This course will focus on contemporary poetics of Native North America, from “traditional” oral and written literature, to contemporary written and spoken-word performance, along with a variety of multigeneric readings that will inform students regarding the socio-historical, cultural and literary contexts from which the poetry emerges. Since “tradition” can be described as “practices that maintain and reinforce a continuous connection within a group,” we will seek to understand why and how Native North American poetry can be considered traditional, as well as why and how this poetry reflects an Indigenous identity and worldview. A look at the colonial educational practices and policies for American Indians in the United States will provide context for the often caustic criticisms of colonial domination expressed in Native poetry. Next, through an in-depth discussion and study of appropriation, students will gain conceptual framework that will expose the power-flows at play when Native writers strategically incorporate Euro-American literary formal devices as a means of resistance. Students will also become familiar with the way that self-conscious and well-crafted genre-bending strategically unsettles Euro-American colonial authority in terms of aesthetics, definitions, boundaries, identity, bodies, lives, and places. Despite the sometimes gritty depiction of Indigenous experience in some Native American poetry, students will encounter numerous poetic voices that reject the role of victim or subjugation through trickster play, humor, and the celebratory enactments of survivance.