From Fugitive Poses to Visual Sovereignty : The Photo-poetics of Leslie Silko’s Storyteller and Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave

Abstract

This essay foregrounds Indigenous critical perspectives on the history of photography in the U. S. West. It considers how two Native writers, Leslie Silko and Joy Harjo, resist the settler-colonial narrative of “vanishing” Indians in their multigenre texts. By narrating the “fugitive poses” staged by white and Native photographers, Silko (Laguna Pueblo) and Harjo (Muscogee Creek) mobilize still images through time and space to generate open and flexible literary forms. Deploying what Gerald Vizenor calls “a tricky, visionary resistance,” they relocate their bodies and their voices to the center of an ongoing process of native storytelling and thus reclaim the power of photographs to express and transform individual and communal identities.

Keywords

• native photography
• visual sovereignty
• photo-poetics
• Leslie Silko
• storytelling
• Joy Harjo