Visual artists, dancers, and writers celebrate the creative pulse of indigenous languages that sustain their works in a night of performances that honor 2019 as UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages. Headlining the show is Aluqtiiq artist-choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, joined by Northern Chumash artist Sarah Biscarra Dilley; Afro-Indigenous poet Alan Pelaez-Lopez; Nez Perce writer and scholar Beth Piatote; and Santa Clara Pueblo member Patrick Naranjo, executive director ofUC Berkeley’s American Indian Graduate Program.

In many Indigenous communities, tʔɨnɨsmu, or language, provides a crucial resource in grounding knowledge and meaning within our own cultural context(s), holding immeasurable information, ranging from land management systems to poetics, material practices that are deeply tied to cultural continuance to place and placemaking. Centering tʔɨnɨsmu tiłhinktitʸu, the language of the people of tiłhini (commonly known as San Luis Obispo, CA), Sarah Biscarra Dilley will discuss the ways yakʔitʔɨnɨsmu grounds her own visual and written practice and remains central to her tribal community’s work, asserting creative, intellectual, and embodied sovereignty.

Alan Pelaez-Lopez will perform excerpts of their latest project, Libélulas/Chambalés, a choreopoem written in Spanglish that tells a story of settler-colonialism through the voice of an unnamed toddler, a medicine woman/grandma, and five dragonflies.

Beth Piatote will read from her forthcoming collection The Beadworkers: Stories and reflect on the relationship of beadwork, storytelling, and indigenous language in contemporary Native life.

Aluqtiiq artist-choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater will read from her book Slow Scrape, accompanied by video works and performance documentation.

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu.