In Bone Light, Orlando White’s debut volume, he explores the English language from a Diné (Navajo) perspective.  He invites us to imagine that we, as a people--all people in this imaginary country called the United States--are speaking an Indigenous language and that the English language exists merely as a remnant of the colonial past. 

Despite its tenuous existence in this re-imagined present, English remains a danger to Indigenous thought, as it threatens to impose an alien worldview through its vocabulary and syntactical maneuvers.  Historically, English was used by non-Natives to document  Indigenous cultures; against this historical backdrop, White also writes to document, but he works to create something more beautiful than harmful.   He does not attempt a critique of the English language; he works with it and against it to gain a better understanding of its peculiarities and limits, creating a relationship through these sometimes humorous, sometimes irreverent acts of exploration.

Throughout Bone Light, Orlando White approaches the English language as if he has just encountered it, as if it were a mysterious set of symbols.  Focusing on the particles of the language—the punctuation marks, the letters, the spaces between words—he turns them a while in his hand like strange inexplicable artifacts from a lost world, then sets to work, refashioning them into something he can use.

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BONE LIGHT