The Tools of a Cartographic Poet: Unmapping Settler Colonialism in Joy Harjo’s Poetry

Abstract

This essay looks at alternatives to the Cartesian forms of mapping that have come to structure settler colonial geographies. The poetry of Joy Harjo enables an engagement with concepts of spatial justice from an Indigenous feminist practice. I place Harjo’s poetry into multiple conversations with various tribal stories and geographies, thus illuminating constellations of human relationships to each other and to land and their complexity. Settler colonialism is about putting into place settler understanding of geography. These are always gendered practices. Language and concepts of storied land enable us to push for a spatial justice that unpacks settler produced knowledges. It is this type of focus on land that engenders my desire to (re)map socialities that will materially and mentally sustain future Indigenous generations.