Many poets have written about North America in a way that suggests there were no people here until the settler-colonial types showed up. Indigenous peoples lived here long before the establishment of the colonies that turned into states. They are alive today and speaking to the present moment. Are you listening?

November is Native American Heritage Month, and in honor of that, let’s look at some of the poetry that Native Americans are writing today. New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich (Dartmouth Class of ’86) came out in 2018 and curates Native American poetry published after the year 2000.

In her introduction, Erdrich writes, “We do and we do not write of treaties, battles, and drums. We do and we do not write about eagles, spirits, and canyons. Native poetry may be those things, but it is not only those things. It is also about grass and apologies, bones and joy, marching bands and genocide, skin and social work, and much more.”

Native languages are important to many of the poets in this book. For example, Margaret Noodin’s work appears in Anishinaabemowin and English. Her poems split the page between the two languages, with Anishinaabemowin on the left and English on the right. Here’s the first stanza of her poem “Waawiindamojig/The Promisers”:

Nangodingong                                          Sometimes

niizhing gimewon                                     the rain came twice

mii wi apii gii giiwanimowaad.                 and that is when they lied.

New Poets of Native Nations is full of moments that I keep going back to again and again. In a poem called “How Soon,” Gordon Henry Jr. gives us:

The sculptures grow by the day,

birds in ice, recognizable

eagles, a bear who began

as a man in a moment of dance.

In “Finders Keepers: Aboriginal Responses to European Colonization,” LeAnne Howe writes:

Bread is the human body

Bread confers immortality.

When my story is finished,

You will offer yourself again to me like bread.