Joy Harjo on the Diverse, Groundbreaking World of Indigenous Poetry

We begin with the land. We emerge from the earth of our mother, and our bodies will be returned to earth. We are the land. We cannot own it, no matter any proclamation by paper state. We are literally the land, a planet. Our spirits inhabit this place. We are not the only ones. We are creators of this place with each other. We mark our existence with our creations. It is poetry that holds the songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming, and it is poetry we turn to when we travel those places of transformation, like birth, coming of age, marriage, accomplishments, and death. We sing our children, grandchildren, great-​grandchildren: our human experience in time, into and through existence.

When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Song Came Through, then, is a way to pass on the poetry that has emerged from rich traditions of the very diverse cultures of indigenous peoples from these indigenous lands, to share it. Most readers will have no idea that there is or was a single Native poet, let alone the number included in this anthology. Our existence as sentient human beings in the establishment of this country was denied. Our presence is still an afterthought, and fraught with tension, because our continued presence means that the mythic storyline of the founding of this country is inaccurate. The United States is a very young country and has been in existence for only a few hundred years. Indigenous peoples have been here for thousands upon thousands of years and we are still here.

When the first colonizers from the European continent stepped into our tribal territories, we were assumed illiterate because we did not communicate primarily with written languages, nor did we store our memory in books and on papers. The equating of written languages to literacy came with an oppositional world view, a belief set in place as a tool for genocide. Yet our indigenous nations prized and continue to value the word. The ability to speak in metaphor, to bring people together, to set them free in imagination, to train and to teach, was and is considered valuable, more useful than gold, oil, or anything else the newcomers craved. Many of our known texts, though preserved in orality, stand next to the top world literary texts, oral or ­written.

The Diné Blessingway Chant, or Hózhóóní, is a poetic song text that is remembered word for word and is central to a ceremony for setting a community in the direction of beauty, or healing. The Pele and Hi‘iaka saga of two sisters is an epic poem that carries profound cultural significance to this day in the practice and fresh creation of  ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i. Like the Mahabharata of the Hindu religion or the Iliad of ancient Greece, every culture, every tradition has its literature that guides and defines it—​and the cultures indigenous to North America are no different.

What then distinguishes indigenous poetry from other world poetry traditions? Much depends on indigenous language constructs, which find their way into poems written in other languages, as in English here. My own poem “She Had Some Horses” would not have been written without stomp dance, or without my having heard Navajo horse songs. So many poetry techniques are available, whether it’s utilizing metaphor, syntactic patterning, or some other application of poetic tools; and those of us who read and listen to poetry want our ears and perception “bent” for unique insight and want to see how the impossible becomes momentarily possible in the arrangement of language and meaning. This is true of poetry in all languages. Each tribal entity and language group is different.

English then has become a very useful trade language. We use it to speak across tribal nations, to people all over the world. Many of the poets here find a way to carry out established tribal form and content in English. Consider Louis Little Coon Oliver’s “The Sharp-​Breasted Snake” poem and its movement on the page. Some of the poets don’t want that at all, and instead they create and work within generational urban cultural aesthetics. What is shared with all tribal nations in North America is the knowledge that the earth is a living being, and a belief in the power of language to create, to transform, and to establish change. Words are living beings. Poetry in all its forms, including songs, oratory, and ceremony, both secular and sacred, is a useful tool for the community. Though it is performative there is no separation of audience and performer.

Even as we continue to create and perform our traditional forms of poetry, we have lost many of these canonical oral texts due to destruction throughout the Western Hemisphere of the indigenous literary field by the loss of our indigenous languages. We were forced to forsake our languages for English in the civilizing genocidal process. We are aware of the irony, for many of us, of our writing in English. But we also believe English can be another avenue through which to create poetry, and poetry in English and other languages can live alongside texts created and performed within our respective indigenous languages. It is the nature of the divided world in which we live.

Many who open the doors of this text arrive here with only stereotypes of indigenous peoples that keep indigenous peoples bound to a story in which none of us ever made it out alive. In that story we cannot be erudite poets, scholars, and innovative creative artists. It is the intent of the editors to challenge this: for you to open the door to each poem and hear a unique human voice speaking to you beyond, within, and alongside time. This collection represents the many voices of our peoples, voices that range through time, across many lands and waters. May all readers of this anthology bear a new respect for the unique contributions of these poets of our indigenous nations.

We are more than 573 federally recognized indigenous tribal nations in the mainland United States; 231 are located in Alaska alone. That number doesn’t include the indigenous peoples of Hawai‘i, the Kanaka Maoli, whose nation numbers over 500,000, and the indigenous peoples of Guåhan and Amerika Sāmoa. We speak more than 150 indigenous languages. At contact with European invaders we were estimated at over 112 million. By 1650 we were fewer than six million. Today we are one-​half of one percent of the total population of the United States. Imagine the African continent with one-​half of one percent of indigenous Africans and you might understand the immensity of the American holocaust.

There is no such thing as a Native American. Nor is there a Native American language. We call ourselves Mvskoke, Diné, or any of the other names of our tribal nations. In many cases these names often translate as “the people.” Within our communities we know each other as Bird, Wind, or Panther, or by other nomenclature determined by the particular tribal band, ceremonial ground, or family. Some of us grew up with the term American Indian, which came into use after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed into the region that came to be called the West Indies on his heavily financed trip to discover a shorter route for trade to India.

America is a derivative of the name of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. He proved that the West Indies and Brazil were not India but what became known as the New World. Native American became ubiquitous in the 1990s, employed by academics to replace American Indian. Only the youngest generations of Natives have begun to use that term. None of the original treaties signed with the federal government use the term Native American. Native, or Indigenous, or Native Nations are where we have settled in the editing of this ­collection. Many tribal nations have reclaimed or are reclaiming their original names. One of the first was the Papago, who now use their original name Tohano O’odham. Many tribes’ names mean “enemy” in the language of their enemy. For example, Sioux is a French name adopted by the English that was derived from an Ojibwe name that meant “little snakes.”

Because we respect indigenous nations’ right to determine who is a tribal member, we have included only indigenous-​nations voices that are enrolled tribal members or are known and work directly within their respective communities. We understand that this decision may not be a popular one. We editors do not want to arbitrate identity, though in such a project we are confronted with the task. We felt we should leave this question to indigenous communities. And yet, indigenous communities are human communities, and ethics of identity are often compromised by civic and blood politics. The question “Who is Native?” has become more and more complex as culture lines and bloodlines have thinned and mixed in recent years.

We also have had to contend with an onslaught of what we call “Pretendians,” that is, nonindigenous people assuming a Native identity. DNA tests are setting up other problems involving those who discover Native DNA in their bloodline. When individuals assert themselves as Native when they are not culturally indigenous, and if they do not understand their tribal nation’s history or participate in their tribal nation’s society, who benefits? Not the people or communities of the identity being claimed. It is hard to see this as anything other than an individual’s capitalist claim, just another version of a colonial offense. We note that there are some poets who have cycled through varying tribal claims from their first appearance in print. Some claim identity by tenuous family story and some are perpetrating outright fraud. We do not want to assist in identity crimes.

Within the pages of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Song Came Through you will find 161 poets. There were many more poets we wanted to include, but we were limited by the available number of pages. The poets span four centuries, from the 17th to the present. The earliest recorded written poem by a Native person was composed as an elegy by “Eleazar,” a senior at Harvard College in 1678, whose tribal identity remains unknown. He most likely died before graduating. We do not know anything about Eleazar’s life. All we have is his poem, “On the death of that truly venerable man D. Thomas Thacher, who moved on to the Lord from this life, 18 of August, 1678,” which is written in Latin. Three lines translated into English read:

. . . ​With righteous tears, and with weighty grief.
The mind is senseless, the mind is silent, now the hand refuses this just
office . . . ​

The Boston minister Cotton Mather published the elegy in his most famous book, Magnalia Cristi Americana (1702). Mather commented on Eleazar’s contribution: “And because the Nation and Quality of the Author, will make the Composure to become a Curiosity, I will here, for an Epitaph, insert an Elegy, which was composed upon this Occasion (Thacher’s death) by an Indian Youth, who was then a Student of Harvard College.”

The most recent poems in the anthology center indigenous tribal traditions and knowing within contemporized oratorical forms, far from the confines of Puritanical constructions.

In the collection more than 90 nations are represented. This speaks to the powerful presence and practice of poetry within our communities. These poems range from ceremonial, like the opening to the anthology by the renowned Kiowa poet and writer N. Scott Momaday, to concrete constructions like Orlando White’s “Empty Set” and Wayne Kaumualii Westlake’s “Hawaiians Eat Fish.” These poets range in age from high school students whose poems appeared in tribal and community newspapers in the late 1800s to the early 1900s, to young spoken-​word artists, to the above-​mentioned poet Louis Little Coon Oliver, whose first book of poems was published after he turned eighty years old.

Just as we have familial ancestors, so we have poetry ancestors. We venture to claim that even poetry anthologies have ancestor anthologies. This collection of poetry has ancestors and would not be here without them. One of the oldest anthologies that set contemporary Native poetry into motion was The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary American Literature, edited by Geary Hobson, first published in 1979 by Red Earth Press, then picked up by the University of New Mexico Press and published in 1981.

Ancestor anthologies include Songs From This Earth on Turtle’s Back, edited by Joseph Bruchac, Greenfield Review Press, 1983; That’s What She Said, Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, edited by Rayna Green, Indiana University Press, 1984; Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry, edited by Duane Niatum, HarperOne, 1988; Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans, edited by Kenneth Rosen, Arcade Publishing, 1993; Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers’ Festival, edited by Joseph Bruchac, University of Arizona Press, 1994; Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, W.W. Norton, 1998; and Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Hedge Coke, University of Arizona Press, 2012.

Recent relatives of this Norton anthology are New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich (Anishinaabe–​Turtle Mountain) and published in 2018 by Graywolf Press, which presents 21 Native poets first published in the 21st century; and Native Voices: Indigenous Nations Poetry, Craft, and Conversations, edited by Cmarie Fuhrman and Dean Rader and published by Tupelo Press in 2019.

Despite the contributions of the previously published Native poetry anthologies there are no other anthologies that attempt to address the historical arc of time and place of indigenous nations’ poetry. There has never been a Norton anthology solely of Native poetry, though Gloria Bird and I previously edited the Norton anthology of contemporary Native women’s literature noted above. One of the contributing editors of this book remarked during the process of editing that to have a Norton anthology of Native poetry means that finally we have a place in American poetry. We have always been here, beneath the surface of American poetic consciousness, and have questioned how there can be an American poetry without our voices.

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Adapted from When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Copyright (c) 2020 by Joy Harjo. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.