Reclaiming Home in Indigenous Women Poetry of North America

Abstract

The tendency of reclaiming home in Indigenous women poetry of North America is seen as a part of a multilayered decolonizing project, which aims at disclosing, reconstructing, and removing the effects of the colonial policy for self-determination and betterment of the Indigenous peoples. A precondition of reclaiming home is resurrecting tribal knowledge of belonging which situates the Indigenous subject within family and tribe and close connection to natural surroundings. This paper extends the boundaries of the concept of home from a physical space, such as house and homeland, to a representational one, such as community or cultural articulation, in which one finds comfortable identification (cf. Lefebvre 1991). This assumption supports the expansion of Indigenous agency to the realization of home on the global level. The paper takes a multidisciplinary approach and gathers a vast corpus of poetry, coming from different nations Indigenous to North America, and, therefore, from different locations and writing styles. While using the concept of the Indigenous to refer to Native Americans, Alaskans, First Nations, and Chicana/o, I will also briefly introduce the authors’ tribal affiliations to underline the collective pattern of suffering among the diverse groups.