“Native Guard” is a sonnet sequence by American poet Natasha Trethewey about a member of the Louisiana Native Guard, one of the first Black regiments to serve in the U.S. military. The poem is from her collection of the same name, Native Guard, which was published in 2006 and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966 to a white Canadian father and an African American mother. In her poetry, Trethewey often writes about race and prejudice throughout American history. This particular work deals with these issues in the context of Black soldiers fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Elsewhere in the collection, she writes about growing up in the South. She describes her parents' marriage, which was illegal at the time, as well as her experience as a biracial child. The poem captures events from the Civil War from the perspective of a soldier in the titular "Native Guard" as he watches over Confederate prisoners on Ship Island.
The poem is structured as a series of dated entries in a journal spanning a timeline from November 1862 through the end of the war in 1865. Although formatted in the style of a diary, the individual entries are written as sonnets. The sequence, called a sonnet corona or crown of sonnets, gives a narrative depiction of life on Ship Island from the perspective of one soldier. While different topics are covered in each entry—one shows a scene of basic training, while another is a recollection of the speaker's former master—the central question of the sonnets is: how free has this man, and the other former slaves in the regiment, become? Trethewey highlights the way in which the speaker's journey from slave to soldier does not afford him as dramatically different a life as he wants, or deserves. There is a significant lack of dignity and care given to the members of the unit depicted in the poem. Union generals treated the deaths of Black soldiers in the infantry as unworthy of the respect awarded to their white counterparts. In recounting his experiences, the speaker acts as a witness to the many sacrifices made by his regiment, and Black soldiers more broadly, as well as the complete lack of recognition or acknowledgment they received for it. The speaker writes for the purpose of making sure that this story is not forgotten, even after the war ends.
