Beth Piatote Talks The Beadworkers, A Collection of Stories About Indigenous Life

MM: This book features multiple stories in multiple genres. How did you choose which genre to apply to which story?

BP: My view has been that different genres tell different kinds of stories in different kinds of ways. I look at the ideas and questions I have, and then I try to figure out what genre is most effective for getting at the specific thing I want to think about. Sometimes the genre is a scholarly essay; sometimes it’s a story; sometimes it’s a poem or a personal essay.

MM: What is the common thread that hold the various stories together?

BP: One of the threads is the mixed genre aspect itself. Over the long term, Native people have always been borrowing arts and aesthetics from other peoples, while still maintaining their tribally distinct practices and styles. Working in various forms but inflecting them with Native characters, plots and aesthetics is a way of highlighting that tradition of adaptability. It’s the way that Native people have survived and thrived across time.

MM: How does your own heritage factor in?

BP: I placed an emphasis on Indigenous aesthetics. I’ve studied my heritage language of Nez Percé, a process that has included reading and translating a large number of stories from the original sources. And in this collection, I’ve incorporated particular motifs, concepts and formal properties — even some of the stories themselves, as intertexts — into my own stories.

MM: Why was it important to include beadworkers in the title?

BP: I wanted the title to point to the work that beadworkers, other artists and medicine people do to sustain our Native communities and the incredible strength and spiritual depth these people demonstrate in continuing to make beauty — even through, and at times because of, loss.