Pauline Johnson helps invent a different kind of modernist poetry that challenges representations of indigenous peoples as pre-modern. As public literary tastes shift from poems to legends at the turn of the twentieth century, E. In the Chicago area, Simon Pokagon uses insurgent practices of appropriation to criticize and revise colonialist American poetry through cross-racial citations and borrowings in his birchbark pamphlets and novel. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft draws from multiple cultural traditions as she manipulates time and genre through her mourning poems, ballads, and lyrics in the Anishinaabe world of the Great Lakes. Each chapter examines how indigenous poets comment on the practice and form of poetry, thus speaking to a diverse community of poets and readers through a variety of verse traditions. In this dissertation, I argue that early Native North American poets chose to write in specific poetic genres in response to local, national, and international publishing worlds. Indeed, understanding early indigenous poets’ formal choices and poetic communities challenges critical narratives of American poetry’s history as having been linear and progressive, demanding a new way of organizing the study of American poetry. hegemony and assert sovereignties from the sexual to the tribal to the national. Examining this poetry reveals how indigenous writers manipulated poetic genres to contest U.S. Yet indigenous North American poets also composed and published poetry and participated in reading communities during this time. During this time the figure of the Indian was, in poetry, customarily depicted as melancholy and moribund, a noble savage making way for a supposedly superior civilization and race. The story of American poetry has developed alongside the idea of America itself, becoming almost synonymous with national sovereignty projects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hatchet awaiting evil rarity