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7 - The Multiplicity of Early American Indian Poetry

from Part II - Assimilation and Modernity (1879–1967)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Robert Dale Parker
Edited by
Melanie Benson Taylor
Melanie Benson Taylor
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

This essay introduces the understudied archive of early Native American poetry by reading a series of little-known poems that face the routines of ordinary life, including the observation of nature, scientific curiosity, complicity with Manifest Destiny, work, curiosity, resistance to and complicity with ideologies that exoticize Indigenous peoples, sexual anxiety, and self-critical reflection on environmental devastation. These poems speak with a shifting blend of irony, doubt, pride, political resistance or complacency, and resentment or embrace of stereotypes, while each poem also models how lyrical cultural interpretation can confront internal contradictions and competing impulses. In these ways, poetry’s capacity to represent intense literacy moves beyond colonialist, demeaning views of American Indian cultures and histories and invites us to see American Indians not only as topics of literary history but also as its creators.

Keywords

Native American poetryCarlisle Indian Industrial SchoolAlex PoseyLynn Riggs
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Native American Literature , pp. 131 - 148
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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