This episode is about Indigenous women’s writing, technology, and community in contemporary American culture. We interview Mishuana Goeman about Heid E. Erdrich, a Turtle Mountain Ojibwe writer whose body of work experiments with multigenre, multimedia expression and places poetry at its centre.  We discuss poems from several collections by Erdrich, titled National Monuments, Cell Traffic and Curator of Ephemera, along with Erdrich's cookbook, titled Original Local.

In her standalone video-poem or “poemeo” titled “Pre-Occupied,” Erdrich delves into the many and nuanced meanings of “occupation” in American natural and cultural spaces, identifying Indigenous cultures as the original 100% of America, now recorded at 1% of its population, who seek to protect their homelands from environmental destruction and other forms of invasion. To produce the poemo, which brings together collage and animation, Erdrich collaborated with visual artists and musicians; their cultural touchstones include Langston Hughes and a Superman cartoon. Produced in 2013, the poemeo is bracketed by the Occupy Wall Street and Idle No More movements, and it traverses centuries of experience at the same time.

Kinship concepts and practices permeate Erdrich’s work: she has commented, for instance, on how the term “poemeo” was developed by her daughter and sister, the latter of whom is the well-known writer Louise Erdrich. In our discussion, we consider the place of publishing and bookselling as part of the intellectual and material conditions of the Erdrichs’ community, with a look at their establishment of Wiigwaas Press and Birch Bark Books, specializing in Indigenous writing and art, in Minneapolis and Heid’s additional focus on editing anthologies that highlight and make accessible the work of recent and current Indigenous authors for wide public audiences.