What Sparks Poetry

Ecopoetry Now

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems.

In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. In poems and poetics statements, their work describes important local differences, including bioregion and language, as well as a shared concern for the Earth. We hope to highlight poetry’s integral role in creating and sustaining a broadly ecological imagination that is most alive when biologically, culturally, and linguistically diverse.

M. L. Smoker on “Heart Butte, Montana”

I write often about the geography, the landscape that my ancestors have called home for fifty generations. I have a deep connection to this slice of the northern plains, stretching from the Elk River (the Yellowstone), north into Saskatchewan, Canada. We traversed many hundreds and hundreds of miles of surrounding terrain until 1878, the year we were forced on to the Fort Peck reservation in the northeastern corner of Montana.

My great grandparents and their grandparents understood the reciprocal nature of being in right relationship with the land, reservation or no reservation. It is then next to impossible for me to ignore the echoes that reverberate from beneath and across the earth’s surface. There is both a human and non-human story here. Such places formed by millennia, marked by water and ice, light and dark. Of shifting rock and the new formation of land, plateau, mountain range. Humans were taken in and the land cared for us—we were gifted survival and song by our plant and animal family. We grew up in this way, over multiple generations—building our kinship circle, a way of knowing and a way of being in the world. For my Tribes, kinship has always been paramount to our survival. Kinship is about enduring hardships together, trusting in collective knowledge, sharing responsibilities, and valuing everyone and everything in the community.

When I wrote “Heart Butte, Montana” I had been driving to that area for several years, at least every other month or so. I was the Indian Education director for the state and our team was collaborating with, and supporting, the Heart Butte school district on their journey toward building a system that met the needs of students and the community. The school is located on the Blackfeet nation, nestled at the base of the Rocky Mountain Front, or what the Tribe knows more affectingly as The Backbone of the World, a sentient place with great meaning and significance. While I am not Blackfeet, I would often pull my car over, look across the vast terrain to the east and think of my own family, several hundred miles away. I would think about my mother buried there, on a high bluff overlooking the Missouri River. And I could feel our connection and our home.

The poem itself is my attempt to better understand a kinship one feels with people and places. As I looked across that beautiful land, I was reminded that this interconnection is not immovable. It is in motion. And we can all play a role in what remains, at any given moment. This type of kinship can break down—through our interactions, acknowledgements and responsibilities. As this erosion takes shape in our human connections, it too can take form in our relationship with all non-human beings. In English, the word used to describe these other parts and pieces of our natural world is ‘inanimate.’ This is defined by Merriam Webster as ‘not endowed with life or spirit.’ Indigenous peoples do not presume to have the ability to declare anything lifeless or spiritless. We are connected to everything that our feet touch, to the air we breathe and to one another.

But this poem is not just about loss. It is a recognition as well of what can happen when we press ourselves to the earth, feel the pulses of energy, and realize our stories remain tethered. As Indigenous peoples, our ancestors are now a part of that land—it is where our languages, oral traditions, songs and ways of being have been formed, and we must find ways to carry on this necessary kinship. It is vital to us all.

Writing Prompt

Write a poem exploring your relationship with non-human beings, such as the land, your ancestors. It’s all about your way of carrying the “kinship” as Smoker portrayed in her essay.

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M.L. Smoker

M.L. Smoker is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. She served as Montana co-poet laureate from 2019-2021 alongside her longtime friend, Melissa Kwasny. She received an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University and received an honorary doctorate in 2023. Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. She also co authored a children’s graphic novel entitled Thunderous, published in 2022. She received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay. She served as the Director of Indian Education for the state of Montana for almost ten years, was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama and currently works at Education Northwest providing support for Native education efforts around the country.