dáanzho, ha’shi
hello, greetings
Margo Tamez
I’m a poet, herstorian, deaf and hard-of-hearing (since childhood), and Indigenous justice advocate alongside gochish kółáńlíná kótsoi Ndé (lightning big river big water Ndé Dene People). I’m tribally enrolled Lipan Apache Band of Texas, who are of the greater Dene Nation currently trifurcated by the Canada-US and US-Mexico settler borders.
In centering Ndé body-spirit-spatial memory, and lenses of dispossession and belonging, my work highlights and amplifies Ndé perspectives, values, herstory (matrilineal & matriarchal experience-based knowledge systems), oral tradition, philosophy, poetry, oral tradition, community collections, memory and commemorative practices.
My work infuses Ndé peoples’ perspectives of memory, time, place, and space, the present and the future, through forms I continue to push in order to illuminate Ndé knowing, and my understanding and interaction with Ndé experience and existence.
“[On Raven Eye]—“what it is not is a simplistic black-and-white collection of political poetry. There are not only no simple answers here, there are no simple poems. And Tamez is capable of filling almost any page with some tremendous moments of writing even when what is being depicted is itself utterly horrific. It’s an exceptionally complex project & Tamez shows herself to be completely up to the task. [...] It doesn’t really matter what genre she chooses to employ – the lightning bolt energy is going to go right through you.”
Father | Genocide
“Father | Genocide (Turtle Point Press, 2021) reconstructs a history of my father’s struggle to “be a man” under American domination, and amplifyies Ndé men's dehumanization and resistances in the settlers’ Americanization and Texanification processes. It is impossible to situate my father in Ndé territory in the 20th c. without unpacking the brutal spatial, psycho-social, and spiritual amputation of Ndé peoples from unceded homelands, the American history writing tradition that performs this erasure, and why these interlock and are key to reckoning with Ndé peoples' current state of abjection under American domination, denial and genocide disavowal.
I trace the settler erasures, denialism, and genocide that my father and preceding generations experienced and I reclaim stolen territory in the felt and known history of settler-colonial Texas through Ndé Dene place, memory, poetics and narrative resistance.”
