Of Joan Naviyuk's Poem 'Exceeding Beringia'

The Bird and the Cooking Pot
Imagine your home. A place where you belong. Now imagine it moves to another state. It keeps moving and moving. Imagine settling down somewhere, but then having to move again and again. It’s not easy to imagine the full implications of this struggle and suffering, but once you read the poem “Exceeding Beringia” you understand the lives of indigenous Alaskans who went through the very same thing. Through different aspects of symbolism Joan Kane uses the concept of displacement in order to demonstrate how people are being forced out of their native homes. Joan Naviyuk’s idea of displacement is a recurring theme throughout the poem, and the most prominent symbol of this is a bird. Kane writes, “From nest to

This quote refers to the land’s ice and ash, being covered. Ice and ash are reminders of what once was, ash is disintegrated remainders of burned history and ice can have history frozen inside it, The covering of these by layers of land relate back to displacement because the history of the land has not remained and is covered by something else, much the same to the indigenous people’s history with the land being removed when they were forced to move. This proves that when natives were displaced their history and relation to the land was impacted as well and the new group of settled people covered up what they had once settled in. As the poem progressed Naviyuk wrote, “Let us lose our griefs in great rafts” (Kane 36-37). In this instance the poem uses a raft to tie back to the displacement of people because rafts are being used in this context to leave their homes. “Lose our grief” adds value to the difficulty indigenous Alaskans struggled with and leads the reader back to Kane’s main goal of explaining how people are being moved from their homes. Displacement is integrated repeatedly into this poem, but most