My work is an act of rematriation: a sovereign reclaiming of story from the forces of disconnection and assimilation. As a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Osage, Muscogee, and Cherokee lands, I write from the nexus of fractured lineages. I am the eldest grandchild, the family historian—tasked with holding the artifacts and narratives of trauma, poverty, and displacement that ripple through my maternal line.
My poetics intentionally engage surrealism. Surrealism’s inherent rebellion against rational thought and traditional forms parallels the decolonization of language, culture, and history. I utilize surrealism as a powerful tool for resisting colonialism by embracing fractured narratives, reclaiming indigenous knowledge, and disrupting oppressive structures. I attempt to dismantle linear, assimilative narratives—particularly those overwritten by Christian ideology—to make space for the queer and Indigenous histories they seek to erase. I am interested in a fluid, Indigenous relationship to time, where chronology dissolves, and death defies binary. Queerness is not a modern identity but an ancient, cyclical logic, and the body itself becomes a landscape where decay is inseparable from renewal.
Through teaching in carceral settings, I witnessed firsthand how powerful writing one’s own story is to the foundational act of sovereignty. I bring this same conviction to the page. My poems are sites of return to honor the fractures as evidence of what we have carried, and to map a path for what we might become. Ultimately, this work is an assertion that the imagination is our source of liberation. The only way to combat a war on vision is to persistently, defiantly imagine sovereign futures.
Claire Maracle 