Cultural Interface in Joy Harjo’s Selected Poems: An Indigenous Standpoint Study

Abstract

Indigenous peoples faced obliteration, genocides, assimilation and displacement from their original lands by European for imperialist reasons. Consequently, their identity obliterated so indigenous communities confront these expansion campaigns with the aim of safeguarding their families and territories that is why thousands of them are killed. Many studies tackled indigenous people ordeals from many angles. However, Martin Nakata’s Cultural Interface in Joy Harjo’s selected poems is overlooked in these studies. Cultural Interface as first coined by Nakata to describe the contested space between indigenous and westerners. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate Nakata’s Cultural Interface in the Indian American Harjo’s Poems in light of Indigenous Standpoint Theory by the use of Nakata’s book “Disciplining the Savages Savaging the Disciplines” (2007). Thus, the first objective of this thesis is to investigate Harjo’s ways to demarginalize her indigenous culture through a selection of her poems in light of indigenous standpoint theory. The second objective is to examine Harjo’s involvement of Indigenous knowledge to claim that they are not an uncivilized nation through Nakata’s intersectionality of the cultural interface in light of indigenous standpoint theory. Harjo’s “An American Sunrise” (2019), “Conflict and Resolution for Holy Beings” (2015), “She Had some Horses” (2008) and “In Mad Love and War” (1990) are the selected collections for the current study. These collections display Harjo’s depiction of indigenous’ resistance, traditions, culture and knowledge in order to revive her people’s culture. The thesis concludes that applying Nakata’s cultural interface in the selected poems of Harjo is used to demarginalize indigenous people’s culture, by this theory we can claim that indigenous people are respected people and have productive knowledge parallel European knowledge so that they challenge Euro-American mainstream which devalue indigenous people of America.