Kolby KickingWoman
ICT
The talent in Indian Country is immense and only beginning to be tapped.
Representation, while historically lagging, is starting to gain steam across a large number of mediums.
What may be well known to some and a little less to others is the recent and concurrent reigns of Indigenous Poets Laureate across the country.
Of course, Joy Harjo, Muscogee Nation, was the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2022 and was the first Native to hold the position. Heid Erdrich, Ojibwe and Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, served as the inaugural Minneapolis Poet Laureate in 2024.
In Montana, Chris La Tray, Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, is nearing the end of his term that began in August 2023. Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, is in the middle of a five-year term as North Dakota Poet Laureate, and Mark Turcotte, Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, was named the sixth Illinois Poet Laureate and the first Native to hold the position earlier this spring.
While there have been great Indigenous authors over the decades, the groundwork they laid is helping today’s authors thrive. Turcotte said the Native writers of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s did a lot of the “Indian 101” work.
“Now these young writers don’t have to spend as much of their artistic energy explaining who they are, but just instead expressing who they are,” Turcotte said. “So they’re just taking leaps and bounds and creativity in the way they’re portraying themselves and their worlds that are just astonishing to me.”
Turcotte also credits places like the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and other tribal colleges, where young writers and artists today are free to express themselves.
“The joke is, you can throw a stick and hit a Native poet in the eye. You know, I mean, there’s just so many of them,” he joked.
La Tray loves the fact that, at one point, Lajimodiere, Turcotte, Erdrich and himself shared time as Poet Laureate of their respective areas.
“From Montana to the other side of Minnesota, it’s Anishinaabe poets who are Poets Laureate, so there’s a kind of a burnishing of pride to say, ‘Yeah, we’re dominating this region,’” La Tray said. “I say that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but there are just an abundance of great Native poets all over the country from every culture that you can imagine. Whether it’s Southwest and Southeast and the upper north and all of that, I feel like we’re setting a bar for other poets to try and recognize. And I love that.”
While the duties for poets laureate vary from state to state and are often broadly defined, they are usually expected to promote the reading, writing and appreciation of poetry within the general public.
The most rewarding part for Lajimodiere and La Tray is working with young people, particularly Native youth.
“I think it’s important to me, because I did not have a mentor when I was in high school. So I love when I get invited into high schools,” Lajimodiere said. “I encourage them to write and tell them that, that they are poets, that they can, they can be a poet, you know, at a very young age.”
La Tray said poetry can be used as healing or as an outlet for Native youth, while also echoing the sentiment of Lajimodiere that holding these positions shows Native youth there are folks who look like them out in the world succeeding.
“There’s the importance that youth be encouraged to tell their story, no matter how they choose to do it,” La Tray said. “You know, poetry is one avenue that I give a pretty broad definition to. I think any of the arts are essentially poetry. Any kind of expression is poetry. So I like to encourage them to do that and in whatever way that it comes out of them.”
For Lajimodiere, who remembers writing her first poem when she was 10, poetry was a way for her to deal with being shy, introverted and having low self-esteem. Her first poetry book, “Dragonfly Dance,” focused a lot on her trauma growing up and was very healing.
“So that’s what I think poetry can do to a lot of Native kids who are struggling, can help them find their identity and also deal with grief and with trauma,” Lajimodiere said.
With the Native representation across media and mediums that has exploded today, La Tray cited Harjo, Lily Gladstone and “Reservation Dogs” as examples that were not there in the past.
“I think it’s important for Native youth to see Native people out succeeding in all these ways that maybe they thought was denied to them,” La Tray said.
The love for poetry runs deep among the three poets interviewed for this story. While there are a lot of rules for different forms of poetry, they can also be stretched or broken.
“I know there are a lot of rules to poetry, but the poetry that I was introduced to didn’t seem to have rules, and they seemed to defy the rules of grammar and writing sentences and stuff, and that was just attractive to me,” Turcotte said. “So that was a natural place for me to play.”
La Tray compared the medium to punk rock. He said you write poetry because you love it, not because you aspire to become financially successful by it.
“Which is kind of the story of punk rock. You know, punk rock, we’re just going to go out there and we’re going to blast our songs out, and we’re going to be disruptive, and we’re going to speak truth to power, and I think the essence of both punk rock and poetry are the same,” he said.
Lajimodiere shared an anecdote from her time studying for her doctorate. At the time, she asked a professor, “How do you know when a poem is done?”
“‘You don’t,” she recalled him saying. “You just abandon it.”
In honor of these Indigenous Poets Laureate, this story is abandoned.