PULLMAN – A poetry reading by Margo Tamez, instructor in WSU’s Women’s Studies Department, from her 2007 book, “Raven Eye,” will be at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, in Smith CUE 203.
It is part of the Department of English Visiting Writer Series.
Tamez, a Nde’ Lipan Apache, is an award-winning indigenous human rights activist and co-founder of the Lipan Apache Women Defense organization.
Her creative work addresses Nde’ peoples’ experiences in colonization and their tensions and struggles as they move toward autonomy from the United States and Mexico.
Her poetry interrogates the micro and macro perspectives of indigenous women in local and global struggles for personhood and human identification. Tamez’ work challenges and investigates two of the fundamental rationales for conquest and colonization of Nde’ territories “savagery” and “female inferiority.”
“Raven Eye” critically scours the contradictions and ironies in Native American and American justice movements, offering indigenous women’s and children’s views on globalization. It is a tense and edgy trip through the lives of a mother and her two children living on and off a reservation and under the grip of militarization along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The book is a contemporary warning of U.S.-style low-intensity conflict come home. Zone of war, National Guard soldiering, minutemen, neo-KKK, environmental justice warriors, extra-legal killing, indigenous migrant workers, environmental destruction, cow-town thrift stores, desert monsoons and tourist-trafficking are the threads Tamez weaves. So are the national borders that indigenous women traverse and subvert as an everyday form of resistance.
Tamez’ work explores why resurgent, trans-national indigenous movements critiquing states and violence are here to stay.
