Traveling with the Underground People

Traveling with the Underground People is a hybrid collection of poetry, graphic poems, and prose, chronicling a North American Sámi diaspora. The Sámi are one people in four countries, and are the indigenous peoples of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula. At least 30,000 Sámi now live in North America. Vivian Faith Prescott's poems explore indigenous identity, transgenerational trauma, and the complexities of living far from one's cultural origins. The narrator is often mournful of this loss: "…how many grandmothers and aunties and cousins you can search for, back-and-forth in time, before the shoe-bands of your world weaken."