A Conversation with Teresa Dzieglewicz

© Noah Smith-Drelich

Teresa Dzieglewicz is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, educator, and lover of rivers and prairies. She is a fellow with Black Earth Institute, a Poet-in-Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, and part of the founding team of Mni Wichoni Nakicizin Wounspe (Defenders of the Water School). With Natasha Mijares, she organizes “Watershed: Ways of Seeing the Chicago River.” Her first book of poetry, Something Small of How to See a River, was selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). Her first children’s book, Belonging, co-written with Kimimila Locke, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books. She has won a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, the Gingko Prize, the Auburn Witness Prize, and the Palette Poetry Prize. Teresa lives with her family in Chicago, on Potawatomi land. 

Poet Teresa Dzieglewicz spent five months living at the Ocethi Sakowin camp in 2016, teaching at the school, learning about the Dakota Access Pipeline movement, about Lakota history and stories, and about what it means to be in relationship to the land and to water. This is the focus of her debut poetry collection, Something Small of How to See a River, where documentary poetics bring to life the many voices of elders, children, and community members at the camp.

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Leonora Simonovis: Your collection is divided into three parts, titled “Headwaters,” “Flood Plain,” and “Confluence,” which are all words related to rivers. What was your thought process in organizing the collection along a river’s path? What is your relationship with rivers?

Teresa Dzieglewicz: Rivers are 70% of what I think about. I’ve always been interested in ecology and nature. I’m obsessed with rivers. They hold everything: our stories, our history, our art, it’s all in the water. I feel like I’ve been working hard to try to understand myself on this land. What does it mean to be here? I just keep coming back to the idea that the way to understand things is through our waters. 

The way to understand everything, I think, is through the water, and for me, it’s the rivers that just keep pulling. Wherever I go, that’s how I can feel connected. They connect us all, right? As I was writing the collection, it kind of naturally organized itself into these three parts. The section at the beginning is about being at the camp when we were starting the school—when there was all this joy and new energy, before the violence had started.

The middle holds much of the experience, including when police violence began, and the struggle to contend with that—to hold all this joy, and also, this violence. The last section is when I’m home and trying to process and make sense of what happened, trying to figure out how to piece back together my life. I think everyone who’s been in some sort of intense situation can relate to this. The structure of the book really is the structure of a river, where this story comes from, this joy, and this community care.

The final section was titled before the others because there’s a poem that talks about the Mississippi and the Missouri meeting, and that image was so important for me—the river I lived by and the river I came home to. They’re the same river, and my life can be the same life somehow. And the way the two rivers merge, my two lives come together, right? 

LS: I completely agree with you; water connects us to people all around the world.

One of the things I noticed and appreciated about your poems is how they bring in different voices. The collaborative poem, “I Kept Thinking Back,” written with Alayna Eagle Shield after interviewing her great grandmother, is one example of this. What was it like to write this poem and to honor and balance the voices in it?

TD: It’s such a delicate thing to write a movement, and to say this is the story of a group of people working together and the story of their community. How do you tell that as one person? I am not Lakota. I am white and that is obviously another tension in this book, and a tension in the writing of this book. For me to tell this story, or my piece of this story, is a delicate thing. I knew, as I was writing, that I needed to find respectful ways to share other people’s voices. This is a community story. 

I was thankful to many of my students who shared such beautiful quotes and thoughts, and I tried to include a lot of dialogue, because I wanted this to be very much a book populated by people. I wanted readers to know the people who were there, who were running this movement, and who were making this community possible. Alayna is the person who started the school and her great great grandmother’s story is so important and crucial to this book. I was grateful to her for inviting me to be a part of the school and for doing this project with me.

As we were talking about history, she mentioned how the first time she saw the police coming in, she felt like she was seeing what her ancestors had seen. Then we found a book that had an interview with Moving Robe Woman and, in reading it, noticed all these parallels. In our first conversations, we hadn’t read that piece yet, so afterward we noticed how they just overlapped in so many ways. It felt beautiful to have the gift of bringing her and her relative into the story, to broaden it in that way as well. It felt important to acknowledge history, and to acknowledge that this moment in time is not coming out of nowhere.

LS: That’s beautiful! I find the speaker in these poems is an activist who cares very deeply about what’s happening in the community. How do you see your role as a writer in this conflict, and what can poetry offer? 

TD: I wish I had had the answer to that, you know, because I feel like that’s the question I’m constantly asking. I mean, I think we all are. I started working on this collection, really as a way to reconcile my life, and to reconcile the stories I was seeing on the news with the story I had lived.

There were some independent journalists doing some very good work, but even then, the news stories often focused primarily on the violence. I so often thought, “Where are the kids at the river?” It’s so important to see this violence, to know this is happening. And it also feels equally important to see the joy of movement spaces, the way people take care of each other; to see the kids picking up trash, or someone teaching someone else to make a drum. Those things don’t feel like less important parts of the story. And I think that that’s what poetry can do. It can help us hold so many different things together. It can help us look at those interpersonal moments on the land. It can help us hold the violence and beauty and history and community all at once.

I think that understanding stories fully and humanely, in all their emotion and trauma and joy is sustaining for us, right? We need that to keep resisting, to keep going. All these small labors and the small work that people did at the camp was so important because it helped the camp function. Somebody cleaning the porta-potties is just as important as somebody being on the front line with the police. People can be on the front line because they can come back and go to the bathroom, have something to eat, sit by a fire. For me, it’s important to recognize and remember the significance of all these small gestures, which are not small at all. Let me not say that cleaning the porta potty is small! All these daily labors are what makes a big movement and it’s so easy sometimes to forget that, to feel like you have to do everything. But really, making a spreadsheet is sometimes all you can do in that moment, and I wanted to honor that.

LS: In the poem “If You’re Married, Why Do You Call Her Teresa?,” the speaker reflects about the inadequacy of the English language in comparison to native languages when one of the students asks her why she calls her husband by name, instead of calling him “husband.” What does it mean to belong to place and to language in the context of this movement?

TD: I think I would say I’m still very much trying to figure that out. This is what we do as poets, right? These things that feel like big, essential questions of my life, that’s why I’m writing them, because I don’t have the answer. I almost never write about something I feel like I know the answer to. Isn’t her question amazing? I was like, wait, what? I can’t imagine him calling me wife, but I do think that that’s so much of what I’m trying to grapple with as a human, and in this book. Again, I’m obviously white, I’m obviously a settler in this place, and yet, this is where my body is, you know? I think so much of the book is about trying to figure out how to live in relationship to these places, these people. And as I’m writing poems, I’m constantly pushing up against language, the white supremacist structures inherent in English, and that are embedded in what I say and how I think, and how I talk. And so, I so appreciated her asking me that, and being like, “Yes! you’re right!” 

I say it in the poem, but it’s hard to talk about things that you have a relationship with in English without saying “my.” Even when I talk about the river, I’m like, oh, my river, because this is the river I’m in a relationship with and I feel like I need a different word.

LS: Or even saying the river, right? You’re already qualifying it as something that’s outside of you, but the river is more than that to you.

TD: Right.

LS: And so how do you find the language for that?

TD: Right! How do we grapple with these ideas when we’re speaking a language that holds them so closely and so tightly? I think another thing happening a lot in the book is the question of how, as a white person, I can love something without trying to own it. Because I think that’s something society really teaches us is the goal of things, right? To feel ownership over them. How can I say this has been a home to me during this time, and also that I’m a guest. How can I love all of this and not try for it to be mine? I wanted to acknowledge that and try to hold those tensions and find ways to show them throughout.

LS: I find myself, as a reader, guided into spaces of violence, but also, of joy and song and prayer led by the children at camp. Why do children have a predominant role in many of these poems, other than the fact that you are their teacher? 

TD: The kids were so important in the movement and still are. They know a lot, notice a lot, are so insightful and observant in so many ways that I think adults have unlearned how to be. I know I miss a lot that the kids notice, anyway!

When we were at the rally asking, “Why are all these National Guards here?” One of the kids responded, “Well, because they want this fear for us.” They understood instinctively that this was a power play, and there were many times at the camp that the kids were leaders or sources of calm. 

There was a really hard day that involved a lot of police violence. The camp was empty because so much was happening. There were a lot of elders at the camp, the kids, and various others for different reasons, and it was an anxious time. No one quite knew what was happening, everyone felt a little bit scared and insecure. I had some ideas for the school but knew we couldn’t do our regular activities, so I talked to the kids and proposed a few alternatives. And the kids said we should go out to the fire, to the microphone, and play songs. And we should sing, and drum, because everybody needs that. The elders and people who were still at the camp came and gathered and you could just feel that it was a different space. The energy changed because of the gift that the kids gave to everybody. 

Obviously, Indigenous cultures and Lakota cultures are good at teaching their children that the repercussions of this moment are going to be inherited—what we do now, and the ways that we stand up, or the ways that we don’t, last long beyond what we can see. That’s important for me, too—to remember that the kids are leading this movement, and that we do this for them, for the people after them, and for the land and water.

People talk a lot about doing things for the future in a lot of activist spaces that don’t include kids, but I do think that movements are stronger when they’re multi-generational. No one’s money gets you a different Earth, right? If you damage the land, if you hurt the water, that’s still the land and the water where you have to live, and your kids too. You need that land and that water, and no amount of money is a wall between you and this earth. You can pretend it is, but it can’t last.

LS: I wholeheartedly agree.

You include many different forms in your poems, both traditional (a pantoum, for example) and received (police reports, charts). I’m curious about the relationship between form and content in shaping the book. How was this process for you?

TD: The poems that I started with were the document poems. And I think, like we talked about a little bit at the beginning, when you’re coming home from a movement or anything big, there’s a process of reconciling with the stories that were being told around me, and I felt like I didn’t know how to write about all I had experienced. It was too big, and I thought, “I don’t know how to do this.” And then I found the documents, and I was looking at them, and I could just see they were not a reflection of the world I lived in. It’s not even that they were lying, which they were, but also realizing these were statements that came from a completely different place. So I think for me, that was a little inroad to get started, to say, okay, I don’t feel like I can write a full poem, but when I see this, and I see the way that someone is talking about the vehicles that are left behind at the camp, I know a different story, and can just put this glimmer of a different story in there. 

I think there was something for me in being able to acknowledge that this was the official narrative that was being told, and to both be able to hold that, but also to say, okay, but here’s what I know, what I saw, here are the people I love.

In terms of the form, I feel like I had to search so much for the ways to tell the story, asking myself, “What tools are available?” But I do think that there is a relationship between form and ancestry. Form is a way of acknowledging history, to hold and to see what we’ve been given, where it supports us, and where it breaks apart. The process of experimenting with form, for me, felt like an echo of trying to process history and the events at the camp and think about ancestry and belonging and what we’ve inherited.

LS: I love that.

TD: Thank you! And all these connections that are unseen, that you feel, but can’t always explain in the most coherent way. Poetry is perfect for that, because it gives you tools where you are connecting, maybe symbolically, but not necessarily chronologically. That’s what I love about poetry. Like we talked about, it holds everything in one place, and we don’t always get to look at things in that way.

LS: “These leavings a privilege I want and don’t want.” I keep coming back to this line, as well as to others where the speaker grapples with their experience at camp, and how different it is from their day-to-day life. How did your relationship to land and water, but also to yourself, change after writing this book? 

TD: This is an excellent question. I’m sorry, I feel like the answer to a lot of your questions is “I’m still working on answering that.” I’d say being at camp changed everything. It was only a few months, but it altered so much for me. It built my sense of connection to land and water in such a deep and meaningful way. It’s such a completely different way of living, to be out on the land all the time, to be so intensely in community. This is something our ancestors once knew. No matter where we’re from, at some point, our ancestors once knew this deep relationship and deep noticing of a place. I think that that relationship had been so fractured for me in so many ways that just being on the land gave me so much.

But also, the movement, like we’ve talked about a little bit, was so deeply about relationship, about, “How are you a good relative here?” And learning there are many ways to do that was beautiful. For an elder, the way of being a good relative can be sharing stories, and that is just as crucial as anything. For a kid, it might be being at the fire, and for someone else, it might be sorting the books in the school library. It’s different for everybody, and so your job is just to do what you can do. Seeing how much of themselves people were willing to give, and how much people gave to sustain this movement, was inspiring. There were so many people who gave so much, and that generosity, that deep love in activism really changed me, has pushed me to try to ask myself, “How do I live like that? How do I focus on being a relative to people, to water, to land all the time in whatever ways I can?”