| This dissertation examines the poetry of four contemporary Native North American women---Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Kimberly Blaeser (Ojibwe), Elizabeth Woody (Warm Springs, Wasco, Yakama, Navajo), and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo)---in relation to Native aesthetics and spirituality. This dissertation establishes an interdisciplinary criticism of indigenous poetry by creating a lens that tribal-specifically frames each woman's work. What I term a Native Women's Theory ultimately purports close-reading from the "inside-out" in order to privilege distinct cultural, political, geographical, lingual, and epistemological loci germane to the nations and identities of each poet, while simultaneously taking into consideration the issue of gender in relation to indigeneity. This framework continually maintains an interrogative rather than a prescriptive approach to theory in order to reflect the flexibility and mobility in Native original knowledge and the syncretistic manner in which Native communities have always continued to survive and endure. While this dissertation secondarily utilizes western theoretical approaches such as Post Colonialism, Post Modernism, and Ecofeminism to unpack the literature, it ultimately employs each poet's particular location within the poetry itself based on identity, epistemologies, religious traditions, and Native language in order to illustrate a self-reflexive and collaborative hermeneutics. One of the goals of the dissertation is to add to the burgeoning field of Native American Literary Criticism. Finally, this dissertation works to honor the connection between spirit and creative expression as each woman fashions her poetry from a community-based perspective as a means to bear witness and to heal. |
