ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Native American poets’ marshalling of haiku as a form of resistance and survival, a comparatively new dimension of haiku writing in North America. Whereas many Anglo-American poets have framed haiku writing as a white middle-class escape from subjectivity, this chapter finds conversely that some Native American poets employed the form in the service of cultural survival and for the exploration of racialized identities. In particular, Ford focuses on the writing of Native American poets Gerald Vizenor and William Oandasan and their distinctive engagements with haiku. The chapter also explores the paradoxically simultaneous urge to identify with Japan through haiku and to render haiku “native” to North America. Ford concludes by noting haiku’s “surprising utility as a form, supposed to suppress self-identification, for competing projects of national identity.”
