4 Influential Indigenous Poets to Read
November marks Native American Heritage Month, a time dedicated to honoring the achievements and traditions of the Indigenous community. Poetry is just one of the many fields that Native Americans have contributed to. From poet laureates to Lambda Literary Award recipients, countless Indigenous writers have carved out their place in the genre and helped it flourish. If you are new to Indigenous poetry here are a few award-winning, deeply resonant poets to read first.
Heid E. Erdrich
Heid E. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, has authored six poetry collections. Her most recent book, Little Big Bully, excavates the long-standing feminist resistance against stalkers and harassers in searching political poems that question what truth is now and how to find it. Edrich’s first collection, Fishing for Myth, explored the mythic elements of daily lives, digging into how passed-down family stories become holders of ritual, trauma, and spirituality. These threads of lineage, upbringing, and culture reach across all of her collections. Erdrich has also been appointed as the first Poet Laureate of Minneapolis and has received a National Artists Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, amplifying poetry both locally and nationally. With her sister, writer Louise Erdrich, she founded and led the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop.
Get started with Little Big Bully, Heid E. Erdrich’s 2020 collection.
Heather Cahoon
Heather Cahoon is a scholar of federal Indian policy and the founder of the University of Montana’s American Indian Governance and Policy Institute, interdisciplinary work that informs and drives her award-winning poetry. Cahoon, who lives in Missoula and grew up on the Flathead Reservation in Southwest Montana, writes with an alternatively piercing and gentle focus on place, with the reservation towns and the history of the land where she was raised serving as a major theme of her first chapbook, Elk Thirst. Her debut full-length collection, Horsefly Dress, considers the use of suffering and traces the role of evil in Native myth. Cahoon’s work has also appeared in multiple anthologies of vital Native voices, including When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, curated and edited by Joy Harjo.
Get started with Horsefly Dress.
Kinsale Drake
Kinsale Drake’s debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket, came out in September of this year and is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series. The Gen Z poet served as a National Student Poet from 2017-2018 and has already published poems in top journals, including POETRY, Black Warrior Review, and Poets.org. Drawing on her Navajo identity Drake s showcases both her relationship to inherited landscapes and rituals and to new, distinctly modern forms of pop culture, music, and more. Drake’s poems transcend a linear idea of time, stepping through and charting past, present, and future.
Get started with The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket.
Billy-Ray Belcourt
A queer writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation, Billy-Ray Belcourt has authored the poetry collections This Wound Is a World, which documents the pain and sadness of Indigenous people while searching for a decolonized, “at least a little gay” heaven, and NDN Coping Mechanisms, which contrasts Indigenous suffering with Indigenous utopia and possibility. Belcourt also writes across genres, and has published three other books of essays, lyrical vignettes, and fiction. Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body, which blends poetry and memoir, became a bestseller, earned praise from Ocean Vuong, and was reviewed by Oprah Magazine. Their work often showcases the intersections of their identity and the duality of indigenous experiences.
Get started with A History of My Brief Body.
Happy Native American Heritage Month! Celebrate and reflect on the month by picking up some of these poetry recommendations, attending readings and other programming near you, and centering indigenous voices all month long.
