‘Those People that are Invisible’: An Interview with Santee Frazier

This interview with Oklahoma poet and educator Santee Frazier discusses the context and creative process for his first book of poetry, Dark Thirty (2009), and the importance of language and place in Native American poetry.

Mangled Coding: Class in the Poems of Santee Frazier

Santee Frazier’s 2009 collection, Dark Thirty reveals a text that can be largely read in the genre context of Native American poetry, around signifiers of poverty. Though Frazier passionately denies that his poems are constructed on a thematic basis, his curation of them in this collection does nevertheless add up to a coherent argument for interpreting his characters’ lives as specifically working-class lives, subject to interlocking and international forces of capital, displacement and documentation in a surveillance state.

7. Indigenous futurity

‘Indigenous futurity’ considers how indigenous revivals might be viewed as expressions of “futurity,” operating in resistance to those assumptions that consign Native American peoples and lifeways to the past. It discusses a range of Native American poetry and theatre, including the work of Simon Ortiz, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge, E. Pauline Johnson, Laura Tohe, and Joy Harjo. Whatever the form, contemporary Native poets look to oral literature and its long-held understanding of language as a source of change. Such poetry not only frees Native American voices, but confirms a spiritual awareness of ancestral land and community. Native American writers in all genres express an Indigenous world in all its complexity.