Kane 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.
Short description of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s Hyperboreal:
Hyperboreal originates from diasporas. It attempts to make sense of change and to prepare for cultural, climate, and political turns that are sure to continue. The poems originate from the hope that our lives may be enriched by the expression of and reflection on the cultural strengths inherent to indigenous culture. It concerns King Island, the ancestral home of the author’s family until the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs forcibly and permanently relocated its residents. The poems work towards the assembly of an identity, both collective and singular, that is capable of looking forward from the recollection and impact of an entire community’s relocation to distant and arbitrary urban centers. Through language, Hyperboreal grants forum to issues of displacement, lack of access to traditional lands and resources and loss of family that King Island people – and all Inuit – are contending with.
Järjestäjä
The event is organised in connection with the course Indigenous Literary Geographies and financed by the Academy of Finland project Mediated Arctic Geographies.
Lisätiedot
Johannes Riquet