Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso still remembers the books she used to read when as a young girl she attended a Christian school in Farmington, New Mexico: The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew and, of course, Bible stories.

"It was real fascinating to me," she says, "because I found out about the end of the world on my own. Then when I got home I would tell my mother and she was appalled that they encouraged us to learn about such terrible things.

"I think that with the kind of education I got, a lot of things were fragmented," she says. That has made her appreciate the importance of representing the world in a way that presents a "unified picture."

Tapahonso is the author of three books of poetry: A Breeze Swept Through, Seasonal Woman, and One More Shiprock Night. A fourth, Saanii Dah Hataal: The Women Are Singing, is forthcoming. Her poetry speaks of everyday experiences in Navajo life, in rhythms that often echo the distinctive sound of Navajo speech.

"I write in terms of how I hear whatever's being said," she says. "Sometimes that voice is a Navajo voice, with the accent and a certain kind of syntax that a non-Navajo wouldn't use. Sometimes I don't even translate things because it just doesn't make any sense in English."

After growing up in Shiprock, on the Navajo reservation, Tapahonso attended the University of New Mexico. There she found her way into a writing class with Leslie Silko, who encouraged her writing, even suggesting she might one day write a book of her own. "I thought, 'Oh sure, yeah, right,'" Tapahonso says, although she held onto the possibility. "But that belief in me was really important."

Not only did her work make it into print, but Tapahonso herself later became a teacher at the University of New Mexico. For the past two years, she's been an assistant professor of English at the University of Kansas. 

She admits to feeling homesick at times. She's the only member of her large family who lives off the reservation. But, she says, she was fortunate to have been raised in a way that stressed the importance of her identity. "People always said: 'Remember you're Navajo. Remember the things that make you different.'"

She describes how this sense of identity has created in her a continuing connection to her people and to the land -- no matter where she lives. This identity also makes her feel a sense of responsibility about the way she uses language. To explain this responsibility, she describes a Navajo belief about childbirth.

"In Navajo," she explains, "they say that when a baby's born, with the first breath the wind enters the baby through the top of the head -- there's that little whirl where your hair starts growing -- and then it goes into each of the fingertips of the hands. Into each of the fingers a different color of wind enters. The wind then is going to be in the child until the person dies. And each time a person breathes, they are really inhaling and exhaling the wind.

"And so when the person speaks, whatever they say is a part of this wind. And in that way, whatever they say is sacred in a sense because it's part of something larger. A person's not by himself, a person's part of this whole universe that they can't even comprehend on their own. It's an immense kind of connection that they have."

In this way, Luci Tapahonso's respect for language is more than just an aesthetic. It's a way of seeing herself in the world, of understanding her interconnectedness with everything around her.

"When I was pregnant with my children," she says, "people told me not to ever let them say 'shut up.' because in effect when people say that, they're cursing the air. They're saying, stop the air. Stop that. And so it's real dangerous to use words carelessly. Because their meaning is more than we can really comprehend."