have tried a number of different measures. Some of these (for example, the costs embedded in the materials found in the house or in its associated trash) probably work fairly well but most of them are also subject to various “formation processes.” For example, some houses get cleaned out before they are abandoned, whereas others are accidentally burned with all their materials inside. In some sites, it is straightforward to associate extramural trash with a specific house, in others it is nearly impossible. One reason we settled on house size is that it relatively immune to such confounding factors.
MS: In order to be consistent in comparing the wealth measures from different regions and time periods, we mostly limited our consideration to the sizes of houses. Several chapter authors touched on other measures of wealth at their sites, but all contributed house size measurements. Our basic assumption (borne out by a number of ethnographies) is that wealthier people live in larger houses. While this is not an absolute statement, it does work well in many cases where we know the house sizes and have independent measures of wealth. This justifies our reliance on house size.
Since publication, your book has received a lot of notice, including an article for the public in Smithsonian Magazine. Why do you think this concept is so interesting to people right now?
MS: Wealth inequality is hot topic today, both among economists and other social sciences, and by the press and the public. The level of wealth concentration in the U.S. is now much higher than it has ever been in the past. A variety of social problems seem to flow from pronounced wealth inequality in a society. The fact that we were able to present data in inequality in the past – using a measure that other scholars understand and use all the time (the Gini coefficient) – helps make our work more attractive to a wider audience.
TK: I think there’s a widespread feeling, at least in the U.S., that even though unemployment has been declining for a number of years, most people aren’t making the same sort of economic progress that was widespread from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is also widely understood that Gini indices computed on total wealth were also a lot lower (indicating more equitable distribution) than now. It’s easy enough to put these two facts together. That naturally makes people interested in what causes concentration of wealth, and whether there have long-term trends that help us understand its consequences.
What are you working on now?
TK: The data we published in the book are a nice start, but there are many regions (most of Africa and all of South America, for example) that were not represented. I’m working with a group (that includes Mike) to start a project to fill in these data gaps, and also to make more progress on the causes of changes in wealth concentration in different regions, and through time.
MS: In addition to participating in Tim’s project that continues our work on ancient inequality, I am working on Teotihuacan. I recently took over as Director of the ASU Teotihuacan Archaeological Laboratory, and I am completing some of the unfinished analyses, of the influential Teotihuacan Mapping Project. I am also writing a book on early cities that will be called something like “Urban Life in the Distant Past: Archaeology and Comparative Urbanism,” and I am involved with several interdisciplinary research projects on cities.
Timothy A. Kohler is Regents professor of anthropology at Washington State University. His most recent book, edited with Mark D. Varien, is Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology.
Michael E. Smith is a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University. His latest book is the prize-winning At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life.
In Discovering Pluto historian William Sheehan along with his co-writer Dale P. Cruikshank uncover the behind-the-scenes history of the enigmatic and much discussed icy orb at the edge of our solar system. Today, William answers our questions about the outer Solar System.
William Sheehan and Alan Stern at Lowell Observatory, June 2018
Why do you think Pluto has so captured the public imagination since it was first identified by Clyde Tombaugh in the 1930s?
From times immemorial, there were five planets—wanderers—tracing movements across the starry background of the night sky. After the Copernican revolution, the Earth of course became a planet, like the others traveling around the Sun, but still Saturn marked the outer boundary of the Solar System, and the stars were at unfathomable distances beyond. This ancient picture changed in 1781, when William Herschel discovered Uranus. Suddenly the scale of the Solar System had doubled, and within a few short years other astronomers began to discover new planets, as they were then called; these were the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Inspired either by the discovery of Uranus itself or by the first asteroids, Keats wrote the stirring lines,
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.”
Uranus began after a few years to wander inexplicably off course, and this led two mathematical investigators—John Couch Adams in England and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier in France—to use the discrepancies in its movements to calculate the position of an unseen planet beyond—Neptune—whose optical discovery was made on the basis of these calculations in Berlin in September 1846. This was seen at the time as the greatest achievement of Newtonian celestial mechanics—the discovery of a planet, “with the stroke of a pen.” Adams and Le Verrier were duly enshrined in the pantheon of astronomical greats. Few developments in astronomy were awarded greater accolades than this, literal discovery of a new world.
Le Verrier himself thought that there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and even gave it a name, Vulcan; it does not exist, and never did—the movements for which its existence was invoked were explained by Einstein on the basis of the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. However, Uranus continued, apparently, to be wandering off course, even after Neptune was entered into the equations. Several astronomers, of whom Percival Lowell was the most celebrated, developed an elaborate program to track down another putative planet—Planet X—which might be indicating its presence as Neptune had done for Adams and Le Verrier. Lowell was an extraordinarily colorful and interesting figure, who is best remembered for founding the Southwest’s (and Arizona’s) first major observatory in Flagstaff, and for his exciting and provocative theories about the canals of Mars, which won over the general public (and inspired science fiction writers like Wells and Burroughs) but were harshly criticized by many professional astronomers. Lowell’s motivations in searching (secretively for the most part) for “X” were complex, and included the hope that recapitulating the great feat of Adams and Le Verrier would restore his prestige in the eyes of other astronomers. Unfortunately, Planet X was undiscovered when he died in November 1916.
The story of how later the search was resurrected at his observatory, how a self-taught farm boy from Kansas (Clyde Tombaugh) was hired to carry out the mind-numbing and backbreaking work of searching for it on photographic plates exposed in all weather under the stars, and how Clyde found a planet that at first was hailed as the incarnation of the icy planet of Percival’s dreams in 1930 provided the perfect coda to the story of frustrated ambition redeemed by faith and hard work. The planet was also the first discovered by an American, and came just as the Great Depression—and the rise of Fascism in Europe—were getting underway, so that the world, and Americans in particular, were in need of “good news.” In the end, Pluto proved to be a most peculiar planet, and was shown—rather definitively by Dale Cruikshank and David Morrison who in 1976 discovered the presence of methane ice on the surface—to be smaller than the Earth’s moon, and has now been seen as a kind of dual object—planetary in some ways, including rotundity and having an active (if extraordinarily odd) geology, but also the largest of the Kuiper Belt Objects which roam the outer Solar System.
What was the most surprising thing you uncovered during your research for Discovering Pluto?
The most surprising thing was what the New Horizons probe found when it passed by Pluto in July 2015. Most people, including me, had probably expected a cold and inert world, not perhaps unlike that the celebrated British astronomy writer Patrick Moore had invoked in 1955, “Beyond all doubt, Pluto is the loneliest and most isolated world in the Solar System—cut off from its fellows, plunged in everlasting dusk, silent, barren, and touched with the chill of death.” Far from it; instead, areas of Pluto show evidence of quite recent geological activity, with changing “land” forms that consist of exotic ices—including recently, methane ice dunes in Sputnik Planitia. It is also exciting to see—on an actual body in the Solar System—examples of the behavior of these ices that has already been elucidated in the laboratory.
You have written many books about planetary science, including Planet Mars. What keeps you coming back to writing these histories?
I have been fortunate in having been born just before Sputnik went into orbit around the Earth, and being consciously aware as the first spacecraft set out for the Moon and planets. I acquired my first small telescope in the mid-1960s, at a time when visual observations by amateur astronomers were still often better than the most detailed photographs by professional astronomers at the great observatories, and when it still seemed that amateurs might contribute usefully to their study. When I started out, Mariner 4 had not yet passed by Mars (July 1965, fifty years to the day before New Horizons made its Pluto flyby!), and it was still possible—just—to believe in Percival Lowell’s canals of Mars! Mariner 4—which showed there were craters on Mars—brought what seemed at the time to be a Great Disillusionment; almost like finding out (and I was at that age, just ten or so) that Santa Claus didn’t exist.
Robert Burnham, Jr, who wrote the Celestial Handbook series, and used the Pluto telescope for the proper motion study at Lowell Observatory in the 1960s, was a mentor, and encouraged me to look at Comet Ikeya-Seki in October 1965—it remains the most spectacular comet I have ever seen. This shows how important an interest of a professional can be in encouraging a young person. After a number of years, I was invited (in the summer of 1982) to Lowell as a guest investigator with a somewhat tentative project of trying to understand how observers like Lowell could have seen canals on Mars when obviously there are no canals. Art Hoag was the director then, and Bill Hoyt, who had written the landmark book Lowell and Mars published by University of Arizona Press, was in-residence historian. While there—and coming into contact with the observing books of Lowell and his associates, and seeing how their visions of canals gradually unfolded and became elaborated over time—and also observing directly through the Clark telescope they had used, I had a flash of insight—I was in the NAU library at the time; I remember it as if it were yesterday–that the key aspect no one had recognized was that because of fluctuating seeing the canals were seen only in brief intervals of a fraction of a second or so. All the observers of the canals—including Clyde Tombaugh, who graciously corresponded with me on his experiences—described this. Thus the phenomena of the canals could be related to experimental psychology. I had always been drawn to interdisciplinary work—this has become the fashion now but at the time represented an aspiration that was more honored in the breach than the observance, simply because the various disciplines had become so developed and complex that it was difficult for anyone to master them at the same time. In any case, I came away from Lowell with the thesis of a book—Planets and Perception—which I drafted during the summer of 1983, while living in a small town in southern Minnesota, just across from the Iowa border, with no resources more than those I brought with me and the Carnegie library with a six-foot shelf of books on astronomy, physics, and math. In retrospect, I think I was crazy to tackle such an ambitious project more or less alone and unaided; had I been in a graduate program, I might have worked for ten years on it, but I finished the draft in several months and then—put it away in a desk drawer as I began my medical studies.
Eventually, I got around to submitting it—and did so only to one publisher, the University of Arizona Press. Though they quailed a bit at the cross-disciplinary nature of the thing—and had to send it out to three academic reviewers, two astronomers and one psychologist!—they graciously accepted it. It was published thirty years ago in November, and I didn’t know what to expect. I was in my internship then. In January, I got a good review from Richard Baum in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, which I remember reading in the on-call room, and thought that I was lucky to get that. By early May, I was at morning rounds on the psych service the VA in Minneapolis; the attending physician, Charlie Dean, who subscribed to Nature, rather casually congratulated me on the review the book had received in Nature by the renowned historian of science, Albert Van Helden. I was over the Moon. Of course, the book had many faults which I see only too clearly now—how could it not?—but proved to be quite seminal in its small way, and I will always be grateful to the University of Arizona Press for taking a chance with an unknown scholar and a very experimental piece of work and believing in it.
But to get back to your question, this book has defined my lifelong career interest—and until recently, when I retired, I have been both a practicing psychiatrist, interested in the brain and the way we “know,” and a historian of astronomy—and have found the history of Solar System studies during this period of time to be perhaps the most important thing we as a species have done. It has been our Parthenon, our Cathedrals. Obviously there are a lot of writers who understand this, and have devoted themselves to the documentation of this wonderful era, including many of the scientists who have been in the forefront of research (like Dale Cruikshank, my co-author of Discovering Pluto). But I think my background in psychiatry has given me a somewhat unique perspective on the human angle of this story, and that story—the exploration of the Solar System—is, after all, passionately and irreducibly a human story, whose grandeur and magnificence far exceeds the explorations (and too often bloody) conquests of previous eras. It collectively represents some of the best aspects of human nature, Something, I would add, that we desperately need to affirm and reaffirm at the present time, when it is too easy to be disillusioned about our species in light of some of its more unsavory aspects. These are things that keep drawing me back to this subject.
With the New Horizons space probe back in action after a 6-month break, what do you think will be the next chapter in Pluto’s history?
We are looking forward to New Horizons’ close approach to another KBO, MU69, which most of us expect to show only an ancient battered landscape. But as with Pluto, we are foolish not to expect to be pleasantly surprised, and perhaps we will discover fresh patches of surface exposed by a recent collision with another KBO, in which case we may have an opportunity to see deeper into the interior where so much of the early history of the Solar System lies hidden.
What are you working on now?
I have been working on a series of books on each of the planets for Reaktion Press in Great Britain—so far I have finished Jupiter and Mercury, and am on to Saturn. I am also working on a book on Mars with Jim Bell for the University of Arizona Press, who is the PI on the camera system for the 2020 Mars rover (and sample return mission). As with the Pluto book written with Dale, I will be covering mostly the historical backgrounds, in this case how we came to know Mars (including our long tendency to see it as the image of the Earth, or even of Arizona!), while Jim will take over the torch and bring to it his unrivaled knowledge of the spacecraft era. I always prefer, by the way, if possible, to work in collaboration, as it not only provides an opportunity for me to greatly extend the range of my own knowledge but also is as much more enjoyable for the shared companionship.
William Sheehan is a historian of astronomy and psychiatrist. His many books include Planets and Perception, Worlds in the Sky, and The Planet Mars, also published by the University of Arizona Press. Asteroid No. 16037 was named in his honor.
Born in Sonora, Mexico, Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga is a scholar of Mexican and Chicana/o Indigenous literature and culture. He has a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California Los Angeles. His book Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity , published in March, is the first book-length study of the representation of the Yaqui nation in literature. Last month Ariel sat down with Ed Battistella and the blog Literary Ashland for a Q & A about his work:
Ed Battistella: Congratulations on your book. Can you tell our readers a bit about it? What fascinates you about Yoeme Identity and the trope of the Yaqui warrior?
Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga: Thank you Ed. Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity is a study of the representation of the Yoeme (or Yaqui) indigenous nation in Mexican and Chicana/o (Mexican American) literatures. In it, I study Native depictions with an emphasis on Yaqui history and culture. Until now, there has not been a book length study on this community’s representation in literature, despite their historical and political importance in Mexico, and their presence in the United States. Yaqui Indigeneity is also unique in that it looks to Yoeme history, cosmology, and traditional ceremonies (oral tradition known as etehoi and dance) as a basis for its literary analysis. Finally, it identifies a group of authors that I call Chicana/o-Yaqui writers, who are the sons and daughters of the Yoeme diaspora, often a direct result of… see the complete Q & A.
In her dazzling new collection Bright Raft in the Afterweather, Jennifer Elise Foerster confronts humanity’s dangerous ecological imbalance, immersing readers in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. She recently answered five questions from her editor Scott De Herrera about her work:
Photo Courtesy Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda
A number of recurring figures from your previous work continue to inhabit the poems throughout this collection. How do their journeys compare to yours as a writer?
I appreciate that you ask about the journeys of these figures, as to me they are quite their own figures. Sometimes their journeys are a silhouette of mine; other times they diverge into places I can’t see. Magdalena appeared under many guises in the first book – the woman in the blue dress by the gas station, a reflection of myself in the mirror, birds . . . I’m not sure where she is now, still hovering in mirages, I think. She is what is almost visible. Hoktvlwv was present in the first book, but I didn’t meet her until I reached the coastline, when I moved to San Francisco from New Mexico in 2005. The second book developed from that edge of the continent, even though I wrote it while living in Colorado over the past three years. The poems and figures usually form themselves after I have encountered them—they are like the afterweather, I suppose, of a journey.
You employ a vocabulary and diction that reveals an intimate knowledge of science and the environment. In what ways did this inform your use of imagery as you rendered the worlds occupied by each character?
I wish I had a clearer knowledge of science and the environment—this is one of my goals, in fact. I’d like to take some classes in geology, astronomy, physics, and ecology. I feel my sense about the environment is only intuitive, and there is so much to learn. The imagery of these poems arrived out of my sense of the environment. If I were a painter, I would paint natural landscapes, atmospheres . . . I’m just not as compelled by the visible world of human-made things, including how we appear as people. I think this translates into why I write what I write. The characters of the poems are suffused by their ecologies and energy systems, including those systems we can’t see.
One of the issues you confront is that of ecological imbalance and the health of the planet. How can poetry contribute to the broader discussion surrounding climate change and humanity’s impact on the Earth?
This is something I think about all the time. I am haunted by the worry that poetry is not, right now, effective enough. This may be a version of my own sense of inadequacy in effecting broader healing. But I do deeply believe that poetry has the potential to transform us if we embrace it in our society as a way of seeing and comprehending. The poem can innovate language to expand the possibility of comprehension, to reorganize the perception of the known and imaginary. Poetry it is, I believe, the only word-based language that can transform us in this way, that can reveal the invisible landscapes, histories, and stories that we’ve forgotten, that we need to remember in order to continue. When I say “transform” I’m talking about healing, which naturally involves ecological balance. Despite my worries, I am still writing poetry, and will continue to, because I believe in its possibility. Poetry is especially needed in this country, which has written over and attempted the erasures of the continent’s long-standing dynamic cultures, peoples, and ecosystems. We must insist on poetry as part of our conversations and educational systems. I don’t know the most effective way to do it, but this is the work I’m committed to.
Can you tell us the story behind the visual “word hurricanes” at the opening of each section?
These four visual pieces (I like that you call them “word hurricanes!”) are from a book I made called “Of.” About two years ago I reviewed all of my unpublished poems (many of which became poems in this book), and realized I had a concerning habit. I counted hundreds of “of” constructions through the poems! To break this habit, I thought I’d exhaust it, so I made up a method of reorganizing all of these constructions, and used Excel, a printer/scanner, and scissors to make a book of these “hurricanes.” I have only an original version of this book – since I made each page manually there isn’t any digital evidence of its process. Preserving a few of these pieces in Bright Raft felt like a way to acknowledge the book’s swirling origins. Also, the pieces feel like weather—the way words transmute in our processing of patterns.
What topics or trends in literature excite you the most as a poet?
I’m excited about cross-genre work coming out, especially the poem-essay.
Jennifer Elise Foerster is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, received her MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Foerster is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Foerster is the author of one previous book of poems, Leaving Tulsa.
February 15, 2018
In his new collection The Real Horse: Poems, Farid Matuk offers a thought provoking collection about the meanings of self and citizen. He recently answered five questions from his editor Scott De Herrera about his work:
What inspired you to write this work?
There’s no such thing as a good man, or a good American. In this work I at least crystalized that for myself, and tried to situate that as a ground floor from which to reach, in future works, toward goodness as such, a non-moralistic force I very much believe in.
How does your upbringing as an immigrant influence your approach to poetry?
I’m not only an immigrant but I’m also from long lines of immigrants, some who came from Syria to the highlands of Peru to California, and from others who came from the Aymara people of the Andean altiplano, surviving and changing through the Incan and Spanish conquests and subsequent mestizaje, and who recently migrated down to the urban capital of Lima. Those layers of displacement have left me not with a rich intersection of cultural and linguistic heritages but with a shallowness. That’s okay, because I still have language, body, and spirit. I try to make that intersection my home in art.
What value do you see in poetry as a form of expression over other creative formats?
I’m with the poet Alice Notley, who wrote in her poem “I, the People,”: “And we are the masters/ of hearing & saying/ at the double edge of body &/ breath.” I walk away from her word “masters,” though, mostly because I believe that when we do our work at the “double edge of body &/ breath” we don’t own or control anything but instead make ourselves available and porous to ghosts, landscapes, and to those others bearing their “double edges” among us.
What is the biggest challenge you see today for poets?
We’re a varied lot, and so are our challenges. Maybe the perennial and shared challenge is to stay close on the heels of our betters (across all genre and media) so as to deepen into the particulars of our own questions and of our own art. As for “today,” social media helps by creating access, visibility, and community for folks kept out by old systems, and social media hurts when it distracts us with our own ubiquity and keeps us from asking, Access to what?
What are you working on now?
I have a couple of manuscripts drafted out, but I’m searching for new angles of approach so I can get back into them. One is a book-length verse project and the other is a hybrid prose and verse work of scholarship, or of reading. While I search for ways to enliven those manuscripts, I’m helping out with some translations from Spanish of the outsider Peruvian poetry group, Kloaka, and I’m reading a draft of a text that chronicles Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar’s journey accompanying Syrian refugees across the Mediterranean and into Europe. Hopefully, I can be useful to Khaled as he works out how to use that text in future installations and multi-media works. More broadly, I’m reading works written by folks outside the U.S.A., trying to hack a way out of our big bad provincialism.
Born in Peru to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, Farid Matuk immigrated to California at the age of six and was undocumented until the age of thirteen. The recipient of an Alumni New Works grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Matuk is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona.
Oscar J. Martínez’s forthcoming book Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City provides a rich and nuanced portrait of a complex border city. He will be a featured author at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books, discussing Juárez’s history as a Spanish frontier outpost and the city’s current border issues. Before the festival, we sat down with him to discuss his inspiration:
You spent some of your childhood in Ciudad Juárez. Were you aware of the dichotomy between El Paso and Juárez when you were growing up?
Crossing the border frequently made me highly aware of the differences in the levels of development of the two cities. I was struck by the presence of high‐rise buildings in El Paso and their complete absence in Juárez, the differing traffic patterns in the two cities, and the ubiquitous poor colonias in Juárez versus the sprawling middle-class neighborhoods in El Paso.
What sparked your interest in border studies and history and inspired you to study and write about it?
While in graduate school, I did research on Mexican cross‐border migration patterns. This made me aware of the importance of border cities as gateways to the United States. But I learned that migration was only one aspect of the all-important relationship between the Mexican border cities and the neighboring country. There were larger issues to consider, especially economic, social, and cultural linkages. By then I knew that the best way to understand the nature of cities, regions, or countries is through a historical lens.
How has Juárez changed in the forty years since your previous book on the city, Border Boom Town?
Several dramatic changes took place in Juárez during the last four decades. The local population exploded as a result of a great expansion of the export‐oriented assembly manufacturing industry (maquiladoras), the city became a major drug trafficking center and a headquarters for a prominent drug cartel, and drug related crime skyrocketed, making Juárez one of the world’s most dangerous urban centers. The violence destroyed the city’s famed tourist industry and dependence on the United States deepened considerably.
What effects do you foresee the current administration and proposed border wall may have on the city?
The prospect that the Trump administration may terminate NAFTA or change it significantly has created great concern and uncertainty in Juárez because the city is extremely dependent on the U.S. economy. Trump’s “wall” is not much of a concern because El Paso is already walled off from Juárez.
What do you hope readers will take away from your new book?
My hope is that readers will develop a greater understanding of the unique nature of the U.S.‐Mexico border region, the monumental challenges faced by Mexican border cities, and the role that the U.S. economy has played in shaping the destiny of communities like Juárez.
Oscar J. Martínez is a Regents’ Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He has authored and edited numerous books and many articles, book chapters, and reviews.
In just a few short months, Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s latest mystery Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch hits bookstores. The fourth book in the Sadie Walela Mystery Series draws Sadie deeper and deeper into danger. When Angus Clyborn’s Buffalo Ranch opens in Cherokee Country, murder, thievery, and a missing white buffalo calf take Sadie Walela and her wolfdog on a dangerous and wild ride.
In anticipation of the book’s release, we were excited to chat with Sara about what drew her to mystery novels and to get her thoughts on the lack of Native American representation in mystery writing.
What advice would you give any aspiring mystery novel writers?
To read, first, and then write, write, write, with a passion. Write what you’d like to read. Don’t try to copy or emulate other writers; create your own voice and tell your own stories. Chances are, if you like what you write, other people will, too.
What drew you to writing mystery novels?
I spent twenty‐one years working in the banking business and had very little time for reading. But when I discovered Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, that all changed. I loved how he wrote mysteries and wove in Navajo and Hopi culture. Even though Tony was non‐Indian, he wrote with such accuracy and respect for Indians that the Navajo Nation gave him their blessing. That’s when I decided I wanted to write mysteries about my people – the Cherokee.
Why do you think there is so little Native American representation in mystery writing?
I think it is simply a case of numbers. Native Americans, who once totally populated this country, have sadly been reduced to about two percent of the population. And, while there are many Native authors, they write in diverse categories from fiction and non‐fiction, both current and historical, to screenplays and poetry. When you boil it down, there’s only a few of us writing mysteries.
You draw upon your upbringing in Oklahoma for your setting. What are the differences between the Cherokee Nation you grew up in and the one you describe in your novels?
It is very much the same. I like to write in a current day setting rather than historical, because I want to dispel some of the myths of what life is like in the Cherokee Nation today. We do not live in teepees. Never did, never will. Cherokees are ranchers, police officers, lawyers, small‐business owners, bankers, business people, writers, and anything else you can think of. I try to describe a real life setting in my books.
Which of your characters do you identify with the most?
Probably Sadie. We both think we can save the world, are quick to speak our mind, and hand out our own kind of justice. Sadie is a good and honest person, and I’d like to think I am, too, even though I’m quick to point out that Sadie is not me. I would be naïve to think most of the other characters I write about don’t have a sliver of my personality in there somewhere.
Is there more in store for Sadie Walela?
I hope so. I’m waiting for her to come to me in a dream and tell me what’s next. We’ll see.
What book are you currently reading?
I recently read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann and Anne Hillerman’s Song of the Lion. I’m currently reading Winter’s Child by Margaret Coel. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil de Grasse Tyson is next on my list to read.
Cover photo: The American Bison by Adam Cocke
For Authors
The University of Arizona Press publishes the work of leading scholars from around the globe. Learn more about submitting a proposal, preparing your final manuscript, and publication.
The University of Arizona Press is proud to share our books with readers, booksellers, media, librarians, scholars, and instructors. Join our email Newsletter. Request reprint licenses, information on subsidiary rights and translations, accessibility files, review copies, and desk and exam copies.
Support a premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works. We are committed to sharing past, present, and future works that reflect the special strengths of the University of Arizona and support its land-grant mission.
The University of Arizona Press
What was the most surprising thing you uncovered during your research for Discovering Pluto?
Born in Sonora, Mexico, Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga is a scholar of Mexican and Chicana/o Indigenous literature and culture. He has a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California Los Angeles. His book 
What inspired you to write this work?
You spent some of your childhood in Ciudad Juárez. Were you aware of the dichotomy between El Paso and Juárez when you were growing up?
What advice would you give any aspiring mystery novel writers?