Point of View

The poem is written in first-person point of view, anchoring it firmly in the speaker’s Native American perspective. This is important to the poem’s political and social purpose, given that indigenous perspectives are marginalized and rarely heard in American public or cultural discourse. The speaker’s claiming of the “I,” the confidence with which she makes claims like “no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel” (12), functions as an act of resistance to this enforced cultural invisibility.

The first-person perspective also matters to the extent that the speaker is communicating with someone else, an invisible interlocutor beyond the scope of the poem. She speaks from personal experience, and with a casual yet knowing tone, advises the interlocutor to not hope to “see angels on the rez” (25). At the beginning, it is unclear to whom the speaker is...