The Puritan Dream and Its Counter Voices: How Joy Harjo’s American Sunrise Reenvisions John Winthrop’s American Exceptionalism

With the colonization of what is now called the United States of America came a vision for how the settler community is supposed to operate. This vision, which will be referred to as the “Puritan vision,” was first articulated by John Winthrop in 1630 when the Puritans first left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As his speech, “A Model of Christian Charity,” gained currency, its ideals shaped the development of American exceptionalism. However, the fruit of this exceptionalism, cloaked in high-sounding phrases such as “Manifest Destiny” and “American Dream,” was inequality and injustice. Counter voices, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Joy Harjo, have stepped in to refute the foundational hypocrisy of the Dream. Harjo, in her poetry collection An American Sunrise, explores the consequences of this exceptionalism as she travels back to where her ancestors were forcibly removed during the Trail of Tears. She notes in her introduction that “there were many trails of tears” (xv), and in an interview with PBS she points out how “it wasn’t that long ago, just a few generations” (“US poet,” 4:50). As she revisits the Trails of Tears where her family and many Indigenous people were forcibly removed, she exposes the cruel results of the Puritan vision. Her poems reveal the injustice of American exceptionalism and envision a new way forward for America to become what it purports itself to be. By responding to the Puritan vision, Harjo addresses Winthrop’s words that allowed inequality and injustice and paves a new kind of vision and a new kind of Dream.