TORONTO - Scattered throughout Kenzie Allen's debut poetry collection are familiar names: Indiana Jones, Pocahontas, Yoko Ono.

"The pop culture figures are not just fun, weird foils for me, which they are, but they're also a shared reference point," she said.

For a long time, she said, she felt like she had to include those reference points in her work – to name the stereotypes about Indigenous women so she could challenge them.

"I felt like I couldn't speak to lived experience — true lived experience — without speaking to those stereotypes first."

The Toronto-based Haudenosaunee poet said her poems are a way for her to reclaim her Indigeneity from those who labelled her too much or not enough — people in the publishing industry who encouraged her to move the more explicitly "Indigenous stuff" to the beginning of the book, rather than a section in the middle. Or the classmates in a long-ago writing workshop who told her they couldn't relate to her writing.

Allen, who is a first-generation descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, said many of those references were born of chips on her shoulder, grievances she's now aired out in "Cloud Missives," published Tuesday by Tin House.

The poems in the collection transform the British Empire into a dude-bro reminiscing about his glory days, trying desperately to hold on to them. They imagine Indiana Jones as a real archeologist. And they bring to life four representations of Indigenous womanhood — two real and two imagined.

Those poems, each titled a variation of "In Which I Become," see their central characters self-actualize. The Earthmother and Sky Woman poems centre guiding figures from Haudenosaunee culture, but the other two, which feature Tiger Lily from "Peter Pan" and Pocahontas, challenge the reader to imagine these figures more fully.

"Tiger Lily doesn't need to eat. Disney's Pocahontas doesn't need to retain custody of her children. Neither of these figures need to survive the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women," Allen said.

"When you turn something into a fantasy figure, you remove yourself from the real world issues facing, for example, Indigenous people."

But as time has gone on and portrayals of Indigenous people in pop culture have broadened, she feels less beholden to include such explicit cultural touchpoints.

She hopes readers also pick up on the more subtle markers of her Indigeneity that are intrinsic to her writing, from the beads she describes being strewn across her home to the language she uses to talk about the natural world.

Though Allen, who teaches poetry at York University, has devoted much of her life to studying an art form that has a reputation for exclusivity and inscrutability, she likes that her poems might be accessible to a wide audience.

Though this is her debut collection, Allen's work has previously been published in Poetry magazine, The Iowa Review and Narrative Magazine.

"Some people in the poetry world might think...the word accessible could be used as a dirty word," she said.

"I'm like: No, I think it's wonderful if my neighbour down the street reads a poem and really connects with it."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 20, 2024.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2024