dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 181one, better tongue’ (p. 21 ). This attention to multiple language use
and challenge to a dominant English tongue is articulated in Kay’s
work through its multiple references to inclusion and multiplicity.
As Gish states in her assessment of contemporary Scottish poets:
‘these poets who are complicating these linguistic borders are cre-
ating not something in between “mainstream” and “experimental”
but culturally specifi c experimentation demanding of those who
have internalized the dominant dialect the effort required to read
genuinely different cultural work’.^30
FROM ORALITY TO TEXT: ETHNOPOETICS IN SIMON
ORTIZ AND JOY HARJO’S POETRY
In a recent interview, Native American poet Simon Ortiz, a
member of the Acoma Pueblo tribal community in New Mexico,
discusses the fate of indigenous languages of the Americas and the
subsequent domination of English and Spanish:
After 1492 , European languages became the prominent and
dominant colonial languages that helped to achieve settle-
ment, invasion, occupation, also known as conquest of the
Americas. English was introduced to North America in the
1600 s along the eastern or Atlantic seaboard, although by
then Spanish was already the strongest European colonial
instrument of social, economic, political control and domi-
nance in the Caribbean and North American continental
lands known now as Mexico and Guatemala.^31Responding specifi cally to the situation of Native Americans, Ortiz
states that English in the USA has invariably become ‘the language-
cultural choice that has determined the lives of Indigenous peoples.
Go to reservations anywhere in the US, and you’ll hear English
as the common language’ (p. 7 ). While he stresses that there are
exceptions and that indigenous languages are spoken in both South
and North America, he emphasises that English has become the
fi rst language for most indigenous poets and writers: ‘Why not?
It is the language that has to be dealt with face to face personally,