From Technology to Half-breeds: Why you should sometimes change horses in the middle of the stream

Like every other course that I have taken in both undergraduate and graduate school that has examined multiple authors from various backgrounds, this course offers very little in the way of indigenous voices for examination or analysis. With the exception of a few mentions in excerpts from selected authors, Native American voices are notably absent in an examination of “American Poetry Since 1945”. How are Native American voices missing from a course on “American” poetry? Is it possible that there are no poems being written by indigenous people? Is it likely that Native poets aren’t specified as “native” in their bios, and are therefore not recognized as being Native? Could this exclusion be a direct result of colonialism, or is this omission more sinister? These are questions that I began to explore as I considered my final project for this course. 

Initially, my interest began as a question of accessibility. How many Native poets are currently writing poetry, and how easy is it to find that poetry if it is being written? However, the internet changes the meaning of accessibility in relation to works of literature in the present day. With new social media platforms emerging every day from which to share original content, the reach of individual poets potentially gets broader while the world seems to get smaller and more reachable. While the internet was not available in 1945 to quickly and easily share works then, it is available now to research and locate poetry from that time period. Exploring this as a “then-vs-now accessibility” dilemma seemed like a fitting framework from which to start, and that also allows exploration of the field of Native American poets in the past and in the present. 

At this point, I should be fleshing out a hypothesis and trying to discover a gem that I can polish into a thesis. And yet … this is inevitably where something gets derailed. In this case, the something is me because the bane of my existence when writing a research based paper is the very heart of the paper – the research. While articles and scientific studies about Native American poets, accessibility, and the impact of technology on both tribal destruction and survival abound, other strands began to emerge that pulled me away from this very worthy yet somewhat cerebral pursuit. In the midst of examining some noteworthy Native poets and their poetry, I kept coming up against a sub-thread of identity that is common in Native writing and hits very close to my own heart, the Half-breed. Midway through my fourth article that mentioned half-breed natives, I realized that while my brain is fascinated with the questions about which poet was available to whom through what publication in which decade, my heart is screaming to explore this idea of the half-breed that has been an integral part of my personal identity for as long as I can remember. Therefore, I am pivoting in order to examine how a person navigates a biracial identity in the context of a culture that is often ignored while also being systematically erased to show how a strong personal identity gained through creative pursuits like poetry might be enough to reverse decades of a culture being intentionally ignored in academic conversations. This is a specific topic with global reach built-in as virtually every country, every culture, on earth can deal compassionately with their Native population.

I appreciate your patience as I navigate the research for this new direction while also seeking to discover more about what makes me both unique in a white world and common but still out of place in an indigenous setting. Trying to understand how Natives are often left out of academic discourse that centers “Americans” while exploring my own place in this landscape should prove interesting, but the hope is that this research contributes to the ongoing conversation of why it is imperative that Native voices be included in American spaces, especially in academia. In this, as in so many other situations in which a Native presence is conspicuously missing, it is important to reiterate the statement that so many indigenous people utter as a mantra every day:

We. Are. Still. Here.