Indigenous Homelands and Global Refugees: Unpacking Joy Harjo's Solidary Poetics in An American Sunrise

Abstract

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• Indigenous Homelands and Global RefugeesUnpacking Joy Harjo's Solidary Poetics in An American Sunrise
• Ana M. Brígido-Corachán (bio)

"I returned to see what I would find, in these lands we were forced to leave behind"

(Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise 5)

Introduction¹

In An American Sunrise, published in 2019, Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo considers land redress, migration, mobility (in)justice, and home/land building from personal, tribal, and hemispheric perspectives. The Muscogee Creek or Mvskoke were violently removed from their lands in Alabama and Georgia in the early nineteenth century and these processes have deeply shaped their history. Vulnerability and enforced movement have also marked Harjo's personal life trails and travels, as a young teenage mother fleeing her home, and as a writer and artist building new homes and planting community roots in diverse landscapes around New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and Oklahoma.² This essay aims to unpack the land-centered mobility strategies displayed by Harjo in An American Sunrise—a collection of poems that render Indigenous homelands as an open refuge for the vulnerable and disenfranchised, and where the reciprocal relations traditionally established between human and more-than-human communities must be strongly acknowledged. Actively contributing to global conversations that are reconsidering human and more-than-human relations and conflicts through an ethics of care and relationality (Held; Elías and Moraru; Martínez-Falquina), Harjo examines the effects of Indigenous land eviction and dislocation [End Page 125] as a result of both local and global settler colonialist forces that are still shaping the planet in the twenty-first century.

Through fifty-nine poetic texts (some of which draw from historical testimonies and other kindred literary works), Harjo's homeland first emerges as "a site of contestation" (Goeman 113) against colonialist policies that expelled the Mvskoke from their original territory nearly two hundred years ago. But she also considers the effects of Indigenous dislocation within a settler colonialist framework that continues to forcefully shape human mobility in the Americas; she brings attention to the displacement of Central American migrants, many of them Indigenous themselves, who are aiming to reach the US/Mexico border today. Setting Native American territorial dispossession and land redress in critical relation to global mobility (in)justice and to the contemporary refugee crisis, Joy Harjo reveals the tensions and complexities that arise when examining conflictive experiences of place that are rooted in irreconcilably polarized views. Challenging these binaries through juxtapositions and contrasts that trigger deeper reflections, reactions, and connections, Harjo builds a renewed conception of homeland as a shared responsibility in local and global contexts that are interdependent.

Guided by specific tribal histories but also by new forms of Indigenous workers' disenfranchisement south of the US border, Harjo posits these fundamental questions to the reader: How are the rights to exercise mobility and dwelling enabled or prevented by colonialist structures? How do we return to the lands our ancestors were forced to leave behind? How does one go back to a place that has been radically transformed by colonial violence, dispossession, suffering, and death? How does one adjust perception, language, and praxis when visiting and re-inhabiting such a place? Can we travel back through the memories of others? Do we return physically or emotionally, with destructive anger, or with compassion and solidarity for ourselves and for others? Can poetry become an instrument of intercultural mediation?

Through memory, place-based solidarity, and a vivid awareness of the colonial histories informing global mobility injustice, Harjo reframes concepts such as homeland, migrant, refugee, and the Trail of Tears, situating them within specific Mvskoke history but also [End Page 126] considering them through a relational framework that is grounded in two traditional Indigenous concepts: place-based solidarity and radical hospitality (Coulthard and Simpson; Coulthard in Daigle and Ramírez 82). For Harjo, these practices can contribute to land-centered conflict resolution efforts at home and in other territories around the world, with the Earth herself and more-than-human communities set as our relatives and responsibility.

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