Finding Language

Zigzag in Twenty Nine Parts is from a series of embroidered porcupine quillworks on paper that Dion Fletcher conceives as a pathway for finding language. Intricately woven in alternating directions, the zigzagging design of cream-coloured quills is the result of a meticulous and laborious process, in which the Indigenous craft operates at the level of language. The composition leaves a compelling trace of Dion Fletcher’s work. Enigmatically inhabiting the page, the quillwork functions as a non-normative approach to language that brings the artist closer to her Lenape culture.

As part of a residency with Bodies In Translation (BIT), Vanessa Dion Fletcher developed the performance Finding Language: A Word Scavenger Hunt. This performance animates Dion Fletcher’s multi-layered relationship with spoken and written languages as a Potawatomi-Lenape artist who is seeking out her traditional and disappearing Lenape language (called “Delaware” by colonizers) and as someone who identifies as learning disabled. The performance begins with audio of her grandmother, which fills the room. The voice tells family stories and then describes the process of getting older, becoming disabled, becoming dependent. Overlaid in the audio, a child softly sings in what might be an Indigenous language—Lenape perhaps? As the audio ends, Dion Fletcher turns to focus on the Delaware-English/English-Delaware dictionary. As she begins to read aloud from this dictionary, it becomes clear that it offers distinctly colonial translations of the Lenape language.

With dictionary in hand, she sets out on a “word scavenger hunt” around the room. She roams the audience and the large room we are gathered in, in search of written words. As Dion Fletcher finds English words, which are plentiful, she translates them into the Lenape language using her dictionary. And the translations she finds are surprising, contentious, revealing. Take, for example, her discovery of a bag with multiple spellings of the English word “women”—“wimmin,” “womin,” “wimmyn.” Dion Fletcher slowly reads out these different spellings phonetically and then turns to her dictionary. As she thumbs her way through the English side of the dictionary in order to find the Delaware translation, she reads aloud other surrounding words: “White, white snow, be white, witch, hm.” Tension rises as the weight of colonialism fills the room. She finds the word “women” and reads aloud its related forms: “Indian woman, Delaware woman—that’s me!—white woman, schoolteacher, bad woman, good-for-nothing woman, woman with poor character [...] fat woman, be a bad woman, be a good-for-nothing woman, older single woman, hm.” Tension rises again.

Finding Language addresses the ways that Dion Fletcher has lost her language through the imposition of settler-colonialism and her struggles to orient to the language of settler-colonialism, a written language, because of the ways she delivers and receives language. In doing so, Dion Fletcher disrupts colonialism and presents new understandings of disability and its meaning in the world.

—Eliza Chandler