It would be easy to describe Pico’s Nature Poem as the act of a queer Native poet reclaiming the pastoral genre from its white colonial history, but what Pico is doing is so much more complicated than reclaiming (“Reclamation suggests social / capital,” he writes), and resists the simplified heroics of these kinds of literary reparations: the idea that it must be necessarily positive for minoritized writers to “reclaim” spaces in which they have been erased, that the Western genre can be redeemed if we just populate it with the Native, Black, Latinx, and Asian people who actually made Western
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