Embodied Liberations: Indigenous Epistemologies as Poetic Practice

An apology entered into the record. A mascot retired. A monument dismantled. What if liberation is not something we seek outside ourselves, but a practice we carry in the body? Following the work of Indigenous poets and theorists, this talk takes up poetics as a liberatory practice, one any reader can learn to enact at the scale of breath, line, and refusal rather than at the scale of the state.

Reading Layli Long Soldier's WHEREAS alongside Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise, we attend to how embodied form carries liberation as relation and obligation rather than as freedom from constraint. We see this in the grammar Long Soldier turns against a federal apology and in the relational, gendered labor of Harjo's elegy for her mother. Together we read and write by breath, leaving with a portable practice for making these liberations legible in our own writing.

A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Santee Frazier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His first collection of poems, Dark Thirty (2009), was published by the University of Arizona Press, which released his second collection, Aurum, in 2019. Frazier's honors include a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, the School for Advanced Research Indigenous Writer-in-Residence, the Native Arts & Culture Foundation Literature Fellowship, and an Amant Studio & Research Residency Fellowship in Siena, Italy. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colgate University.

Our Brown Bag series repeats every Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. These talks are catered, free, and open to all.