Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry by Molly McGlennen (review)

While works of Indigenous prose have seen a blossoming in literary criticism, Indigenous women’s poetry has been long overdue for similar examination. Molly McGlennen’s Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry presents a welcome critical examination of the genre of poetry and its intersections with gender and nation, as well as the way alliance building between Indigenous poets facilitates pushback against settler-colonial boundaries, resistance to imposed binaries and identities, and a renewed creativity.

McGlennen’s inquiry is driven by her connection to Indigenous and poetic communities, as well as her own studies and creative work in the field, and she notes that this may lead to an “experiential interpretation” of her peers. Supplemented by her interviews with many of the poets she examines, this leads to a more nuanced understanding of the approaches to craft of each of these poets and the specific inclusion of poets she feels are underrepresented in the attention of the critical field, such as Diane Glancy, Wendy Rose, Kimberly Blaeser, Luci Tapahonso, Esther Berlin, Allison Hedge Coke, Elizabeth Woody, Linda Hogan, dg nanouk okpik, and more. McGlennen ultimately settles on a definition of “transnational” that is not tied irrevocably to the settler state (as “trans-Indigenous” proponents such as Chadwick Allen may attest) but that does acknowledge the ways these poets negotiate their own histories and traditions, as well as the ways they experience and move through colonial spaces. In fact, the gray spaces, the ways in which poets move through their world and forge connections across regions and in their communities, inform every step of McGlennen’s work, and the potential for coalition is reminiscent also of a kind of nation building, toward a nation both within and beyond one’s own tribe.

McGlennen’s close readings, coupled with her often intimate knowledge of the work’s production or performance from her own experiences and interactions, are rich and expansive, though the inclusion of further theoretical scholarship within the text, such as in areas of Indigenous feminism and anthropology, might have helped to solidify the reader’s understanding of the effects of the colonial viewpoint on areas like science, identity, and intersectionality. Perhaps further terms from these disciplines, such as reterritorialization, might have proved useful and might have amplified McGlennen’s examinations of the rhetoric with which we discuss Indigenous peoples and their work and that rhetoric’s effects; likewise, McGlennen’s examination of gender might have been enriched by a less binary framework, one that includes nonbinary, Two-Spirit, and transgender peoples. To this end, the inclusion of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies and Smith’s discourse on authenticity is illuminating (though the modern dispute of “decolonization as metaphor,” a discussion that Smith’s work helped spur, is not addressed directly), as is her use of Trinh T. Minhha’s Woman, Native, Other, Lee Schweninger’s Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape, and other critical texts and anthologies. McGlennen does not necessarily include multimodal or visual work, forms that Native writers frequently utilize as a means of representing the layering of time or resisting Western expectations of narrative, within the lens of her close readings, but she does mention other poets she wished to have been able to include, such as Heid Erdrich and Layli Longsoldier, as she implores others to do further work.

All in all, McGlennen’s book leaves one with a distinct impression of hope—that the key to what is vibrant and transnational in Indigenous women’s poetry lies in the relationships they and their work build between each other, between poet and audience, and between Indigenous people and the multitude of landscapes they may love, encounter, and express.