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Joy Harjo Commemoration

Vol. 22 No. 2 (2026): Leaves 10th Anniversary

“Coming home through stories”: Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise

Submitted
August 28, 2026
Published
2026-09-02

Abstract

This article focuses on Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo’s 2019 collection An American Sunrise. It explores Harjo’s ability to resist through writing and allow poetry to generate counter discourses challenging the so-called dominant ones in a context where the settler structures that served to destroy Indigenous identities still prevail. This paper also highlights the need for the poet to restore the link to the territories from which the five “civilised” tribes were evicted and, in so doing, to reclaim her identity as a member of the Mvskoke nation. It concludes on an appraisal of the regenerative power of tribal narratives once they have been reactivated by reconnecting with the ancestral land of the Mvskoke people.