Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life

Abstract

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life Will Clark (bio) When TOMMY PICO, a queer poet from the Viejas Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation in Southern California, won the 2018 Whiting Award for poetry, the selection committee praised the "inventiveness" of his "contemporary epics." Framing PICO'S book-length poems through a Western genre, the judges describe PICO'S work as a "forceful … interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self" that is novel for connecting sexual exploration to histories of Indigenous dispossession.1 In celebrating PICO through the veil of a Western genre system, however, the committee obscures the Indigenous genealogies and queer Indigenous poetry that inform PICO'S composition. Yet, the very coloniality of the Whiting Award committee's evaluation unwittingly illustrates a crucial analytic for the way Indigenous writers exist athwart colonial spaces. [End Page 523] That is through what Indigenous critic GERALD VIZENOR calls a "fugitive pose": an Indigenous strategy for hiding in plain sight to combat either outright erasure or the tokenization of Indigenous life in U.S. culture, politics, and history.2 As VIZENOR explains, U.S. narratives have long obscured the "real" experience of Native life behind a "cultural pageantry" that obfuscates the present-day lived experience of Native peoples.3 In this environment, as MARK RIFKIN elaborates, longstanding presumptions of extinction have relegated Native peoples into a "static" past, maintaining the dispossession of Native peoples from land, political power, and cultural visibility.4 In the face of ongoing dispossession, the fugitive pose fosters Native cultural practices that are purposefully "elusive" to the settler imaginary.5 Moreover, as VIZENOR argues, this latent agency is critical for an Indigenous practice of "survivance" that combines survival and resistance to renounce "dominance, tragedy, and victimry."6 PICO'S work deploys such a pose: it enacts a survivance that remains fugitive to the gatekeepers of mainstream poetry who value novelty to the Western tradition more than Indigenous genealogies. The modes of resistance afforded by the fugitive pose for queer Indigenous people, however, remain obscure. Examining his recent book-length poems, Nature Poem (2016) and Junk (2017), I show that Pico presents a sustained argument insisting that fugitivity and Indigenous queerness are deeply interconnected phenomena. In this, Pico answers a call by scholars of queer Indigenous history Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, who suggest that queer Indigenous subjects experience a dual fugitivity that needs further articulation in both queer studies and Indigenous scholarship. On the one hand, although the "diversity [of queer Indigenous knowledge] has been cited as an inspiration for GLBTQ identities," queer critique tends to ignore the "dissent lines that activists, artists, and scholars have already built," leaving Indigenous experience an asterisk.7 At the same time, Driskill and their [End Page 524] coauthors attest to an unmet need for Indigenous scholarship to uncover how the diversity of queer Indigenous sexualities offers distinct, if understudied, knowledge by which to decolonize scholarship and public life alike.8 Because of the ongoing obfuscation of queer indigeneity, contemporary Driftpile Cree Nation poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt calls for a more declarative presence than that offered by a fugitive pose. As Belcourt explains, queer and trans Indigenous peoples face the most "acute and world-shattering" violence and require active demands for knowledge that "queers and indigenizes freedom" itself.9 Not only is attention to queer Indigenous experience necessary for the decolonization of Native life, but what Belcourt describes as the "non-sovereignty of the sexual" offers a method to construct a world for queer Indigenous people that moves beyond cultural and political forms that propagate Western domination.10 This undertheorized conjunction of queer and Indigenous fugitivity is what Pico's poetics embody, creating an evasive space to envision the present and future of queer Indigenous life. But Pico's poetry does more than merely testify to queer Indigenous conditions—it broadcasts that experience into the public sphere through a form attuned to the contradictions of literary history and twenty-first-century media, with a goal of reshaping the horizons of modern poetics through the image of queer indigeneity. As such, Pico's approach to contemporary queer indigenousness...