An Introduction to this Collection
About "Mapping Indigenous Poetry of North America, 1830-1924":
This is an ongoing project to map, make searchable, and thematically arrange poems by indigenous poets, previously known and unknown, who were writing during the long 19th century across the United States and Canada. Some of the poems in this collection are newly digitized, while others can be found easily online through direct search. This project's key contribution, in addition to digitizing some poems previously held in archives but not made searchable, is visualizing and linking this dramatic range of poems by spatial association (mapping) and thematic resonances. The hope is that by not only making these poems widely available, but by making the exploration of these poems more interactive, with more avenues for discovery, both scholars, students, and the public can more readily explore the cultural significance of indigenous poetry. The key mapping element of this project was inspired by Poet Laureate Joy Harjo's project "Living Nations, Living Words", an astounding collection of oral performances by contemporary First Nation's Poets. Harjo's project emphasizes original poems that grapple with "place and displacement," and four touchpoints "visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment." Harjo's project insists upon the thriving present and future of the First Nations that these poets represent, and resists the continuance of settler colonialism by remapping the North American continent with touchpoints from indigenous cultures. This project, in turn, seeks to further revision and make visible the past of indigenous poetry in North America.
Explore the Map Here!
Future possibilities of this project are uncountable. While the digitization and collection aspect of the project widens the audience for these poems to a more extensive public, this collection also has particular potential for environmental humanities scholars. Nature, land ownership, and (if you will allow me the anachronism) environmental justice, are the most prevalent themes in the poetry collected here, marking this body of indigenous poetry as a central repository for understanding the environmental imagination in the long 19th century. Further work deriving from this collection might examine the ways that indigenous nature poetry is borrowing from and responding to settler colonial concepts of nature during the same period, especially in respect to the immense popularity of the transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau.
How to Navigate This Site:
This collection of poems has multiple organizational modes that can offer different ways to discover and move through the poems collected here. Option 1: Table of Contents (Below)
Listed below are all of the indigenous poets that have poems featured on this site. By clicking on the indigenous poet's name, you will find yourself on a page with a brief biography, and a subsequent table of contents of all of their poems collected here. If the poems have been derived from a published book, the poems will be found in the order that they were published originally. "Paths" within the project will allow you to find the next poem in the path, often the next poem by the given author, at the bottom of the page.
Option 2: Map
By following the "Map" link at the top of the table of contents below, you can find a costume made map of all of the poems collected in this project. Poems which have specific locational references either in their dedication or in the contents of the poems themselves have been mapped as such, independently. All other poems by an author, if not place-specific, have been mapped under the author's name, to a place significant to the poet's life. Frequently, I have mapped these miscellaneous poems to the poet's birthplace or place where they spent the majority of their life. The map is interactive, and by clicking on a GPS marker, you can discover each of the poems themselves, or you can use the map-specific table of contents to find poems.
Option 3: Themes and Visualizations (Aka "Tags")
All of the poems have been tagged by thematic content. This allows users to discover links between poets and poems by the patterns and themes that they share. Each "tag" or theme has its own page with a brief rationale or description of the theme and tagging process, reminiscent of a finding-aid in traditional archives. Each tag page also has a unique table of contents of all of the poems tagged by this theme. The visualization above also offers a way to understand the relationships between poets, poems, and the thematic tags. The visualization also allows you to navigate to each poem as you desire.