Kinship, Epistemic Relation, and New Indigenous Formalism

This lecture will provide an introduction to Indigenous poets who have published their first books in the 21st century. It will examine evolving formal practices that extend vital continuities of tribal social and epistemic relation and consider how formal invention is neither a turn away from politics nor a capitulation to mainstream experimentalism. Rather, we will work with the idea that rigorous reimaginations of form and structure are ways of attending to social and intellectual relations irreducible to colonial ontologies. We will look closely at poems that respond to issues of representation in contemporary literature and culture through the assertion that language, land, and history are not artifacts to be represented by poetry, but are methods for making and remaking Indigenous thought in an evolving political and cultural ecosystem. 

Joan Naviyuk Kane (Harvard University) grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, with family from King Island (Ugiuvak) and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She is the author of The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, and Milk Black Carbon. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction in the Department of English at Harvard University.