Ancestral calls: What if learning is bearing witness? And other derivatives of June Beer

This paper aims to engage readers with artist-activist-scholar-librarian June Beer of Nicaragua via a close reading of her poetry while tracing connections of field-specific library pedagogical practices that may be drawn from the ancestral calls evident within her work. Her geographic location informs her embedded community role as artist and librarian as well as her socio-cultural connection to her ancestral lineages. Using a close reading of Beer’s poetry, this article gives power to the language of poetry, and aims to draw conclusions of poetic form which identifies ancestral calls, and may be applied to library and pedagogical practice. Informed by Beer’s subversive work of poetics, activisms, and artmaking, sentipensante pedagogy, storytelling, place, and time, this article aims to reveal that within her writings are embedded useful tools for library and pedagogical practice, as informed not via traditional and normative librarianship, but via ancestral teachings, revelatory within the poetic articulations.