Navajo Poet Laureate Laura Tohe receives Academy of American Poets Fellowship
By Brenda Norrell
Censored News
Tohe, who grew up in the Chuska Mountains, on the Navajo Nation in Crystal, New Mexico, shares the joy of life and the Female Rain in the sweet-scented pinyon high county. She also shares the reality of the abuse in boarding schools.
“Our language was beat out of us,” Tohe said. “Boarding school was taking away our voices.”
Tohe, however, struggled and maintained her “Navajo heart and Navajo mind.”
“I wrote in secret for a long time," Tohe said in Tucson in 2007.