A longtime journalist and storyteller Kara Briggs is headed to the Chilkat Valley this week and will stop by The Bookstore to read selections from her new book, “Rivers in My Veins.”
Briggs, who lives on the Tulalip Reservation in Washington State, is a Sauk-Suiattle tribal citizen and descendant of the Yakama Nation, who uses documentary poetry to tell the stories of tribal heritage and the landscapes where she grew up and has spent most of her adult life.
She said she is looking forward to returning to the Chilkat Valley where she has spent a lot of time over the past 20 years visiting with her husband’s Lingít relatives, the Campbell family.
Briggs talked with editor Rashah McChesney about what informs and shapes her writing and what she hopes readers take away from it.
Rashah McChesney: Your poetry draws heavily from your tribal heritage and the landscapes of your homelands. How do you see those cultural and geographic threads translating into your experience of the Chilkat Valley?
Kara Briggs: This book, “Rivers in My Veins,” which is my debut book of poetry, is very much rooted in my tribes, which are the Sauk-Suiattle tribe … and also Yakama Nation I’m a descendant of and they very much tell the story of the rights of my tribes, the activities, the work, the advocacy of my tribal families. These poems, while very specific to the Salish Sea and the North Cascades and the Columbia River in Washington State, are very transferable to other tribal communities who are protecting their lands and waters. The stories, while they’re my stories, connect to other tribal people’s experiences across, you know, in the Chilkat Valley and across the country.
You grew up between Spokane and Spirit Lake in North Idaho. How did those places shape your early relationship with language and story? How did you get into expressing yourself in this way?
Both, both my parents were high school English teachers, and so books, literature and writing were always around me in my life. And I’ve been a poet … almost since I was able to write. My tribes are in central and western Washington, and so that’s where my adult life has largely been. I have a number of poems as one of my mental places where I go if I start to write is that Spokane area. Writing from the knowledge of those very particular glacial lakes, glacial deposits, historic glaciers that aren’t there anymore, but these very deep inland lakes are, and the power of that place.
As a citizen of the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe and a descendant of multiple Indigenous nations, how do you carry that layered heritage into your writing?
I talk about some of the less-told history of our region in these tribes, the deep life and life ways we had continuously in the mountains, over the mountain passes and connecting people closely on either side of the mountain range.
Here where we have many different tribes of different cultures, and even different languages, close together a lot of our history is about the descendancy among these tribes and what that means for maybe our cultural perspective (which), in my case, combined both sides of the Cascade Mountains. But at the same time, in doing that, what I say about my book is it contains a land claim for the Sauk-Suiattle tribe.
They bought a small acreage for their reservation, but it doesn’t represent the vast forest and mountainous lands that were the homelands of the Sauk-Suiattle tribe, that were lost in the treaty period, that were sort of illegally taken by timber barons, that continued then to be sold and resold out away, farther and farther from tribal ownership.
You blend journalism and poetry, drawing from real-world reporting and personal interviews. How do you navigate the line between fact and feeling in your poems?
What I say about the book is that, although it’s a book of poetry it is factually accurate and to the extent that someone could dispute a fact, what they would be saying is they have a different point of view of that fact than what I have. This book is journalistically checked for accuracy and the verse is adapted to whatever that accuracy needed it to be.
You write about land acknowledgments from a tribal author’s perspective.
That is correct, though I don’t come out in favor of land acknowledgements. I actually write about what it means to a tribal person, which is this very deep history that is layered in genocide. It’s layered in land loss and the violence associated and that to sort of add insult to injury. I’m not saying all land acknowledgements are bad but I’m just saying there are enough of them that are inaccurate or are wishful thinking that it’s frustrating. Or to be a professional, experienced, educated Native person listening to these and being expected to respond in a positive way to them.
How do you hope your poems reshape the way readers engage with those statements?
I don’t think my poetry cares. I really don’t. Mine is really using that idea to talk about other things: dams blocking salmon passage and the impact on tribal fishers, which was essentially what the Yakama Nation and others called the fish wars – which was the mid-20th century legal and law enforcement efforts of the State of Washington to stop tribal fishing, which ultimately failed.It’s that remembering of how we got here that we have tribal fishing on an altered river.
Poetry can be deeply personal, but it also lives in community. How have your poems changed after sharing them with tribal elders or readers in other Indigenous communities?
I have purposefully gone out to my tribal communities. I held my first street reading in the region. I was out at a public library near to my tribe the Sauk-Suiattle, and I had some of my relatives come to that. Even before the book went to print, I went out and talked with my close relatives about what was in the book, and they approved it. This is important. I had a reading in March at an antique store on the Yakama reservation in the mid-afternoon so my aunt and other elders could come. They affirmed the content, including the fishing rights poem that I had described earlier.
So I’ve purposefully taken the book to the tribal communities that are reflected most closely, deeply reflected in it, and I have heard just nothing but support for the book.
What do you hope readers will take away from “Rivers in My Veins”?
What I hope people will take away is that what their voice matters, what their story is, what their point of view is, it really matters. It’s something that I hope to inspire them to to share for themselves
For readers who may be new to poetry or hesitant to approach it, what advice would you give for engaging with your work?
I think a lot of this is just a story. It might be told in verse or it might be published in a book, but it’s story at a reading. It’s story that’s shared orally, like you might hear from someone who was a storyteller or something. I think poetry for people who haven’t been exposed to it, can be the entry point, can be the story.
Kara Briggs will be reading her poetry 5 p.m. Friday, May 23, at The Bookstore, in Haines.