ASU professor Laura Tohe named Navajo Nation’s second poet laureate

Laura Tohe, an English professor at Arizona State University, was named the Navajo Nation’s second-ever poet laureate earlier this month.

The Navajo Nation is the only tribal nation in the U.S. to have a poet laureate, Tohe said, making her the only tribal poet laureate in the country.

“My tribal nation is, I think, giving me one of the highest honors they can give to their artists,” she said. “It validates that we as Navajo people have contributed to American literature in many ways over many years.”

She was honored in a ceremony at Navajo Technical University in New Mexico earlier this month, where she and dozens of friends, family and community members spent an evening celebrating Navajo poetry.

Among the guests was the nation’s first poet laureate, Luci Tapahonso, who won the honor in 2013.

Fans can meet Tohe at a free, public reception honoring her at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 30, at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center in Hayden Library on ASU’s Tempe campus.

“It’s like a black hole on the reservation”

Her duties as poet laureate include promoting pride and respect for the Navajo people, language and culture, and promoting literacy in Navajo and English.

“The ironic thing about this poet laureate honor is that, in many of the schools on the Navajo Reservation, the Navajo writers are not taught in the school,” she said.

One of Tohe’s biggest goals as poet laureate is to have work by Navajo writers become part of the language-arts curriculum on the reservation.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t read any works by Native American authors because there just weren’t any where I was living on the Navajo Reservation,” she said. “I didn’t read anything by a Native American person until I got to college, and it was a very short introduction.”

That’s still mostly the case today, she said, although her undergraduate students often can cite the most popular two or three indigenous authors.

“It’s like a black hole on the reservation, where there’s no information about who these writers are,” she said.

Among her favorite Navajo authors are Tapahonso, Rex Lee Jim, Emerson Blackhorse Mitchell and, of the younger generation, Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Esther Belin and Casey Edsitty.

Decades in the making

Tohe was born in Fort Defiance, Ariz., and raised on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. It was during her graduate creative-writing program that she warmed to indigenous poetry and realized she could contribute.

Famous Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya, who was her teacher, “encouraged me to look in my own community to find stories that were always there.

“I started to realize storytellers were always in my life … and when I realized that, then I felt an epiphany had occurred and I could draw on my life or experiences of people I know, and that’s how I started writing.”

She’s written four books and hundreds of poems, and in 2008 wrote the Phoenix Symphony commissioned libretto for “Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio."

This semester, as an English professor in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, she’s teaching “American Indians in Film and Video: Reel or Real.”