Adapt, Preserve, Keep Stories Alive

Kinsale Hueston (Diné) is a 2017-2018 National Student Poet and a sophomore at Yale University. An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Kinsale’s work centers on personal histories, Diné stories, and contemporary issues affecting her tribe. She is the recipient of the Yale Young Native Storytellers Award for Spoken Word/Storytelling, the J. Edgar Meeker Prize (May 2019, Yale University), and three National Scholastic Gold Medals for poetry and dramatic script. In February 2019, she was named one of “34 People Changing How We See the World” by Time Magazine in its Optimists Issue.

Kinsale is a 2020 First Peoples Fund (FPF) Cultural Capital Fellow and a national Mellon Mays scholar.

As she performed spoken word poetry in Los Angeles, a familiar face in the audience caught Kinsale’s attention. It was one of her former writing workshop students from Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California.

After the performance, Kinsale connected with him and his two friends who had come to hear her perform.

“He told me that our workshops at his school had changed his outlook on art and poetry,” she says. “It was now something he was pursuing seriously as a writer in the LA area and was encouraging other Indigenous youth to pursue as well. It was a wonderful moment.”

This is a part of who Kinsale is as a poet — working with Indigenous youth to draw out their talents. One of the ways she shares with others is by holding community workshops to communicate Indigenous values and stories through poetry and spoken word.

“Most of the time we focus on finding creative ways to write about ancestral lands, ancestors, and key figures in our lives,”

“Most of the time we focus on finding creative ways to write about ancestral lands, ancestors, and key figures in our lives,” she says. “At the end of a series of workshops I usually collect work and produce a chapbook for participants and their home communities that can be displayed or shared.”

Kinsale has taken this a step further by launching Changing Womxn Collective with support from her FPF Cultural Capital Fellowship. Kinsale’s team helps her monitor social media and curate the writing.

“It’s been a lot of fun to see different women of color, Indigenous women, submit work and see their reactions when it’s published,” she says. “For a lot of them, it’s the first time they’ve been published. We don’t have the same selection processes of other literary magazines. We have a very fast turnaround, so I think it creates much more of a community feel than a literary magazine in the traditional sense.”

Much of the inspiration for Kinsale’s writing comes from stories her maternal Diné family passed down. She says, “To properly function as culture bearers and those who will pass on our knowledge to future generations, we must find outlets and ways to adapt, preserve, and keep our communities’ stories alive.”

SOUTH SHÁDI’ÁÁH

In beauty I walk Hózhóogo naasháa doo

God translation spoken in Diné

Open throat upturn hands

Trail marked with pollen

Naasháa doo I will have a light body

I will be happy forever Shideigi but I am only saying words

Hózhó náhásdlíi’ my words will be beautiful

But only if I remember His name Shideigi

hózhóogo naasháa doo open mouth open hands

I walk home in beauty

-Kinsale Hueston

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Banner image: Urban Rez, 2016 by Kevin Michael Campbell