A Culture Without Books
By Andrew Peterson

TOHONO O'ODHAM POET and linguist Ofelia Zepeda was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona when she discovered that a system had been devised for writing her native language. "There was a dictionary and a little book of O'odham stories published by the University of Arizona press," she says. "I bought these books and I figured, 'Well, I speak the language, I should be able to read it.' And that's not true!"

The work that Zepeda would have to do to become literate in her own language would mark a turning point in her life, and led eventually to her current position as assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, where site has developed a class and written a textbook for a course in the O'odham language. It also marked the beginning of her deep commitment to the ongoing task of creating a written O'odham literature.

The daughter of farm workers, Zepeda grew up in the small, cotton-growing town of Stanfield, Arizona, west of Casa Grande. She describes her life there as similar to the lives of people who lived on the Tohono O'odham reservation, about 20 miles away.

"A lot of O'odham people lived there and they were usually related," she says of the farming camps where she grew up. "In that way it was sort of like an O'odham village."

It wasn't an easy life. "We were required to work on weekends and all thorough the summer to have money to buy our school clothes and stuff like that," she says. "I hated manual labor basically, because it's hard, hard work."

But that dislike for manual labor pointed her in an important direction. "I figured if I went to summer school I wouldn't have to work," she says with a smile. "It was sort of the lesser of two evils."

Using school as an excuse soon gave way to a simple love of learning. "For some crazy reason I just enjoyed it," she says. "I enjoyed books and reading and pencils and all the accoutrements of school. And because I was that way, teachers and counselors took an interest in me, and gave me some moral support where they could."

Years later, after having mastered the written form of the O'odham language, Zepeda found herself circling back around to the cultural traditions she'd grown up with, approaching them from a new perspective.

"When I started to become more experienced in working with the language," she says, "I used to get hired on various projects to work with teachers on the reservation, to teach an O'odham language course. Our problem was always finding material. So some of my students and I would write stories for each other so we would have something else to read."

"Basically," Zepeda says, "we had to create our own literature in order to promote our literacy. Some of my writing I used to just transcribe from interviews with people or O'odham songs, just write them down so you could read them as poetry."

From those initial efforts, Zepeda has developed a poetic style very much her own, one that mixes O'odham and English, drawing upon traditional songs and stories to create a highly distinctive expression of her cultural experience of the world.

Traditional O'odham songs, she says, are "very delicate and, in a way, very concise about how the singer viewed the environment, just for that split second. When they talk about the colors of clouds, how they start getting closer lo you, how they change dimension--it's a large thing they're looking at, a very complex atmospheric change that they're observing. And they pack it all into a four-line poem."

Such a description could easily be applied to Zepeda's s own poetry, which speaks in powerfully compact phrases often about the desert environment: rising dust, the movement of clouds, the hope for rain.

Zepeda's respect for the environment is "something that non-Indians tend to associate with Indians." But that's not an association that she finds burdensome. "That's fine with me," she says. "There could be worse things to be associated with."