A Love Made of Stones: Contemporary Anishinaabe Lyric and Asiniig Sovereignty

This article delves into the literary motif of the stone (asiniig) in contemporary Anishinaabe poetry as an ontological assertion of Indigenous sovereignty. By synthesising Michelle Raheja’s “visual sovereignty” (2007) and Kenneth White’s “geopoetics” (1979; 2004), I trace how poets Kimberly Blaeser, Louise Erdrich, and Denise Sweet deploy an Indigenous geopoetics that challenges settler-colonial cartographies. I argue that these poets reconfigure the lyric mode from a passive backdrop of Western Romantic contemplation into an active, decolonial practice of relationality. In addition, this study demonstrates how asiniig emerge in the lyric text not as inert matter, but as living ancestors and archives of archival memory, as well as ceremonial mediators. Moreover, I propose the term sovereignty of stones as a theoretical lens to examine how these lithic poetics disrupts Cartesian binaries, offering a unified cosmos rooted in Native American endurance and survivance.