This chapter seeks to trouble the understanding of how the category of the “human” is articulated in the theory and literature concerning race. It asks how one might view the category of the “human” differently when the focus is shifted from Blackness to Indigeneity. Departing from the premise that Black studies recurringly examines the question of which bodies are assigned a fully human status in a white-dominated society, the chapter posits that Indigenous studies and literatures interrogating the category of the “human” oftentimes ask a question that moves beyond dehumanization: namely, how the human is constructed or constituted in relation to other forms of life, other-than-human or more-than-human, including the land itself. Beyond literary articulation and theoretical interest, this question also has political import as it works to shift the parameters of what is thinkable as politics under the auspices of settler colonialism, as this chapter shows through the analysis of present-day Indigenous poetry by Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash) and Natalie Diaz (Mojave).

This essay looks at the innovations in poetry and poetry publishing from 2001 to 2018, with a particular emphasis on the emerging generation of Indigenous poets like Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Natalie Diaz, and Layli Long Soldier. While paying close attention to the themes and motifs that have been of interest to Native writers, this essay foregrounds innovations in poetic form, including erasures and strikethroughs, complicated syntax, and typographical experimentation. A good deal of recent Native poetry takes on English and its rules and structures as a tool of colonization, repression, identification, and misinformation, and in so doing, seeks to remake English so that it might be viewed through an Indigenous lens.