Trickster Academy
80 pages, 7 x 9
none
Paperback
Release Date:08 Feb 2022
ISBN:9780816542659
Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. Jenny L. Davis’ collection brings humor and uncomfortable realities together in order to challenge the academy and discuss the experience of being Indigenous in university classrooms and campuses. Organized around the premise of the Trickster Academy— a university space run by, and meant for training, Tricksters— this collection moves between the personal dynamics of a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous woman in spaces where there are few, if any, others and a Trickster’s critique of those same spaces.
Trickster Academy is playful at times, yet more complicated and salient issues are at the heart of these poems. Davis’ Trickster Academy deeply challenges the institutions that still hold Indigenous remains in their archives and storage rooms, and the insincerities of the academy when it comes to acknowledging Indigenous peoples. The realities that the poems in Trickster Academy address are not only relevant to people in academic positions. From leaving home, to being the only Indian in the room, to having to deal with the constant pressures to being a ‘real Indian’, these poems illuminate the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.With wry humor moistening the margins of her poems, Jenny Davis showcases how her Indigenous people have become experts in sorrow and seethe.'—Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
‘The poems in Davis’s collection lean into the creative ironies only a slippery operator like Trickster could unearth, stemming from Chickasaw oral traditions and storied experiences. Distinctive about Trickster Academy is Davis’s teasing of language, which complicates the reductive impulses of Western institutionalization, anthropological canonization, and social ostracization. This twenty-first-century two-spirit, Indigenous poetic narrative continually jabs at destructive assumptions about Native life as it carves beautiful, yet deeply complicated, connections to homelands. All readers will love how the collection builds upon foundational Native writers who turn to the generative nature of trickster-as-poet, rendering carefully the unburdened imaginings of Indigenous realities and futures.’—Molly McGlennen, author of Our Bearings
Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an associate professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program.
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