Running out of Indian Time

Abstract

For Native women poets, writing into a poetic tradition and in a language, English, that has been part and parcel of their oppression, poetic techniques act as new time-keeping devices. Poets such as Joan Kane, Esther Belin, Natalie Diaz, and Joy Harjo utilize creative agency to reinscribe temporality, making present the power of both traditional and contemporary Indigenous knowledge. By reimagining time, these writers create multiple temporalities, each one with a different poetic possibility of a future. The restitching of time that occurs through Native poetry brings together the reservation and the city, stillness and motion, the cycles of the seasons and the cycles of the female body.