ᏅᏩᏙᎯᏯᏓ. Nvwadohiyada. What is peace, and what does it have to do with poetry? With words, languages, stories? What does it have to do with all of this in Indigenous ways? In ways we’re now prompting machines—machines we made—to produce?
We are sitting at the precipice of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that drove so-called Independence Day, Fourth of July, fireworks, patriotism, and parades. A document where Indigenous People are called “merciless Indian savages.” That language remains to this day; it was never amended or redacted. And it will be celebrated in 17 months along with what is sure to be unprecedented hoopla, pomp, and unfortunate circumstance. Not everyone is looking forward to this event. Not all of us have been enjoying the last 250 years of dogged colonization of absolutely everything, including our languages, literature, and poetry.
The first tribe on Turtle Island (fka the United States) to have a written form of speech was the Aniyunwiya, otherwise known as “Cherokees.” In 1821, Sequoyah (fka George Guess, Gist) of the Cherokee Nation created Tsalagi syllabary—just 45 years after the Declaration was signed. The colonizers would have called him illiterate. However, when he saw the books and papers of the white “settlers,” he immediately recognized their importance. He called them “talking leaves” and, though the tribe initially mocked his attempts and some dubbed his work witchcraft, an indicator of the depths of colonization even at that time, he persisted.
Six months after the tribe adopted the syllabary, 25 percent of the Cherokee Nation could read and write. Less than three years later, the Cherokee Nation was three times more literate than our white neighbors. Like all Indigenous People of Turtle Island, the Cherokees were, and are, oral traditionalists. Storytellers. However, an argument can be made that oral tradition might be easier to strip and destroy than the written word. Destroy a people’s language and you destroy their culture, history, traditions, and identity. Yes, you can burn books, but you can’t burn all of them. But have you ever tried burning a language? How about a People?
There are many avenues to genocide and assimilation. When Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced into so-called Indian residential schools, not allowing the youngest generations to speak their language was a given. Hair was cut and clothes were replaced, but abusing and murdering children when they were caught speaking their language was perhaps the most effective form of quick and complete assimilation. “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
What is peace, and what does it have to do with poetry, language, stories? Poetry, like Indigeneity, is in our blood. Poetry can be a balm and pathway to peace because it’s already inside us. The moment we’re born, we’re drawn to song, to rhythm, to rhyme. We learn languages, our mother tongues as well as foreign ones, forced upon us or not, in this manner. The ABCs. Dr. Seuss. Indigenous stories often have a cyclical, repetitive nature not just because we inherently like it, humans all like patterns and recognition, but because that makes it easier to remember. Easier to pass on. And that’s what poetry is supposed to do, it’s what we’re supposed to do: pass it on.
What are we passing on now? Many Indigenous People are learning or re-learning our languages. In some cases, languages have been lost forever. For example, the languages of the Tillamook, Tunica, and Yanuk People were declared extinct in the twentieth century. Language learning is being incentivized by some tribes like the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) where there is a paid apprenticeship program to answer the call to “revitalize Indigenous languages!” There is hope, and hope is peace’s buoy.
Some Indigenous scholars, such as Michael Running Wolf (Lakota, Cheyenne, Blackfeet) are using artificial intelligence (AI) in an attempt to preserve and share their languages. Running Wolf, a former Amazon Alexa engineer and co-founder of Lakota AI camp, calls AI a tool, but is quick to point out that AI alone won’t save Indigenous languages. But what exactly are we feeding AI when we’re inputting our languages, our stories, our words, ourselves? What will come out the other side?
On November 18, 2024, an article in The Guardian covered a study from the University of Pittsburgh that revealed that non-expert poetry readers prefer “poetry” “written” by AI over canonical works by the likes of Sylvia Plath, George Eliot, and Shakespeare. There were flaws in the study—the most recent poet died 60 years ago and they were all white—but we cannot ignore its revelations. Increasingly, people are preferring non-human poetry over poetry from the heart. With heart. As someone who comes from a long line of people who have been considered “non-human” for well over a semi-quincentennial, this is more than alarming.
Let me tell you a story, an old Cherokee story about two wolves fighting inside each of us. One is all white and light, joy, kindness, and goodness. The other is dark and dangerous, evil, greedy, and spiteful. A wise Cherokee grandfather tells his grandchild about these wolves, to which the child asks, “Which one wins?” The grandfather answers, after a stoic pause, “The wolf you feed.”
Except this isn’t a Cherokee story. It was devised and used as a tool for missionary conversion in the mid-late twentieth century. The “old Cherokee story” angle just puts a nice mystical spin to it. A year ago, when I asked AI about this, it didn’t know the story’s origin. Now it does. What will it “know”—what will it propagate—in another year? As we keep feeding the wolves, they keep growing fatter, hungrier, insatiable. And greed and peace never coexist.
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Jessica (Doe) Mehta, Ph.D. (Aniyunwiya/Cherokee Nation) is a 2024-2025 Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute.
