African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology

Native American (Indigenous American)

While working on this Anthology, we've encountered a number of poems dealing with Native American communities. 

The most interesting and perhaps most important place to start might be with Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, who was born on Long Island, New York, with mixed African American and Native American (Montaukett) ancestry. (Both of her parents were of mixed descent, but her Montaukett ancestry was on her mother's side.) A good place to start with Olivia Ward Bush-Banks' poetry might be "On the Long Island Indian" (1916)

However, other African American poets who did not have Native American ancestry also engaged with issues involving indigenous communities in various ways. Mary Ashe Lee's 1894 poem "Tawawa," for instance, recognizes the Shawnee name for the place where a new HBCU was being built (Wilberforce University in Ohio), and imagines a Shawnee point of view.  

Mary Weston Fordham's "The Cherokee" has some similarities with Olivia Ward Bush-Banks' "On the Long Island Indian" -- it imagines a Cherokee warrior emerging from the woods and musing on the forced removal of the people from the land. As with the Lee and Bush-Banks poems, it is a poem marking the absence of Native American people. 

T. Thomas Fortune's "The Savage Dreamer" imagines a Montaukett man who is in love with a white woman, but prevented from marrying her. It's unclear whether the poem is based on a true event. 

Eloise A. Bibb's poem "Captain Smith and Pocahontas" (1895) imagines the narrative of Pocahontas from Captain Smith's point of view -- he expects to be killed by his Native American captors in Virginia, but is saved by the love of a Native woman. 

Albery A Whitman's collection Not a Man, Yet a Man (1877), has a long epic poem dealing with a Native American woman, Nanaawa, and her encounter with western explorers. 

Some of the engagements are a bit more incidental. H. Harrison Wayman's "Chicamauga" is the story of a Black cavalryman who apparently saves a Native American boy from a cavalry stampede. 
 

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