PENDLETON — The Pendleton Center for the Arts (PCA) brought poet and playwright Beth Piatote to its First Draft Writers series, a monthly event showcasing new and developing work from established authors.
Piatote, a professor of University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, was the featured guest for the series on June 18 to read poems from her most recent publication “Distant Water.” The collection’s title is the translation of the Nez Perce word ˀeteyékus, meaning “ocean.”
The First Draft Writers series, held on the third Thursday of each month, brings noted authors and poets to the Pendleton stage to share new work.
“ This book is a sort of a set of experiments in playing with language and in using Nez Perce language,” Piatote said to the crowd.
Piatote rooted her collection in the revitalization of language, noting that her aunt was the first person to speak the Nez Perce language to her during a visit to Pendleton.
“ My hope is to encourage other people to use all your languages and idioms and arts in your work, and I’m especially grateful to this land and to our language that comes from this land,” she said.
Languages are deeply rooted with the homeland, with every orientation of the language there is also an orientation of the self, she added.
“ The poems are experiments in showing how the language works, how it moves, how it sounds, how to use it, and also impressions of the feeling of what the word feels like,” Piatote said. “And then some of them are also just studies of a single word and how that word gives us a new way of being in the world.”
She said the reason the language has its vitality is because it lives through the body, bleeding into creativity and taking new forms as time passes and moving with the world.
“One of the reasons I’m encouraging people to use creativity in their language journey is to help them feel like they can play with the language and they can invent with the language. I think there’s so much pressure in situations of endangered languages that people are afraid to make mistakes, afraid to vary, make any variations from how people talked in the 1930’s, 40’s or 60’s or like their grandparents,” Piatote said. “This feeling that it’s just a minefield is because we care so much, I think it’s okay, we can trust that the language can, can play with it and we can trust ourselves and we can make mistakes and we can get corrected even publicly or whatever. It’s okay.”
Piatote described the revitalization of language as vibrations, revibrating throughout the land.
In addition to being an accomplished writer and poet, Piatote also spoke about her play “Antíkoni,” a retelling of Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Set in a museum of Indigenous belongings, the play follows a Nez Perce family navigating modern life while working to preserve tradition. The story mirrors the Greek tragedy’s themes of loss and betrayal while centering the preservation of Indigenous culture.
Piatote’s other works include “The Beadworkers” and the monograph Domestic Subjects. Her play “Antíkoni” premiered with Native Voices in Los Angeles in November 2024 and ran at the Vault Theater in Hillsboro from June 4 to June 21.
