Lanskap Budaya Muscogee dalam Puisi-Puisi Joy Harjo: Analisis Semiotika Roland Barthes

Although contemporary Indigenous American literature has become an autonomous literary discourse, literary studies that focus on linking the tribal cultural identity of a poet/author are still considered obscure. Various studies of Joy Harjo's poetry ignored Muscogee culture as inherent aspect of her poetry. Therefore, this study focuses on dissecting Muscogee cultural symbols that appear in Joy Harjo's poetry. Armed with Roland Barthes's theory of cultural semiotics, this study aims to identify cultural symbols, their meanings, and ideological implications in the poems through the order of signification: denotation, connotation, and myth. This study uses qualitative methods to support an in-depth textual analysis into the selected Joy Harjo’s poems, namely: “Tobacco Origin Story,” “Let There Be No Regret,” “The Road to Disappearance,” “Cehotosakvtes,” “Granddaughters,” and “Memory Sack.” A literature research accompanied by close reading to the research object is a vital step for collecting data, followed by analysis and interpretation of the poems according to Roland Barthes's semiotic framework. The results of the study indicate that Joy Harjo's poems are consisting of Muscogee’s mythical symbols, cosmological symbols, cosmogonical symbols, and religious symbols. These symbols point toward the supreme cosmic energy of Ibofanga, implying the primacy of the Muscogee harmonious principle. In conclusion, Joy Harjo's poems are not simply a neutral display of Muscogee cultural symbols. Instead, they exist at the intersection of oral tradition and modern literature, where Joy Harjo negates discourses of colonialism and modernity and calls for spiritual reaffirmation as a continuation of the story of Indigenous American survivance.