Songs for California, Poems of the Golden State

About the BookSongs for California, Poems of the Golden State is the final poetry collection by Jack D. Forbes (1934-2011), a leading Indigenous scholar, activist, and founding figure in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Composed over many years, this volume is a poetic meditation on place, memory, and Indigenous survivance, offering a verse autobiography grounded in the landscapes and social histories of California.The poems trace Forbes's life from his childhood in El Monte, Eagle Rock, and Los Angeles to his later years in Northern California, interweaving personal narrative with reflections on Indigenous presence, ecological change, urban transformation, and colonial violence. The collection opens with the long historical poem "They Are Still Dancing: The Great Valley Story," which foregrounds California's Indigenous cultures prior to colonization and affirms their resilience in the face of attempted genocide and dispossession. The closing poem, "Yololandia," returns to Northern California and the Patwin homelands, framing the collection within a broad arc of Indigenous history and place-based knowledge.Forbes's poetry may be read alongside the work of Indigenous poets such as Joy Harjo, Simon J. Ortiz, Gloria Bird, and Kimberly Blaeser, whose writing similarly blends personal narrative, history, and political critique. Like these writers, Forbes uses poetry as a mode of Indigenous knowledge production rooted in oral traditions, testimony, and relational ethics. His work is distinguished, however, by its sustained engagement with California as both lived geography and intellectual construct, and by its integration of autobiographical memory with Indigenous historiography.Edited by Jane Haladay, a former student and colleague of Forbes, Songs for California preserves the poet's distinctive formal and stylistic choices while making minimal editorial interventions. The volume highlights poetry as an alternative to conventional academic discourse, demonstrating how Forbes turned to verse to articulate forms of historical, cultural, and personal knowledge that exceed the constraints of scholarly prose.Songs for California makes a significant contribution to Indigenous literary studies, California history, environmental humanities, and life writing. It stands as an important posthumous work that affirms poetry's capacity to bear witness, sustain cultural memory, and articulate enduring relationships between people, land, and history.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Great Oak Press
Published: 11/17/2026
ISBN: 9781942279433
Pages: 216
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.47d