Featured Author: Taté Walker

MIP Author

Aug 22

5 min read

Portrait of Taté Walker, a Two Spirit Mniconjou Lakota writer, wearing purple glasses and a colorful floral scarf. — Taté Walker, an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller and citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Courtesy of Taté Walker.

The Disruptive Poetry of The Trickster Riots

Taté “tah-TAY,” Walker was among the artists featured in Native Voice, a special exhibition presented by the Museum of Indigenous People from January through May 2023. The exhibition brought together nine Native artists whose work addressed contemporary Indigenous identity, colonialism, cultural survival, activism and the recovery of family and community histories.

Taté contributed poetry from their 2022 collection, The Trickster Riots. Ten large illustrations from the book, created by their child Ohíya Walker, were displayed with excerpts from Taté’s poems. Together, the words and images gave museum visitors an introduction to a writer who uses language to confront colonial expectations while examining family, gender, history and the responsibilities carried between generations.

Taté Walker, A Two Spirit Lakota Storyteller

Taté Walker is Mniconjou Lakota and a citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. They are an award-winning Two Spirit writer, poet, journalist, photographer and community advocate who uses they/them pronouns.

Their name, pronounced “tah-TAY,” means “wind” in Lakota. Taté has explained that Taté appears in Lakota origin stories as a messenger of the spirit beings who commands the winds to carry correspondence. The connection is fitting for someone whose life and career have centered on communication and storytelling.

Taté has more than 20 years of experience in journalism and advocacy writing. Their work has appeared in The Nation, Indian Country Today, Native Peoples, Everyday Feminism, Yellow Medicine Review, Pipe Wrench and other publications. They have also contributed to several anthologies, including FIERCE: Essays by and About Dauntless Women, South Dakota in Poems and Everyone’s an Author.

Taté’s writing moves between poetry, journalism and public advocacy without treating them as unrelated forms. Personal experience, Lakota identity, historical violence, queer life and community responsibility regularly meet within the same work.

Entering the World of Iktómi

Published by Abalone Mountain Press in 2022, The Trickster Riots was Taté’s first full-length poetry collection. The book draws upon Iktómi, the Spider, a trickster figure found in Lakota stories.

Taté began researching trickster stories while developing another book. They encountered themes of disruption, anti-authority, queerness and unconventional thinking. They also discovered that English translations often reduced trickster figures to simple categories of good and bad.

“When told in their traditional languages, tricksters weren’t good or bad,” Taté explained in an interview with O’odham Action News. “They have purpose and power.”

In The Trickster Riots, Taté assumes the role of a contemporary trickster. The poems challenge fixed ideas about Indigenous history, gender, sexuality and survival. They explore what it means to be a good relative, question the status quo and prepare the next generation to inherit responsibilities that colonialism has attempted to disrupt.

The collection does not present Indigenous identity as something confined to history or reservation boundaries. Taté writes from the experience of an urban Two Spirit Lakota person living on O’odham and Piipaash homelands in Phoenix while remaining connected to the people and homelands of the Oceti Sakowin.

That position allows Taté to write across several realities at once. Their poetry can be angry, playful, vulnerable and politically direct. Humor sits beside grief. Family relationships appear alongside colonial history. Cultural responsibility becomes inseparable from the right to live fully as a queer Indigenous person.

Using the English Language Differently

In November 2022, Cowboys & Indians included The Trickster Riots in “Listening to Native Voices: 15 Native Authors to Read Right Now.” The magazine described the force of Taté’s writing:

“The poems weaponize the English language against colonial normativity and navigate the responsibilities of an urban Two Spirit writer carrying and empowering the next generations.”

The phrase “weaponize the English language” identifies one of the collection’s central tensions. English has been used through government policy, boarding schools, religious institutions and public education to suppress Indigenous languages and impose outside definitions upon Native people. Taté works within that language while refusing to accept its colonial limits.

Their wordplay bends English toward Indigenous purposes. Familiar terms are disrupted, rearranged and made to carry experiences they were not originally intended to hold. The poems expose the assumptions built into the language while using it to affirm Lakota identity, Two Spirit life and Indigenous survival.

Taté’s approach is not limited to opposition. Their poetry also creates room for tenderness, humor, desire, kinship and possibility. Resistance in The Trickster Riots includes the ability to imagine a future in which Native people do more than survive.

Books

The Trickster Riots is an illustrated poetry collection by Taté Walker, with artwork by Ohíya Walker
The Trickster Riots is an illustrated poetry collection by Taté Walker, with artwork by Ohíya Walker

Poetry in Conversation With Art

The Trickster Riots was fully illustrated by Taté’s child, Ohíya Walker, a Mniconjou Lakota, Red Lake Ojibwe and Mvskoke Creek artist and citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

Ohíya did not simply decorate completed poems. Their illustrations became part of the creative process. Taté has said that Ohíya’s interpretations influenced revisions to the flow and wording of several pieces. “Ohíya is so talented, and the way they interpreted my poems influenced how I revised a lot of my flow and word choices,” Taté told O’odham Action News.

The collaboration required Taté to encounter their own writing through another artist’s perspective. Conversations about the poems and illustrations also brought parent and child closer, even when they disagreed creatively.

Ohíya combines elements of Ojibwe floral design and Lakota geometric patterns with a contemporary visual style. Their images introduce another emotional language into the book, responding to Taté’s words without merely repeating them.

For the museum’s Native Voice exhibition, ten of these illustrations were enlarged, matted and framed alongside excerpts from the poems. The presentation allowed visitors to see the illustrations as individual works while understanding their place within Taté’s larger poetic narrative.

Writing for the Next Generation

Taté’s work repeatedly returns to responsibility. What does one generation inherit? What should it refuse to carry? What must be preserved, repaired or transformed before it is handed to the next?

The collaboration with Ohíya gave those questions a visible presence within The Trickster Riots. The next generation was not a distant audience. It was already participating in the work, interpreting the poetry and changing how some of it was written.

Taté has dedicated much of their career to Indigenous youth, tribal education, social justice and community building. They are a cofounder of the Phoenix Two Spirit Community, which helps organize the Arizona Two Spirit Powwow, and serve on the board of the Oceti Sakowin Writers Society. The organization supports the development of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota writers and literary traditions.

This work reflects the same concerns found in Taté’s poetry. Storytelling is not only individual expression. It can also create relationships, preserve knowledge, confront damaging narratives and help people imagine futures that colonial institutions have repeatedly attempted to deny.

Beyond Native Voice

Taté’s work has continued to develop since the Museum of Indigenous People presented Native Voice in 2023. In November 2025, Taté published Indigenous Voices: Inspiring & Empowering Quotes from Global Thought Leaders. The book gathers more than 60 quotations, stories and reflections from Indigenous elders, activists, scholars, artists and contemporary leaders. The selections are accompanied by work from Indigenous illustrators representing different nations and regions.

Like The Trickster Riots, the book is concerned with who speaks, who is heard and how Indigenous people represent themselves. It continues Taté’s larger commitment to placing Indigenous thought, humor, resistance and creativity in the foreground.

Taté Walker’s contribution to Native Voice introduced museum visitors to poetry that refuses easy categories. Their writing is personal without becoming isolated from history, political without losing tenderness and grounded in Lakota identity while speaking directly to contemporary Indigenous life.

Through poetry, journalism and community advocacy, Taté continues to challenge the language used to limit Native people and to build space for the voices still coming forward.