At the Edge of Memory and Erasure: What Does It Mean to Belong to a Place That is Contested, Rewritten, Forgotten?

I did not arrive at “Indigenized / Tribalized,” my eighth collection of poetry, as a distant observer of Indigenous histories. I arrived there as someone already marked by questions of belonging, fracture, inheritance, and memory. My own life — as an immigrant, as a writer shaped by India’s layered histories, as someone who has lived between continents, languages, and identities – has been haunted by a persistent question: What does it mean to belong to a place that is itself contested, rewritten, or forgotten?

This collection emerges from that question, but it refuses to center me. Instead, it turns outward — toward the first peoples of the world, toward those who have borne the most enduring consequences of colonization, extraction, and erasure. It is not a collection that claims to speak for indigenous communities. It is, rather, a collection that attempts to listen — to echoes, to silences, to fragments of stories that remain despite centuries of violence.

I write in the first person not to assert authority, but to acknowledge responsibility.

Why This Collection, Why Now

We live in a moment of immense technological acceleration and global connectivity. Yet, paradoxically, we also live in a time of deep forgetting. Languages disappear quietly. Sacred lands are appropriated under the language of development. Oral traditions — carried for centuries through breath and memory — are disrupted by displacement and assimilation.

I felt an urgency I could not ignore.

“Indigenized / Tribalized” is my attempt to confront this urgency — not through reportage, not through academic argument, but through poetry. Poetry, for me, is the only form that allows contradiction to breathe. It can hold grief and beauty in the same line. It can mourn and celebrate without resolving tension.

This collection insists that Indigenous struggles are not relics of the past. They are ongoing, urgent, and global.

Everywhere, the rivers were forced backward,
the earth stitched with pipelines and rails,
the sky cleaved by turbines
that did not know the language of wings.

Yet the elders still touch the ground,
listening for the heartbeat beneath.
They hold stories in their hands,
cupped like water,
offering the past to mouths too young
to remember their own echoes.

The cedar will regrow.
The buffalo will return.
The river, unchained, will remember its name.

A Chorus, Not a Single Voice

There is no single Indigenous story. There is no universal voice that can represent the multiplicity of cultures, languages, cosmologies, and histories that Indigenous communities embody.

From the beginning, I resisted the idea of a singular narrative. Instead, “Indigenized / Tribalized” is a chorus. Each poem is a fragment — a chant, a whisper, a lament. Together, they form something larger than any one voice can contain.

This multiplicity resists the flattening gaze that reduces Indigenous experiences into a single narrative of victimhood or romanticized purity. Indigenous communities are not monolithic. They are dynamic, complex, evolving.

They call it progress,
a road carved through the spine of a mountain,
a school where the children no longer speak
in the rhythm of their ancestors.

A boy, once named for the river,
now responds to something easier to pronounce,
something that fits neatly
on a form stamped with approval.

And the land, stripped of its names,
waits in quiet rebellion,
knowing that roots remember
what tongues forget.

Land, Language, and Loss

At the heart of this collection is land — its loss, its memory, its sacredness.

For many Indigenous cultures, land is not property. It is ancestor, archive, and identity. Colonization transformed it into a resource – imposing a language of ownership where none had existed, redrawing boundaries, renaming geographies, and erasing relationships that had been sustained for centuries.

Equally fragile is language. Languages are not merely tools of communication; they are entire worlds. When a language dies, a worldview disappears.

In this collection, I try to evoke this fragility. There are poems where words falter, where syntax breaks, where silence interrupts meaning.

At the same time, I am deeply aware of the paradox: I write these poems in English — the language of colonization. This is a tension I cannot resolve. I inhabit it.

A language unspoken does not die
It frays
in the mouth of a child
who answers in the language of the school,

in the silence of a grandmother
who understands but no longer teaches.

A name, sanded down for convenience,
no longer fits the curve of the land
it once belonged to.

Memory as Resistance

If dispossession is one axis of the collection, resistance is the other.

But resistance, in these poems, does not always take the form of overt political struggle. It often appears in quieter, more enduring forms: ritual, memory, storytelling.

A dance performed under threat of erasure is resistance.
A prayer whispered in a nearly forgotten language is resistance.
A story told to a child – even when the world insists on forgetting – is resistance.

They walk where the earth speaks
in a language older than wind,

They carry their homes in their bones,
homes that exist in the smoke rings of memory.

Once, their feet pressed the soil
with a knowing deeper than maps.

Now, they walk at the edges – 
not erased,
but remembering.

The Ethics of Writing

Writing this collection required me to confront a difficult question: What right do I have to write about Indigenous experiences that are not my own?

This question does not have an easy answer.

I approached it with caution, with research, with humility, and with an awareness of my limitations. These poems are not documentary. They are not claims of authenticity. They are acts of witnessing – imperfect, partial, but sincere.

The world calls them relics,
treasures locked behind glass,

Yet they remain—
rivers that refuse to dry,
seeds cast on soil
that denies them water.

They sing against silence.

Why This Matters Now

As an Indian American, I am acutely aware of the layered histories that connect my own life to the themes of this collection.

India, too, carries histories of colonization, of internal hierarchies, of marginalized communities whose voices are often unheard. The United States, where I now live, is built upon Indigenous land.

These are not separate histories. They are interconnected.

To write this collection is to acknowledge these connections – to recognize that the story of Indigenous dispossession is not distant. It is present.

From stone-skinned mountains of the North
where the winds carry names of ancestors,
earth hums beneath feet of those who remember.

The tribes breathe the same breath as the wind—
and the wind has no home.

A Call to Listen

I do not offer “Indigenized / Tribalized” as a definitive statement. It is not an answer.

It is a beginning, a gesture toward listening.

If the collection has a purpose, it is this: to invite readers into a space of attention. To listen to voices that have been silenced. To recognize the enduring presence of Indigenous cultures – not as relics of the past, but as vital, living, evolving communities.

You thought we would be swallowed
by your towers of glass,

We are the voice beneath the pavement.

We are not the past
you try to bury beneath progress.

We rise like the tide,
unbroken, unbowed,
because the earth remembers.

Closing: The Work of Remembering

In the end, thisis about memory — not memory as nostalgia, but memory as resistance.

To remember is to refuse erasure.
To remember is to honor those who came before.
To remember is to create the possibility of a different future.

As I wrote these poems, I often felt that I was standing at the edge of something—between presence and absence, between voice and silence, between what is remembered and what is forgotten.

This collection is my attempt to remain at that edge.

It is my offering—imperfect, incomplete, but urgent.

Top image, courtesy of kawerak.org.

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Dr. Nishi Chawla is a writer and retired academician whose work spans fiction, poetry, drama, and independent cinema. She is the author of eight poetry collections, eleven plays, four feature-length art-house films, and three novels. She has also co-edited two landmark poetry anthologies—Singing in the Dark and Greening the Earth—published by Penguin Random House.