Words like Beads: Elizabeth Woody’s and Beth Piatote’s Poetics of Abundance
Native American writers whose ancestral homelands include and are now claimed by Oregon are part of a long game of Indigenous defense of homelands and waterways. This essay addresses two of these writers—Elizabeth Woody and Beth Piatote—whose place-based writing activates memories of language, land,...
সংরক্ষণ করুন:
| প্রকাশিত: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| প্রধান লেখক: | |
| বিন্যাস: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| ভাষা: | Anglais |
| প্রকাশিত: |
European journal of American studies
2026
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| বিষয়গুলি: | |
| অনলাইন ব্যবহার করুন: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | Native American writers whose ancestral homelands include and are now claimed by Oregon are part of a long game of Indigenous defense of homelands and waterways. This essay addresses two of these writers—Elizabeth Woody and Beth Piatote—whose place-based writing activates memories of language, land, and literary antecedents. Members of Columbia River Basin Tribal Nations (Wasco; Warm Springs; Yakama; Nez Perce), Woody and Piatote remember homelands—and waters—that endure despite generations of removals, loss, and occupation. Through poetry, essays, and mixed-genre work, they foster ongoing relationships with ancestors, ancestral lands, and landmarks. They do so notably through beadwork, emblem of intergenerational continuance through cataclysmic change. Woody and Piatote find beadwork a powerful metaphor for their writing, and more broadly, for their respective aims to transmute losses into seemingly improbable forms of Indigenous abundance. In doing so, they refuse the terminal plot of absence allotted by US settler colonialism, instead imagining abundant futures beyond the settler present. |
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