Q&A with Annie Wenstrup, author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories

Annie Wenstrup is a Dena’ina poet and the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories. 

The recipient of a 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2023, she received The Alaska Literary Award and support from The Rasmuson Foundation. She was a Smithsonian Arctic Studies Fellow, and an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023.

Interviewed by Moriah Hampton, PhD, an instructor in the University at Albany's Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI)

The Museum of Unnatural Histories is a conceptually rich and visually arresting artifact. How does the collection express your interests as a Dena’ina poet?

The book is interested in narrative failures. One of the threads is a series of engagements with Dena’ina Sukdu'a, or stories, about Ggugguyni, or raven, that were recorded by my relative, Peter Kalifornsky. Both are part of my familial and literary heritage. At the same time, there are aspects of the sukdu and my relatives that are inaccessible to me. I can’t ask Kalifornsky what he meant, or why he recorded a story the way he did. When I work with his records, my reactions are more Rorschach test than reader. 

Consequently, the poems became a way of engaging with what can’t be resolved. I don’t want to claim the poems as a retelling of traditional sukdu. First, it would ignore my positionality as a mixed-race woman who did not grow up with those stories. Second, I’m wary about the language surrounding Indigenous literature that claims authenticity or tradition. That language does much of colonization’s work by insisting on a narrow vision of what Indigenous culture is and can be. It’s language that emphasizes the past while ignoring Indigenous futures.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories partially developed in response to seeing how a museum displayed ivory items carved by Alaska Native artists. They were in a glass case, arranged within a grid, like chess pieces. When I visited the giftshop, the glass display case at the register also held ivory artwork by Alaska Native artists identically laid out. It was unnerving. I wrote a series of ekphrastic poems to try and understand the difference, if there was one, in the eye that displayed the items as artifact and the eye that offered them as commerce. 

Although those poems didn’t make it into the manuscript, they identified the text’s preoccupations and created a map towards the poems that would become the book. At the center are questions I’ve carried for most of my life. What limits agency? In what situations are my identities and relationships legible? What’s the difference between being seen and being objectified? Asking the questions through poems offered me a path to thinking about how my subjective experiences illuminated systemic forces like colonization, class, and gender. 

While Dena’ina culture and other literary traditions influence what is displayed in The Museum, the position of observer is heightened throughout the collection and sometimes inverted, for instance, the couple viewing images of their son through sonography. What does “authentic” Dena’ina culture mean in the context of the collection?

I’m fortunate that I grew up with a mom who repeatedly told me, “Culture is not stagnant, it’s what we’re doing today and what we’ve done.” From that standpoint, Dena’ina culture is what Dena’ina peoples are doing, valuing, and creating. It’s also about who we’re in relationship with and how we understand our responsibilities within those relationships. 

Although Dena’ina identity and culture is present in the museum — the curator, the sukdu’a, the gallery texts—it’s intentionally not represented through art or object. The book’s project began as an experiment to understand the difference between being beheld versus objectified. I didn’t want to re-perpetuate the many ways Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous woman, have been objectified by western culture. I was curious about what would happen if that dehumanizing gaze was refracted towards whiteness. As the project took shape, the work led away from a straightforward reversal in gaze into a questioning of who has agency over how they’re perceived.

The “Acknowledgements” section shares how your conception of museums evolved to be a site that “fosters the possibility of encounter.” At the same time, the collection includes pieces that utilize technology and the mass media, which mediate the audience’s perspective, and suggest the (im)possibility of a direct encounter with the poem’s subject. Will you speak more to this tension?

I’m obsessed with the function of lenses and screens in poems. Works like Ted Kooser’s "Telescopes", and Audre Lorde’s Contact Lenses demonstrate how the presence of a lens allows the poem to change perspectives and image fields while maintaining a single vantage point. 

In The Museum of Unnatural Histories I was curious to see if screens could function the same way. Just like telescopes and microscopes offer us images of the otherwise invisible, our televisions and phones improbably place images in our living rooms and pockets. Unlike lenses though, the pictures are accompanied by a narrative that directs the audience towards a prescribed meaning. I wanted to explore how (if?) poetry could discredit the projection’s intent. 

What I found was more slippery. I had to trust that the reader would bring their own knowledge and experiences of the scenes the poems were engaging with, as well as a willingness to entertain what the poem’s speaker experienced while seeing the scenes. At first, that was a frustrating fact — as you noted, the subject is mediated by the screen before it reaches the reader. Eventually I had to trust that any incongruencies between what the poem offers and what the audience pairs with them, would also be a site of meaning-making. 

Timothy Morton, an ecologist, writes about hyper-objects, entities whose scale and impact are so vast that they can’t be fully comprehended or fully perceived. He compares hyper-objects to coins where only one side of the coin can be known at a time. I think the screen-mediated poems ended up being most successful when they understood the poem’s subjects as hyper-objects — they turned towards the unknowable with interest rather than frustration.

For decades, Indigenous nations have made strides towards the repatriation of Indigenous artifacts housed in museums and galleries internationally. How do you see your book responding to the wider push for repatriation of Indigenous artifacts?

I wish that my book had the capacity to address repatriation directly! My hope is that the text provokes questions about Indigenous agency and representation that contribute to larger discussions surrounding tribal and cultural sovereignty.

Tribal sovereignty always includes the repatriation of ancestors and artifacts, as well as land back and language back. 

What excites you about the Indigenous poetry being published today? What would you like to see published more often?

Maybe the best way to answer this is from two perspectives—first about poetics and then from a publishing landscape perspective. 

For the past four years I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the Indigenous Nations Poets community. There, I had the chance to hear from many Indigenous writers about their poetics. A recurring theme was the desire to place oneself in conversation with the past and future—to develop a practice that honors our literary forebearers while speaking to a future community. I’m always thrilled when I see work that reflects that the poet is exploring that desire. 

 As for what I’d like to see published?  More Indigenous poetry everywhere. 

I’d love to see the publishing industry change, so the publishing process better reflects Indigenous sovereignty. I’m involved with two projects that make me optimistic about that possibility.

The first project is an anthology of Indigenous poetry coedited by Mary Leauna Christensen, No’u Revilla, and myself. It will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2028. In addition to poetry, it will include craft essays, written by the poets. Each contributing poet is also encouraged to name the Indigenous poets who’ve influenced their work. The goal is three-fold: First, to celebrate Indigenous poetry. Second, to increase the amount of agency a poet has over how their work enters predominately non-Native spaces. The poet can offer the context their work should be considered in. Finally, it hopes to be a resource for teachers who want to teach Indigenous poetry in a respectful way. 

Equally important to the anthology is the framework it’s being created from. Our editorial practice is informed by Elements of Indigenous Style Guide by Greg Younging. The press and editors rely on it as starting point for communication and kinship with each person involved with the anthology. This is reflected in matters of style, but also in the contracts between press and contributors and the press and editors. The documents recognize that this publication contains responsibilities not only between writer and press, but also between our communities and nations. It’s been exciting to collaborate with Wesleyan University Press on this project, and I’m excited to see how this process unfolds.

The second project is with Poetry Northwest. Next year we will publish two poetry collections as part of the Native Torchlight series, an imprint that celebrates contemporary Indigenous writers. My goal as series editor is that the structures and values of Native kinship and stewardship are present throughout the publishing process. During my tenure at In-Na-Po, I experienced firsthand what a difference it made to have another Indigenous poet as my first audience. That reception was so affirming it allowed me to take greater risks in my writing. I would love to see what can be published from a similar environment of trust and affirmation. 

akwenstrup.com | instagram.com/akwenstrup

Moriah Hampton teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at the University at Albany. Her fiction, poetry, and photography have appeared in The Coachella Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Ponder Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, and elsewhere. Originally from the southeast, she has Scottish and English ancestry and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.