Striking new lines

A groundbreaking anthology of Native poetry

first comprehensive anthology of Native American poetry in 30 years gathers 21 writers from nations across the U.S. to carve out a shared space beyond boundaries, where relationships to identity, history, and language are turned inside out, reimagined, and invented anew. “These poems create a place, somewhere we could go,” editor and poet Heid E. Erdrich writes in the introduction to New Poets of Native Nations. “The place of this poetry feels like a familiar country … More than 566 Native nations exist in the U.S. and yet ‘Native American poetry’ does not really exist. Our poetry might be hundreds of distinct tribal and cultural poetries as well as American poetry.”

All the writers in New Poets of Native Nations published their first books after the year 2000. Erdrich — who is Ojibwe, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and the sister of novelist Louise Erdrich — marveled at the shifting landscape of Native literature during a phone call from her home in Minneapolis. “I definitely think there are a few more Native people out there than there were in the late 20th century. In that way, it’s very similar to what’s happened in all of American literature.” She pointed to the growing number of Indians entering academia. “When I graduated from high school in I 1982, there were only 11 Native PhDs in the entire country.” Now, she said, “To have so many Native PhDs in a poetry anthology is kind of a mark of what has happened in the last 30 years.”

The poems in the book probe the contradictions and wounds of contemporary Native life, exploding earlier tropes of indigenous literature. In Tommy Pico’s “Nature Poem,” he writes, “I can’t write a nature poem/bc it’s fodder for the noble savage/narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,/I say to my audience.” The Kumeyaay poet continues: “I can’t write a nature poem bc that conversation happens in the Hall of/ South American Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History,” brashly and semi-ironically situating an entire genre of poetry in the colonized historical past. In a long digression, he explains cultural appropriation to a non-Native reader: These writers repurpose their cultural history for poetic fodder. Erdrich said of the anthology’s writers, “There are people who have language recovery as part of their poetry, and they’re responding to traditional forms sometimes in that. I think history is a core, both personal and tribal, something people might be responding to, the stories of their people. And then of course there are typical responses to several centuries of cheating and dialogue between the U.S. and Native nations.”

In Layli Long Soldier’s long poem “38,” she recounts the execution of trader Andrew Myrick during the Sioux Uprising of 1862. Myrick had deprived the Dakota people of a line of credit when they were starving, saying, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” Long Soldier writes,