Joy Harjo TOPICS: Arts / Music / Drama Native-American Issues Women's Issues Culture FEE CATEGORY:* 5.0k to 10.0k TRAVELS FROM: Hawaii Profile Request This Speaker

Joy Harjo: Profile

Native-American Writer & Musician

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 9th, 1951 to Wynema Baker and Allen W. Foster.  She is an enrolled member of the Creek tribe, and is also of Cherokee, French, and Irish descent.  Descended from a long line of tribal leaders on her father’s side, including Monahwee, leader of the Red Stick War against Andrew Jackson, she often incorporates into her poetry themes of Indian survival amidst contemporary American life. 

In 1970, at the age of 19, with the blessings of her parents, Joy took the last name of her maternal grandmother, Naomi Harjo.  As she often credits her great aunt, Lois Harjo, with teaching her about her Indian identity, this name change may have helped her to solidify her public link with this heritage.             

Although primarily known as a poet, Harjo conceives of herself as a visual artist.  She left Oklahoma at age 16 to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, originally studying painting.  After attending a reading by poet Simon Ortiz, she changed her major to poetry.  At 17, she returned to Oklahoma to give birth to her son, Phil Dayn, walking four blocks while in labor to the Indian hospital in Talequah. Her daughter, Rainy Dawn, was born four years later in Albuquerque. 

For years, Harjo supported herself and her children with a variety of jobs:  waitress, service-station attendant, hospital janitor, nurse’s assistant, dance teacher.  She then went on to earn a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in 1976 and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa’s famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1978.  She then went on to an impressive list of teaching positions beginning with the Institute of American Indian Arts. She currently teaches at both the University of Hawaii and the University of California at Los Angeles.             

Harjo is an award-winning poet many times over.  She has won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Oklahoma Book Award in 1995 for The Woman Who Fell from the Sky and in 2003 for How We Became Human:  New and Selected Poems, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America for and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for In Mad Love and War (1991), among other awards.  She has published seven books of poetry, a work of prose and poetry to accompany Stephen Strom’s photographs called Secrets from the Center of the World, and co-edited, with Gloria Bird, the anthology Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native American Women’s Writings of North America. 

In addition to Simon Ortiz, Harjo counts as her influences Leslie Marmon Silko, Flannery O’Connor, James Wright, Pablo Neruda, Meridel LeSueur, Galway Kinnell, Leo Romero, Audre Lorde, Louis Oliver, and June Jordan.  Harjo has said, and this list reflects, that the “larger” community of Black, Asian, and Chicano people has had an influence on her work. 

One of her most powerful poems, “Strange Fruit,” takes its title from the song by Lewis Allan, most often associated with Billie Holiday.  This poem tells the story of Jacqueline Peters, an African-American activist lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in Lafayette, California in 1986.  The speaker says, “  I didn’t do anything wrong.  I did not steal from your mother.  My brother did not take your wife”(23-25).  The plain language Harjo uses here emphasizes the grotesque absurdity of racist hatred by enabling the reader to relate to the victim.  At the same time, she slowly, subtly builds the case against the mob, “hooded ghosts from hell,” contrasted with the image of the victim, a mother, a wife, in heaven.     

As we see from “Strange Fruit,” Harjo does not limit her subject matter to her own heritage, but rather includes other tribal traditions, such as Navajo and Kiowa, other ethnicities, and strives to universalize the experiences about which her poetry speaks, while at the same time retaining the referential specificity of her own native traditions and concerns. 

For instance, in the poem “For Alva Benson, and For Those Who Have Learned to Speak,” she writes of a the cycle of life for a specific Navajo woman, beginning with her own birth. She moves on to this same child giving birth herself, this time in the “Indian Hospital in Gallup.”  

Harjo’s poem might seem to speak only of the experiences of the individual woman, because of the way she is named, and her tribe is named, and even the hospital in which she gives birth is named, but as the second half of the title forecasts, this poem is for “all who have learned to speak.”  The last stanza makes this clear; she says:  “And we go on, keep giving birth and watch / ourselves die, over and over." 

This universalizes the experience of the woman in the poem, making a larger reference to all who give birth and listen to the experience going on inside them and surrounding them.  In this poem, land is the source of life, and listening to the land enables women to speak themselves.               

In “Alva Benson,” Harjo also takes up the theme of modern society and its oppression of Native American domain.  The women in that poem move from giving birth outside, in communion with the earth, to laboring in the confines of a cold, sterile, concrete and metal hospital.  Yet, in Harjo’s world, they can still hear the earth.  She combines these worlds in other poems, such as “New Orleans.” 

Harjo highlights the legacy of colonialism and oppression by placing her Creek ancestors along the banks of the Mississippi River in the south—near the ancestral home they were forced to leave upon removal to Oklahoma.             

This ability to portray ancient traditions in a modern light can perhaps best be seen in Harjo’s poem, “Deer Dancer.”  Here, a young woman enters a cold, cheerless bar, where “nearly everyone had left,”  “except the hardcore,” the “Indian ruins.”  Here Harjo portrays modern Indians bleakly, seeming to say that these regulars in a desolate bar are the what is left of Indian civilization.  But the dancer offers hope;  she is interpreted as a promise for the future.

Harjo’s deer dancer not only demonstrates the power left in the “Indian ruins,”  she restores that power even to those who watch her.  As in other poems, she presents modern Indian reality without despair, she balances the bad with the good, and manages to depict individual experience in a universal way. 

Through her breathtaking poetry and spoken word program Harjo celebrates the Native American experience and the female spirit. Her words and music are at once personal and worldly, capturing the hardships and joys of what it means to be a Native American and woman at the end of the twentieth century. Harjo is also available for an evening of poetry and music.

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