“It Carries My Feet to These Places”: The Mississippi in Joy Harjo’s and Heid E. Erdrich’s Poetic Remappings

Abstract:Memory, place, and Indigenous resistance are explored in two poems whose central metaphor is the Mississippi River and the landscape near its delta and its source, respectively: “New Orleans” (1983) by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee) and “Pre-Occupied” (2013) by the Minneapolis-based Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) in its textual and collaborative video poem versions. I analyze these poems’ retheorizing of place by drawing on gender and Indigenous studies scholar Mishuana Goeman’s concept of “remapping,” arguing that the poems create an Indigenous Mississippi that replaces representations of the river as an icon of the U.S. empire and westward expansion. Both poets transcend regional and temporal boundaries, following the flow of the river to provide a broader definition of Indigenous homelands. Read together, “New Orleans” and “Pre-Occupied” traverse the three decades between their publication dates and the many miles that separate the Lower and the Upper Mississippi, demonstrating a riverine poetics that mimics the river’s flow to enact a relational cartography that defies colonial mapmaking. The poems rhetorically reclaim the historically significant Indigenous space of the Mississippi River Valley and embody on the page a space in which land and cultural memory can come together. In their remappings, both poets turn away from settler cities and their monuments toward rivers, presenting them as repositories of Native memories and suggesting that the health and future of Indigenous stories and waterways are closely linked.