Language, Land and Belonging

This volume takes up themes emergent from the 7th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) which invited participants to reflect on the United Nations Declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. In this refereed collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors use poetic inquiry to explore the importance of their ancestral languages and lands, and consider the Indigenous languages and peoples of the lands where they live.

Situated in diverse global contexts, poet-researchers examine the intersectionality of their languages, their lands, and their sense of belonging. They offer relational understandings of, and articulate obligations for, their environment and communities. Through stories of shared generational pain and renewal, each author brings the reader into their world of learning and growth. They do this through discourses of belonging and relational responsibilities that tie them to a place, a genealogy.

As a method of study that incorporates poetry into academic research, poetic inquiry is concerned with particularity, complexity, and transformations. Making research more visceral and evocative, it invites researchers to examine and engage with the knowledge they seek through a continual process of questioning, welcoming, and awareness. In this volume, poetic inquiry helps to honor languages and histories taken for granted; it allows looking back in order to reexamine, redefine, and make sense of the present and its shortcomings while reimagining a different future. This work seeks to reclaim, through poetic inquiry, wisdom of language, land, and belonging.