by JOY HARJO
In this map, you can begin anywhere.
Each location marker reveals a Native Nations poet and features an image, biography, and a link to hear the poet recite and comment on an original poem.
This body of work forms the foundation of a “Living Nations, Living Words” online collection in the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center.
23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry
The very first maps were drawn into the earth with stick or stone implements. They told us where we lived, the location of food, water, and danger. Some were star maps of the heavens, histories notched and painted, or symbols of stories that gave directions on how to live.
Some of the earliest indigenous maps of North America were not drawn. The placement and orientation of a village, its buildings, and even mound structures were markers that mirrored the meaning of the heavens, or other directional senses.
We mapped with weaving,
baskets, and in songs. We carry many kinds of maps in our poems. We
still do, even as we rely on maps of the newest technologies, like the
GPS we carry in our phones.
For my signature project as the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, I conceived the idea of mapping the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems. I want this map to counter damaging false assumptions—that indigenous peoples of our country are often invisible or are not seen as human. You will not find us fairly represented, if at all, in the cultural storytelling of America, and nearly nonexistent in the American book of poetry.
Like other living American poets, Native Nations poets use the tools of knowledge and creativity to ride the waves of language, even as we also tend to our indigenous cultural systems and communities. Our common language of English, or sometimes Spanish, is a crossing place, a place to meet many from all over the world. And, like any other group of humans, we travel for economic opportunities, for education, for love, and for adventure.
Though we may venture far from our origin story, we are bound by genealogy, by land, even by instinct.
Library of Congress for more