Conference at UC Davis, 11 a 13 de May 2008
To: Conference Participants
From: Inés Hernández-Avila y Stefano Varese
Date: March 20, 2008
We hope that this meeting in Davis will create further meetings and dialogues between Native/indigenous writers throughout the Americas. This conference is important because it is one of the few occasions that bring together indigenous writers from the North and South. Our planned format will allow the establishment of an open and productive dialogue between writers of different ethnicities about issues fundamental to their intellectual and creative production.
This is the principal motive for this letter. The Conference has a “formal” academic aspect in which some participants have been asked to present orally a written paper for 20 minutes in panels/sessions, after which the audience can ask questions. The less formal aspect of our Conference is the one that will originate from the round tables that will bring together participants in creative areas—poetry, fiction, essays, theater and other stage performances—and in very free form with less time limits to enable participants to offer their creative and intellectual experiences and ideas to other participants and rest of the audience.
We consider this part of the Conference essential because it will start a permanent continental conversation between indigenous writers and creators, which will flourish to the degree that we can establish a deep trust, understanding, mutual respect, and, above all, an efficient level of linguistic communication. The bilingualism Spanish-English is not so common throughout our continent. The Conference does not have enough resources to provide participants simultaneous translation services. What we can offer participants and the audience is a screen projection of a summary of texts in Spanish or English during the interventions of the participants. It will not be a simultaneous translation; rather it will be a screen projection of a basic text of one or two pages of the central ideas that each presenter/participant would like to offer.
Here is the specific request that we are making to all of you: please send us (via email) one or two pages of what you consider the central elements of your conversation with the other participants to be. As an example: in Latin America indigenous writers tend to write in their own language and in Spanish; intellectual bilingualism or multilingualism in a normal condition of indigenous creativity. In the United States, English tends to be the vehicle of indigenous literary expression. The decolonizing process of the indigenous populations in the United States has often caused them to “reinvent the enemy’s language,” as affirmed by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, in the search for their own autonomous identity and the intellectual sovereignty even after the loss of their own native languages. This vast debate lends itself, along with other numerous politico-cultural encounters and disencounters of Euro-American and indigenous relations, to innovative reflections that are central to indigenous thinking and practice in the Americas.
Once we receive the texts we will translate them to have them ready for conference participants. We reiterate our request in the most cordial and respectful manner knowing that your own individual experience as creators and intellectuals provide you with incalculable value to share and enrich the project of Native/indigenous autonomies and creativities.
Please send your electronic texts to Silvia Soto sisoto@ucdavis.edu, in the subject of your email please put your last name and .doc, for example: <Pérez.doc>