The Harjo Map: a tool with a feel for shared humanity

In a strategy to have a positive social, cultural, and educational effect during her poet laureateship, Joy Harjo (Creek/Muskogee) realized the open, on-line, interactive map, “Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples Poetry,”1 making poetry from living, Indigenous Americans widely accessible, and making those poets feel part of an interlocking American cultural system, thus rejigging the image of the literary, sociological, and physical country to include Indigenous populations of valuable cultural specificity. The use of literature to develop more empathy, ties into a deepening of the vision of propitious Indigenous sides of American reality. We characterize Harjo’s poetry, defining the spirit guiding the map project. Then we sample Indigenous poets within the interactive map-support, focusing on three themes: connection to the natural and mineral world, preservation of language, and persistence through humor. The poets (Henry Real Bird, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Louise Erdrich, and twelve others) channel Indigenous pasts, with mastery of Western poetics: with tropes, and sound patterns designed to deploy meaning artfully; there is a robust technical control of ironies and polysemic expression throughout. They are syncretic poets in the sense that, while specific Indigenous traditions happily persist, the poems are reconciled to living within and make novel use of the products of American society