Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women's Poetry

by Molly McGlennen Ph.D.

Overview

Tribal histories suggest that Indigenous peoples from many different nations continually allied themselves for purposes of fortitude, mental and physical health, and creative affiliations. Such alliance building, Molly McGlennen tells us, continues in the poetry of Indigenous women, who use the genre to transcend national and colonial boundaries and to fashion global dialogues across a spectrum of experiences and ideas.

One of the first books to focus exclusively on Indigenous women’s poetry, Creative Alliances fills a critical gap in the study of Native American literature. McGlennen, herself an Indigenous poet-critic, traces the meanings of gender and genre as they resonate beyond nationalist paradigms to forge transnational forms of both resistance and alliance among Indigenous women in the twenty-first century.

McGlennen considers celebrated Native poets such as Kimberly Blaeser, Ester Belin, Diane Glancy, and Luci Tapahonso, but she also takes up lesser-known poets who circulate their work through social media, spoken-word events, and other “nonliterary” forums. Through this work McGlennen reveals how poetry becomes a tool for navigating through the dislocations of urban life, disenrollment, diaspora, migration, and queer identities. McGlennen’s Native American Studies approach is inherently interdisciplinary. Combining creative and critical language, she demonstrates the way in which women use poetry not only to preserve and transfer Indigenous knowledge but also to speak to one another across colonial and tribal divisions. In the literary spaces of anthologies and collections and across social media and spoken-word events, Indigenous women poets are mapping cooperative alliances. In doing so, they are actively determining their relationship to their nations and to other Indigenous peoples in uncompromised and uncompromising ways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806147666
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	08/04/2014
Series:	American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series , #62
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	230
File size:	794 KB

About the Author

Molly McGlennen is Assistant Professor of English and Native American Studies at Vassar College in New York. She is the author of articles focused on Native American women’s poetry and a collection of poetry, Like Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits.

Read an Excerpt

Creative Alliances

The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women's Poetry

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By Molly McGlennen

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4766-6

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CHAPTER 1

Gender and Genre

Critical Engagement with Nationalist and Transnationalist Methodologies

Reimagining Cultural Modes

Historically, Indigenous creative-cultural expression was recognized by each tribal nation's balanced perception of that which was both beautiful and useful. Whether weaving, beading, potting, painting, or storytelling, Indigenous artists engaged these mediums (and so many more) to reveal truths about themselves, their communities, and the world. In general, the usefulness of an object, including "the soundness of construction to ensure functional utility, or ritual correctness in the gathering of raw materials, or powers that inhere because of the object's original conception in a dream experience, or the number of times it was used in a ceremony" (Berlo and Phillips 9), correlated to how the community valued the piece aesthetically. In this way, creative production not only satiated the artist's individual desires and vision (perhaps images evoked from dreams), but it also shaped the intellectual and spiritual repository for the community. In many ways, this dynamic continues today.

While many contemporary Native American writers acknowledge the spiritual and intellectual properties of their creative expression in tribally specific ways, many also understand creative writing as a means to transcend nationalist boundaries and colonial borders in order to fashion global dialogues across a spectrum of experiences, realities, and issues. Indigenous women's poetry, especially, reveals these transnational designs by understanding poetry as a vehicle to travel across many storied landscapes at once. Because this possibility is often specifically engendered by the poetic form, many Indigenous women writers use poetry to map the mobility associated with contemporary Native life, as I will demonstrate in the following chapters.

Several Native women poets stress the connection between creative production and building tribal-community engagement and broader sociopolitical Indigenous networks. For instance, Janice Gould says in her essay "American Indian Women's Poetry: Strategies of Rage and Hope" that "poetry is ... the vehicle for prayer, song, and oration. Many American Indian women seem to write out of the notion that words are powerful, that they contain magic, potency, the ability to effect change in credible, meaningful ways" (806). Because of the transcendent properties of poetry as Native women writers express them to be, I argue that Indigenous women's poetry highlights some of the limitations of nationalistic approaches to understanding the work just as it suggests how central tribal identity is. While tribally specific readings of Native poetry provide clear pragmatic importance to our understanding of Native culture and politics, the poetry also suggests broader transnational mappings of Indigenous resistance and relationship building. And I believe this is more than an exercise in semantics. In X-Marks, Scott Lyons reminds one that Native writers are part of a robust intellectual history of public Indigenous peoples both contesting and appropriating "dominant discourses of their time" that ultimately provides "a powerful critical pedagogy" (30). I am interested in how Indigenous women's poetry, at least, expresses a contemporary and collaborative narrative of just how varied Native experience is and how nuanced one's tools must be to make sense of those experiences.

Contemporary Native women's poetry supplies navigational tools for surviving, healing, and even thriving in the twenty-first century. Much of this has to do with how Native women are conceiving and utilizing art, and poetry more specifically. Creative expression for many Native women writers acts as means to decode and unpack colonial narratives and the historical legacies of violence against Native women within those settler narratives. Nancy Cooper says in her essay "Arts and Letters Club: Two-Spirited Women Artists and Social Change," "Art has always been a vehicle for political change, and artists have often been the first ones brave enough to hold a mirror up to a community or a society and bring to the fore issues such as racism, the effects of colonialism, classism and homophobia" (135). While in many ways Native writing articulates the deep-rooted connections to specific tribal nations, to specific landscapes, epistemologies, and cultures, it also tugs at those deep roots to delineate the ways in which the realities of Indigenous peoples' lives complicate notions of homeland, territory, and dislocation.

The concept of resistance through writing is nothing new and has been well documented and analyzed by such Indigenous writers and theorists as Simon Ortiz, Jace Weaver, Gloria Bird, Robert Warrior, Joy Harjo, and several others. The connections between feminism, writing, and resistance are also nothing new. As early as the 1980s, Paula Gunn Allen and Beth Brant were pioneering now common associations in Native American literary studies and Native American women's studies between feminist creative expression and resistance. For instance, in her preface "Telling" from Food and Spirits, Brant proclaims, "What good is this pen, this yellow paper, if I can't fashion them into tools or weapons to change our lives?" (14). Even earlier, women writers like Ignatia Broker, Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Ša, and others were in many ways expressing the Indigenous cultural contexts from their respective tribal communities at the same time they linked their writing to broader intellectual and political goals of self-determination. However, political resistance and cultural connection by way of poetry has not been explored to the extent of linking the specific literary genre of poetry to gender and issues of Indigenous feminisms.

Indigenous Feminisms

The well-known Cheyenne proverb "A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors nor how strong their weapons" emphasizes the essential and resilient position women held and continue to hold within Native communities. In fact, Indigenous people's histories reveal that Native women have always been the backbone of communities, have known how to feed their communities by any means necessary, have been instruments of fortitude during time of war, and have been the progenitors of cultural continuance; thus, it seems appropriate that a study of Native women poets in relation to poetry's facilities (which I will explain shortly) brings about a deeper understanding of a transnational Native American Studies, and specifically a transnational Native literary studies that relies on nationalist premises as much as it articulates broader cosmopolitan designs and reveals decolonizing objectives on a intertribal, hemispheric, or even global level. By extension then, it is imperative that scholars attentive to Native issues and methods continue to create and employ Indigenous women-centered analytical frames. Carolyn Dunn advocates as much in her essay "The Trick Is Going Home: Secular Spiritualism in Native American Women's Literature" when she says that "in forming our own literary criticism ... we can heal the vast schisms that seek to threaten our families, our communities, our tribes, our nations. Perhaps [Native women-centered works] are the first steps to define ourselves on our own terms, and those of us struggling in academia can create a methodology for contextualizing our aesthetic" (190).

Native women's drive to retell stories, rewrite the past, and initiate healing through their own words stems from a history of being silenced. Much of the west's understanding about Native Americans has been heavily influenced by the writing of European chroniclers and early ethnographers. Prevalent within these documents is the colonialist mentality that upholds gender inequity and the necessarily subordinate position of women in society. In their pursuit to tame and secure land and resources, colonists regarded nature as "gifts from God," believing they had both divine and civil rights to the Americas' "virgin" land and its creatures. What stood in the colonizer's way were nature's "inhabitants," the savage indian—heathens in the "untamed" environment. As Andrea Smith documents in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, the image of Native peoples, like the vanishing wilderness, reinforced an "absence" in the U.S. colonial imagination that "effected a metaphorical transformation of Native bodies into a pollution of which the colonial body must constantly purify itself" (9). Stemming from this mythology, the demonization and oppression of Native women grew because of their perceived dirtiness; this provided, moreover, the basis for the strategies of Euro-American men to maintain control over Euro-American women. Thus, as Smith argues, racism and colonial oppression served the purposes of patriarchy. While white women were subdued but "protected" by white men, Native women were dehumanized and hypersexualized as a means to implement gendered and racist hierarchical structures of power.

In efforts to subjugate Indigenous nations in the Americas, the practitioners of colonization and importers of Christianity recognized the implicit need to subdue Native women through rape and murder in order to maintain their hierarchy of gender and power; this was necessary to eradicate Native people's traditional egalitarian societies and uphold the colonizer's imperialist (as well as misogynistic and racist) agenda. According to Smith in her essay "Christian Conquest and the Sexual Colonization of Native Women," "The egalitarian nature of Native societies was threatening the legitimacy of the abusive nature of European societies; it was imperative that Native societies be exterminated and demonized in order to legitimize the European social structure" (381). Smith states further, "Colonizers realized that in order to subjugate indigenous nations, they would have to subjugate women within these nations. Native peoples needed to learn the value of hierarchy, the role of physical abuse in maintaining that hierarchy, and the importance of women remaining submissive to their men" (378).

Needless to say, Native women's stories and histories have, with few exceptions, been inaccurately portrayed, often tainted with sentimentality and delivered through a lens of western patriarchy and domination. In addition, what is historicized in ethnographic literature about Native societies is predominantly male-oriented or viewed through a framework that is imperialistic and paternal. However, Native texts—oral and written—show that North American Native women have been and are responding to over five hundred years of colonization by employing strategies toward survival and continuance.

In the chapters ahead, I focus on a gendered approach to Native poetry because of the specific targeting of Native women in the genocide against Native peoples, with sexual violence as an important colonial tool in that enterprise. As Smith analyzes in much of Conquest, Native women were and are seen as "the bearers of a counter-imperial order and pose a supreme threat to the dominant culture. [Thus], symbolic and literal control over their bodies is important in the war against Native people" (15). Contrary to this, Native belief systems generally project Native women as the carriers of culture, the progenitors of the generations to come that ensure the survival of their particular nation. Many traditional stories accord respect to Native women and their ability to perpetuate their community's values. In many ways continuing their roles as cultural carriers and mediatory envoys of their communities, contemporary Native women poets use poetry as a means to create narratives of resistance against narratives of control and to create connections to other writers around the Indigenous globe. While more and more Native women are writing and publishing poetry to date, the field is relatively unfamiliar to most mainstream and academic readers of literature. To some degree, this has to do with the shortage of scholars giving Native poetry significant consideration.

Indeed, there has been a lack of critical attention toward Native American poetry to date. As editors Dean Rader and Janice Gould note in their introduction to Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry, only a handful of book-length texts are devoted entirely to Native poetry, despite the burgeoning field of Native American literary criticism, and despite the (relatively) extensive attention to Native American fiction, autobiography, and transcriptions of oral traditions. As such, this book stems from the primary premise that Native women's poetry needs its own critical attention. Further, it attempts to trace the many types of continuums disclosed in Native women's poetry to reveal the specific Indigenous ways this form of creative expression is being used by the writers. Their work illustrates temporal, spatial, political, and epistemological trajectories that offer guidance on how Native communities have historically adapted, cross-pollinated, and incorporated tribal, intertribal, and colonial/western cultural and intellectual traditions. As much as tracing these trajectories provides a map of the evolution of Native orality and literature, that action also charts how Indigenous writing continues to operate as the nucleus of hemispheric literature; as such, Indigenous cultural production functions as the antiquity of the Americas' humanities. If Indigenous texts are a repository of the Americas' cultures, then understanding these trajectories in more complex ways will reveal indexes of tribal, intertribal, hemispheric, and global exchange.

Fundamentally, this book attempts to examine key (but as of yet unanalyzed) components of contemporary Native American poetry by mapping the distinct ways women writers deconstruct binaries that have historically defined academic study of Indigenous writing: temporally, spatially, politically, and epistemologically. Thus, the temporal binary of "traditional versus modern" is complicated by the evolution and adaptation of contemporary artistic production; the spatial binary of reservation versus urban living is complicated by Indigenous migration, diaspora, suburban life, and urban and reservation living; political tensions expressed in the literature such as tribal enrollment, citizenship, and blood quantum are complicated when writing is used to assert tribal sovereignty while it simultaneously outlines effective means of relationship building across tribal and colonial lines; and finally, epistemological dichotomies of the oral tradition versus written literature fall apart when contemporary Indigenous writers use poetry as an seamless extension of story making and living. As such, how do issues of genre and gender intersect with current literary debates of Native literary nationalism as well as Indigenous transnationalisms? Further, does reading such qualities as border crossing, hybridity, code-switching, and/or the erosion of cultural barriers in literature destabilize the tribal affiliation many Indigenous poets claim in their writing? Can Literary nationalism and Indigenous transnationalisms work in tandem? Finally, as Elizabeth Kalbfleisch suggests in her essay "Bordering on Feminism: Space, Solidarity, and Transnationalism in Rebecca Belmore's Vigil," can the trope of the border be a space for new types of Indigenous interlocution?

Beyond these scholarly concerns, I'm also interested in looking at the poetry of Indigenous women as a fellow poet and person of Anishinaabe and European descent. When I engage this lens as a poet-critic, I'm centering a type of scholarship that is attentive to the incredible risks Indigenous writers take and the closure critics can produce in understanding that writing. Indigenous writers continue to counteract colonial narratives of erasure and violence. Part of that poet-critic lens, then, brings forward more inclusive analytical models so to stave off the anthropologization and ownership that has often framed the work of Indigenous writers. With critical honesty, I have to not only recognize how analysis is done and who gets to do it, but also think seriously about audience. On whose behalf does a poet write and share her work—herself, her community, her tribe? And, is it always and forever on behalf of one person or group of people; is her community always in mind? For example, as a poet, I often think I'm speaking to my family as they are often my first readers; at the same time, I feel I'm speaking to Anishinaabe people (especially urban folks), and my every hope is that my poems will resonate with any Anishinaabeg who might read them. Yet, I have had non-Indigenous folks from Minneapolis and northern Minnesota alike tell me how much my poetry felt like home to them. Then again, at times my poems demonstrate that I am speaking as a San Franciscan urbanite, many of my pieces being written during my twelve years of living there, engaging the city's politics, running around with poets of all backgrounds, going to Mumia and Peltier rallies and intertribal powwows, barely affording my rent and tending bar at Nickie's on Haight Street every weekend to make a living. What's more, like many Indigenous women poets do, often I'm speaking in my poems to friends, other poets who I know will read them. That's my way to say hello and honor their work because I rarely get to see them (it is like our own virtual poetic messaging). And I could list a number of other "communities" my poems engage.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Creative Alliances by Molly McGlennen. Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
CHAPTER ONE. Gender and Genre: Critical Engagement with Nationalist and Transnationalist Methodologies,
CHAPTER TWO. Can a Poet Get a Soul Clap? Urban Experience and the "Spoken Word",
CHAPTER THREE. Adjusting the Margins: Revisiting Citizenship and the Politics of Identity in Poetry,
CHAPTER FOUR. Shadow Trails: Troubling Nationhood through Migration Routes,
CHAPTER FIVE. As the Spirals Found in Shells: Toward an Indigenous Land Ethic,
CHAPTER SIX. Keeping Company: Shared Poetic Spaces and Writing across Heteronormativity,
CONCLUSION,
NOTES,
WORKS CITED,
INDEX,

Editorial Reviews

Through her astute and thoughtful study of Native women poets, Molly McGlennen has reinvigorated the tradition of the poet-critic. Creative Alliances argues for the crucial role poetry must play in the larger conversation about sovereignty, nation, and Indigenous feminisms. This groundbreaking study is a much needed addition to the growing critical response to Indigenous poetry and poetics.——Janet McAdams, author of The Island of Lost Luggage and Feral.

From the Publisher