Joy Harjo's Mvskoke warrior mapmaking practice

This article theorizes Joy Harjo's “warrior cartography” as a Mvskoke practice of direction-finding that enacts three interwoven forms of return: physical, ceremonial and spiritual. It situates Harjo within the under-theorized history of Indigenous women's mapping practices across temporalities and territories. Bringing ancestral, anti-colonial and decolonial maps created by and for Indigenous women into dialogue, it argues that these traditions constitute a distinct cartographic formation: relational, embodied and inseparable from lived systems of ecology, memory and responsibility. Within this framework, Harjo's poetry emerges not as a metaphorical engagement with space but as cartographic practice in its own right. Drawing on Mvskoke epistemologies and Indigenous feminist and nationalist criticism, and placing Harjo alongside Édouard Glissant's poetics of relation, the article shows how Harjo reclaims cartography from the fixity of settler mapping and reanimates it as a sovereign navigational art grounded in ancestral story, ceremonial obligation and the moral compass of the tvstvnvke (warrior). Through readings of A Map to the Next World, “Four Horse Songs,” “Returning from the Enemy,” and An American Sunrise, it argues that Harjo's maps orient people toward homelands, obligations and continuance across kolvpaken (seven) generations, functioning as living, storied instruments of sovereignty that refuse settler temporalities and geographies.