Who gets to speak for iconic American spaces and whose voices define them? Can poems intervene in public memory and offer insights into erased histories? How does poetry represent Indigenous space in a way that rejects colonial mapping, reclaiming sites of dispossession and extraction? This seminar invites participants to consider such questions by focusing on Indigenous rewritings of the Mississippi River in the work of two contemporary poets, Joy Harjo (Creek) and Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe).
The Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota (photo by Sara Černe)