Emory University anthropologist Debra Vidali captured first place in the 2023 Ethnographic Poetry Competition of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Humanistic Anthropology.
Vidali, a sociocultural anthropologist whose work centers on experimental ethnography and ethnographic theater, won for a set of two experimental poems, “Two Row Repair II” and “Two Row Repair III.”
The titles refer to the Two Row Wampum belt that encodes the first treaty between Europeans and Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Confederacy.
Vidali’s poems use the wampum belt as both a metaphor and visual basis for the pieces, which can be read top-to-bottom and left-to-right, that focus on “a journey of recovery and repair” connected to the territory of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, located in the region also known as New York state and Ontario and Quebec, Canada.
The judges praised the connections, saying Vidali’s work “not only speaks about, but embodies, decolonial praxis in a historically anchored way.”
Vidali accepted the award in person and read the poetry last month at the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's annual award ceremony in Toronto.
Vidali writes and teaches about multisensorial forms of knowledge, with a current research focus on Indigenous sovereignty and allied solidarity.
She says she was motivated to write the poems after a 2022 research journey to find the original location where the Two Row agreement occurred in 1613 between Dutch and Mohawk, near the port of present-day Albany, New York.
“The Two Row Wampum is a foundational treaty extending into the present. It conveys expected relations between Haudenosaunee and people of European descent to co-exist in peace, respect and friendship, and in common stewardship for all orders of life, including rivers, plants, animals and earth itself,” Vidali says.
“As a non-Indigenous person who was born and raised on Haudenosaunee lands, and whose ancestors go back to Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley in the 1630s, I strive to honor this treaty and to communicate to others about it,” she adds. “With the set of poems, I activate and inscribe a journey of ancestral reckoning using the unique affordances of experimental ethnographic writing. It was a deep honor to receive the award, and to have it conferred on Haudenosaunee lands in Tkaronto (Toronto).”