This paper offers a sustained critical analysis of Mamang Dai’s poems “Small Towns and the
“River”, “Voice of the Mountain”, “Once Upon a Time in Pasighat”, and “Remembrance” are read through the interpretative lens of Lawrence Buell’s four-criterion ecocritical theory, as theorised in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture; the poet’s Adi tribe’s Donyopolism, an indigenous, nature-based cosmological religion; and Rob Nixon’s important concept of “Slow Violence”, as theorised in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. The paper begins with an introduction to the poet, situating her as a Northeastern Indian writer in English who occupies a critical position as an indigenous tribal poet and environmentalist. Her oeuvre thus becomes a set of political texts that resist formidable political and economic forces endangering indigenous people and the land. The subsequent sections analyse all three theoretical frameworks to emphasise their critical importance for understanding her poetry. This is followed by an individual analysis of each poem within the theoretical framework. The paper’s core thesis is that Mamang Dai’s poems give voice to non-humans, functioning as an ecological counter-memory that resists effacement by the anthropocentric worldview, which privileges man over nature.