Beyond the Watching Eye: Reclaiming Story and Sight through Diné Thought by Chris Hoshnic
Blue Corn Tongue
Poems in the Mouth of the Desert
by Amber McCrary
University of Arizona Press
The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket
Poems
by Kinsale Drake
University of Georgia Press
The Missing Morningstar
And Other Stories
by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie
Torrey House Press
Beyond the Watching Eye: Reclaiming Story and Sight through Diné Thought
Diné thought cannot boil down the concept of living to the materiality of things, time, and space. Which is why finding literature and media that articulate these complexities is like finding a Horned lizard on your walk with your dog. Like running your fingers along its back for the first time. Placing it on your chest to whisper a prayer. Spreading corn pollen along its spikes before setting it free.
As you read that last sentence, you must sense a knowledge of your own disrupting it. Something tells you that Horned lizards spray blood from their eyes. That I may be putting myself and my dog in danger, for the blood may be poisonous. Perhaps you wonder if what I have just written is a literary device called Magical Realism. Or maybe I have completely lost you as a reader, and you thank God you are not Navajo.
Unfortunately, that is not the case.
What I’ve just described, I call the ethos of surveillance. By this, I mean surveillance not just as a technological tool for observation, but also as a way of seeing, a technology of perspective. The word ethos refers to the values, beliefs, or guiding principles that shape our behavior. Together, the ethos of surveillance describes the role that this perspective, shaped by surveillance technologies, plays in how we experience narratives, whether through self-help books, a Netflix show, or even a paragraph in this essay. It also refers to how our values, beliefs, or religious frameworks interact with and are influenced by this way of seeing.
The works of Amber McCrary, Kinsale Drake, and Stacie Shannon Denetsosie are three vessels that run through this ethos of surveillance, like the San Juan River, the Colorado River, and the Little Colorado River on the Navajo Nation. In their debuts, Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert (McCrary), The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (Drake) and The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories (Denestsosie), we see a different kind of processing, one that inhibits surveillance and exercises Diné philosophies of breath, song, and prayer.
I met McCrary through the Diné Artisans + Authors Capacity Building Institute, Drake at the Indigenous Nations Poets 2024 Writing Retreat, and Denetsosie at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center’s Indigenous Open Mic Night. Each writer exudes a philosophy of Diné practice, seen in their collection. McCrary, the owner and founder of the publishing house, Abalone Press, has long resuscitated creativity and self-expression in Indigenous communities with her zines and events across Arizona and beyond. Her collaborations often cross paths with Drake, who directs programming for NDN Girls Book Club, a 501(c)3 literary organization that distributed over 10,000 free Native books to the Navajo and Hopi Nations in 2024.
Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, one of five authors honored by the National Book Foundation, with Drake and Darcie Little Badger, has just assembled an anthology of Indigenous Futurism & Feminisms with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Diaz, forthcoming from Torrey House Press. Their work, on and off the page, is distinguishable, yet braided to create an ethos of harmony, balance, and love.
In their respective debuts, they each reflect what their community work is all about; McCrary, a Diné woman on a path to self-discovery and land acknowledgement; Drake, writing a love letter to pop culture, Navajo living, land, and 20th-century music; Denetsosie, whose stories depict the grief and struggles of settlerism on the Navajo reservation. Separately, they each embark on a journey of modern Diné women resisting a world that often tells them to conform to colonialism. Together, they create a tapestry of Diné thought and knowledge, each uplifting the other.
There is no confusion about their work as artists and community leaders. There is only a sense of care, love, and resilience. This is why I am drawn to their work as a Diné person. These texts are the spikes along the Horned lizard’s back. They sit on my chest listening to my prayers. With the corn pollen I spread across these three collections, I want to illustrate how they work together as a library of Navajo thought and knowledge.
To begin, McCrary places the lens on the Flora in Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert. Flora, whose name ironically derives from the Roman goddess, is known for springtime and fertility, just as Hosh, appearing several times across this collection. Hosh is a sound known as the whistling brush of wind against the cacti spines, singing the song of breath, of voice, of saad.
Each poem absorbs light, as does Hymn for Hosh:
“A pond of oil glistens in the sun / sits like melted butter on Alką́ą́n crust...” (McCrary 29).
This light is then soaked in such a simple scene in the poem’s third section to give us the sweetness of care:
“my hum is heard / when I’m / in solitude, washing dishes, in my apartment / thoughts only / smiling down with soapy silverware and / sponge in hand / scrubbing, rinsing, repeating” (McCrary 30).
In Blue Corn Woman, it is the Navajo woman’s mission to remind us that without these lands, we come from nothing:
“Grind me / Metate me / Nourish me” (McCrary 5).
Here, the body becomes the political statement. How often we find the body on the ballot, in the courtrooms, or watercooler discourse, but not in conversation with the land and what it has to offer. For McCrary, the body is springtime, it is fertility, it is breath for the people, and not as a thing to be debated.
In its experience, Blue Corn Tongue does not ask what the world will look like after us. I find these poems are more involved with the work of the breath it’s giving us, as the listener. For breath, in Diné thought, is linked to the spirit and soul.
Just as a listener, Kinsale Drake’s The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket is just that, with its love for ethnomusicology, these poems are rooted in the Navajo practice of the Hata'li, or the singer of medicine and prayer. I assumed Drake is playing the role of the Hata'li as she steers us up and down the highways of the reservation, tuning and re-tuning the radio to match its landscapes. The lyrics of each line in this collection work to incorporate, like a Hata'li, breath given by the Hosh and other non-human life, a song.
A song I experienced in Dark Blanket for the first time, a narrative I can relate to after Sacred Water (Our emergence):
“the beings that lived there / did not know where to escape the ood / & what saved the world was a reed curling / into the sky” (Drake 30).
Upon this arrival with Drake, I came to leave this section, asking if there is more than one way of praying and singing.
Also seeing this firsthand, at NDN Girls Book Club readings, Kinsale brings these songs and prayers to Ancestor’s wildest dreams, singing the Navajo word for laugh for her young listeners:
“I learned the word in my language for laugh… / We found it together; / Dloh dloh dloh dloh / We eat it / We setting spray it to the page” (Drake 57).
This, I find, is her speaking to the holy ones, the Diyin Diné’e, to smile down on her passengers, with wind in their hair, who are safe in the bed of Grandma’s pickup truck.
In that revival, I feel we are returned to the ethos in The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie. I come to these stories asking what sound is doing once the Flora has given breath, and what happens after the songs sung from the radio are muted. The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories asks how we have gotten here and why, employing prayers as anchors. Where McCrary and Drake become part of what the holy ones are giving, Denetsosie puts this into practice. What does the receiving end of these songs look like, and how can we express our deepest gratitude for them?
The trouble I find in Denetsosie’s stories isn’t about losing a sense of place but losing our sense of selves in prayer. By reconstructing prayer and giving it a conclusion, self-identication is surveillance in The Caskset in the Backseat:
“On the fourth day, a small glimmer appeared, and I walked toward it for what felt like a mile. As I neared the glittering light, I glimpsed what appeared to be the front door of my trailer in the center of the glow… This was a memory” (Denetsosie 25).
This conclusion is not what the Hata'li prayed for, not for our desperate call for gratitude. The prayers set in place are not looking for a conclusion at all, and I feel this is the message The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories is trying to tell us.
Just as the title suggests, The Missing Morningstar is referential to light-gone. However, it becomes the antithesis of all these collections. Light-found can enter the Hosh for breath, like the poems in Blue Corn Tongue: Poems in the Mouth of the Desert, and give the Hata'li life to sing the songs in The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket. Yet, we are still wrestling with the prayers given from those songs in The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories.
Instead of ironies, I discover more questions. Questions I am not afraid to find answers for. At this arrival, through these three distinct voices, I discovered McCrary, Drake, and Denetsosie have created breath, song, and prayer. Together, they are in a conversation all their own that no self-help book or Netflix show can fully realize.
Each collection has its moments of reflection, moments to stay still. These moments, like one of the Diné traditional living systems, Nitsáhákees, gave me time to recognize living as a gift. To recognize the songs as teachings and healings, and to take prayers not as answers, but as guidance towards harmony, towards Hózhó.
These writers lean on one another to give voice, to give saad to their people. Surveillance, after all, is a technology, like writing and ethos, that gives it a role to play in our daily lives as Navajos. When used appropriately with love and care, we, too, can discover that our way of thinking and seeing the world is also living.
Chris Hoshnic is a Navajo poet, playwright, and filmmaker, honored with the 2023 Indigenous Poets Prize for Hayden’s Ferry Review and Poetry Northwest James Welch Finalist. His fellowships include the Native American Media Alliance’s Writers Seminar, UC-Berkeley Arts Research Center, and the Diné Artisan and Authors Capacity Building Institute, with support from Indigenous Nations Poets, Playwrights Realm, Tin House, and others. He is published in Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and other journals.
