Ecocritical Reading of Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem” & “Remember”

Joy Harjo is a renowned Native American poet whose poetry resonates with themes of survival, identity construction, spirituality, and man’s reconnection to nature. She merges the personal and collective histories, and blends music, myths, and memory to celebrate the traditions of her ancestors. She dedicates her poetry to talk about injustices against her indigenous people. Past studies dealt with themes of oppression and identity reconstruction in Harjo’s poetry, yet the investigation of the Natives’ reconnection to nature in the selected poems via Glotfelty and Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology(1996) is not done. Thus, the aim of the current article is to explore the revitalization of the indigenous voice of Harjo’s people in her ‘Eagle Poem’ and ‘Remember’ in light of the above-mentioned framework. Methodologically, the article conducts a textual analysis guided by some assumptions of the framework. The article concludes that Harjo’s celebration of the landscape and ecologicalconcerns resonate with the struggles and resilience of her marginalized people, which shows her poetics of the interconnected vision of identity and nature