Abigail Chabitnoy is an author and assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Chabitnoy is known for her poetry anthology “How to Dress a Fish,” discussing the forced assimilation of Indigenous children at boarding schools that occurred until the 1970s and exploring the exploitative policy of assimilation by focusing on her great grandfather, Michael, who was forcibly taken to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania as a child.
Chabitnoy, of Unangan and Sugpiaq descent, said she realized the potential significance of storytelling in Alaska Native narratives after studying Navajo oral tradition.
Chabitnoy, however, was initially conscious about potentially “trivializing” a culture that was different to her own. “But it also made me realize, ‘Oh, but there’s a whole … oral tradition of Alaska Native stories, and Alutiiq stories, and Unangan stories, and what are those stories?’” Chabitnoy said. “Because when you get the collection at Barnes and Noble, of Native American folklore stories, et cetera, you maybe have one or two from Alaska … I then became obsessed with looking up what oral traditions, what stories would I have heard? … What would I have been raised with, and what were my stories to play with?”
“Again, it was still a little different, because I felt like, growing up outside of that community, what I took from those stories was going to be different than someone who lived in that community [would have taken], but it was kind of a starting point,” Chabitnoy said.
Laura Furlan, an associate professor of English who teaches Native American literature, is currently working on her own project about Native and Indigenous writers, titled “The Archival Turn in Native Literature and Art,” which will devote a chapter to Chabitnoy’s book.
“[Chabitnoy’s] work reminds me that there are many ways into a book, that poetry is essential, that the past and present are intertwined in really important ways,” Furlan said. “As I’m writing about her first book, she’s helped me think about the limits of the archive, which she draws upon in that book, about how to make sense of family history … She’s also pushed me to learn more about Alaska Native history and geography, and to include Alaska Native writers in my classes, and I will be teaching her book for the first time in the spring.”
Although Chabitnoy felt that she was being labeled simply as an “Indigenous poet” at times, her end goal was always to discuss her family’s history and its nuances.
“For me, it was always really important to bring the narrative back to my own experience and my family’s experience, and things that we had direct knowledge of without making these broad, sweeping assumptions,” Chabitnoy said. “But part of what that meant, too, was reckoning with the fact that my great grandfather might not have had a terrible time at Carlisle.”
Although few records remain of Michael’s time at Carlisle, the lack of resources intrigued Chabitnoy, and heightened her interest in his situation.
“The institution as a whole [was] horrific, and what he lost in terms of being cut from that community and not being able to return, and what that loss may have perpetuated on our family [was] horrific,” Chabitnoy said.
“But … [my great-grandfather] was an athlete, and the athletes at Carlisle were treated better than other students because they were the … face of success and a healthy stock of students, and … he had just lost his family before he was sent [to Carlisle],” Chabitnoy continued. “So, there was a lot of his backstory that made it more complicated than just a single narrative of ‘Carlisle was horrible.’ It wasn’t all great, but it also was more nuanced for him too.”
Chabitnoy credits the ability of literature to “humanize” history when it is being discussed, especially in the context of discussing past atrocities that had been committed unto communities.
“I think the [Indigenous] literature, on the one hand, preserves the history, and spreads the history, but also, the history that the quote-unquote ‘victors’ would like to see silenced,” Chabitnoy said. “These are all things that matter to me as an Indigenous person, but I think we’re seeing … a lot of what happens when we forget history, when we stop listening to the narratives of people who lived in that history, and start to listen to the … more propaganda-driven narratives, and when we look at those narratives as … banners, as opposed to looking at the individual narratives and the individual stories, it makes it a lot easier for misinformation to spread.”
Although Chabitnoy stresses that generalizations shouldn’t be made about Native literature, she credits it with instilling a strong sense of community in her, and reinforces the idea that community is “a relationship of reciprocity.”
“It’s not one of ‘what are my rights as an individual?’ It’s ‘what is my responsibility to my community?’” Chabitnoy said.
Chabitnoy is by the University’s ongoing efforts to expand awareness of the Indigenous and Native American communities. These efforts include the encouragement of smudging, a ritual that involves burning traditional herbs and plants, which uses smoke as a connection to the spiritual.
“There’s talk, in the library, of creating a reading room, there’s talk at the Native Advisory committee meetings of what it would be to bring back … community dorms where students could have that community, but it does seem like something that we very much still have to work on,” Chabitnoy said. “There are things that other universities are doing that we could do more of … but it seems like it’s on the radar.”
Alejandro Barton, program coordinator and supervisor for the Josephine White Eagle Cultural Center (JWECC), spoke about a poetry reading that Chabitnoy held at the JWECC on Nov. 7.
“[Chabitnoy] talks about how there’s a large disconnect between wanting to represent her own ancestry within her life, but then also that struggle of if she wants to bring that into her daughter’s life,” Barton said. “She wants to protect her daughter, but a lot of her poetry is just about the idea of motherhood, and the idea of tying in generational stories.”
Kalana Amarasekara can be reached at [email protected].
