Joy Harjo
Appearances
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
That book came out with my first granddaughter. Is that right? Yeah, my first grandchild, my first granddaughter, Krista. And For a Girl Becoming is kind of a children's book, but it goes beyond that. It's a book for coming of age. It's a book for—and I seem to land on that period a lot, and I think it's because I went through so much during that coming-of-age period.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Maybe I'm just working out trauma, but I want to be helpful. I think even in trauma, that's where you learn yourself. Really, it's a challenge. That's where you learn yourself and who you are and what you're made of. So when this granddaughter hit that age— I wrote for a girl becoming the poem in there for her.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah, if you put it that way, that makes a lot of sense. But there's themes, every poet has their themes, and I realize mine is transformation. One of them is healing and justice and transformation, what happens in those transformative spaces. So I have another book out at the same time called Washing My Mother's Body.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
because I didn't get to wash my mother's body when she died, and I wanted to, but I let that go because it was causing too much commotion. And this poem comes, I never got to wash my mother's body. And so poems teach you, and this poem taught me that I could do it in a poem. And in the poem, I do what I wasn't able to do in the physical, but I went and washed her body in the poem.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And it's sort of similar to, for a girl, these doorways of transformation that we walk through. And I feel like when I've walked through them, I haven't been the best. What do you mean? I hit the walls, awkward, too many elbows. Not too many. I'm glad I have it.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But I think it's not just for me the poet, but I think that's something useful for anyone that you can sit and, you know, you might do it through painting or the song or writing because we all have things we say we regret or people who go we can't talk to. And you can do it. You can sit and write it and talk to them. Thank you for that. The book is beautiful. Do we have more cards? Yes, Joy!
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Do we have more cards? More cards.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
What's the biggest risk you've ever taken? Recently... I sat in. To me, this is the biggest risk. I sat in at the Blue Note in New York.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I played a song. I played a song. So we need the context of this.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I did. I'm friends with Esperanza Spalding, and she was doing a two-week run at the Blue Note. She sold out, I think, every show. Yeah, she's incredible. She's incredible, and she's real. I mean, that's the thing about it. I think what maybe is that she's absolutely who she is. She's very generous and very humble. And as a mute, she's in that space. And I'd played with her.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
We just, you know, improv. We're friends. Yeah. But this is different. Yeah. I mean, she said, oh, why don't you sit and do a song, you know, do a piece with, you know, with a guitar player who, you know, and the drummer. And so I couldn't say no. I mean, I thought about it. Of course not. No, I thought about it. I mean, I thought about saying no. Well, what would I feel like if I said no?
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Well, I would feel... I would feel very disappointed. Yeah. Like I should have done it, and I don't want any should-haves.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But I'm sitting down there in one of the seats with my horn on my lap waiting to be called up, and I'm thinking, what if my horn messes up? So then you have to have – It's just the Bluto.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I know. It's just that. I know. I love that club. I often go there. If I go to New York, that's where – maybe that's where I should go tonight.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah. I sat there with my whore. And I got up there. But then the thing I've learned, because I used to have a horrible stage fright. It was bad enough when I was just doing poetry, and then I picked up horn when I was almost 40 and learned to play mostly on stage.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But the thing I learned was that if I just listen to the music, and that's even if I'm just reading or even doing a wild card, that if I just listen to the music, I'm okay. Yeah. But I did it. You did it, Joy! No, to me, that was like bungee jumping from the bridge at the Royal Gorge.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Thank you so much for being game to do this. It's intriguing, and so that interests me. All right. Let's go.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Well, yeah. I mean, they're just wonderful musicians. And the thing I was taught early on is to play with people better than you.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
That's how you grow. Yeah. Okay. Three more.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I'm like, well, like, okay, there's two, there's several parts of me. I'm like, my mother used to write music, and she would write these really kind of sad ballads. However, she wrote a song that my sister just gave it to me, and it was, she typed it out. She didn't capitalize everything, and I love the way she wrote jazz, J-A-S-S. This was in the early 50s. It's called My Guy.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
We just recorded that song with Esperanza. We just recorded it for my next album from Folkways. And it's so cool. It's my mother's song. So that's an up one. And I like that because it's so up. And most of her songs were these really heartbreak ballads, sort of like Patsy Cline and Crazy. And I love those scraping the bottom of your heart ballads. You know, Nat King Cole.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah, Nat King Cole. And then I like funk. My most played artist is James Brown. I mean, can't go wrong.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Well, it is pointed. I keep thinking a lot of the problems we have going on right now are because of belief systems. You know, how powerful. I keep thinking about how powerful and potent beliefs are.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
The middle. The middle. Number two. Okay, number two.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Tremendously. If I think about God before they were words, it has to do with the sunlight or the rainbows and sunlight or that kind of joy. A kind of resonance that goes through everything. And I think kids have that. And then I remember going to church and God being very much like an image of Jesus or an illustration of an elderly white man. And that was the next implanted image of God.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
As a kid, I would escape into the closet, as a little kid. And my drawings, they're probably still in that closet or outside. I would go out at times when everyone was asleep or the world was quiet. And I still like that. That's where I find things. That's where I find images and sounds and fresh ideas. That's how I discover, I guess you could say, a kind of peacefulness.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And then there were qualities given to this God, or that they were always angry with you, or that you would always be guilty in their presence. So that was the second version, which didn't really sit right with me because, you know, in our Muscogee tradition, and I think in, you know, we were created by love. I remember...
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
My husband and I sometimes will lay there and just talk for hours, even now. And we're laying there talking, and I said, you know, I think about why were we created with, you think about the system, all of the systems in our body and the magnificence of it and how everything works together and then all of it, the insects, the birds, and all of this is going on.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And I think I can be overwhelmed and think, why? I mean, we all ask those questions. I mean, why? Why these systems? Why this striving? Why do we go through all the challenges? Why evil? I mean, why all of this? And the way that I find a peace in it is kindness, is knowing that there's kindness.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Then it can all make sense that, okay, you know, all of this can go on, but the path of kindness will bring peace. you know, it brings a different kind of nourishment. Is that the third version of God, then?
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Probably, yes. Yeah, I think that's more the present, where there's an... It's, again, an immense creator, an immense creativity, but it's imbued with what we call anagechka, with a love that is so potent and powerful. It's powerful. It's not just, you know, it's not weak. It's very powerful. And it connects everybody.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And when I say everybody, I also mean the winds, the plants, the animals, each of us. So that's where I am now. Yeah. That could change. Yeah.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
What are you feeling? Between two and three. I'll go with three.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah, it's... You know, it's funny. The older I get, then I talk a little bit more about things I usually wouldn't talk about. I think that's true for me, too. In 2011, I helped my mother pass. My mother's around all the time. But it was not long after that, and my cousin died. And they said she died in a chair. She was just sitting there. And, you know, she had different health problems.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
My age, though, and this was about... 10, 11, 12 years ago. And so I went to her funeral, my sister and I went to her funeral. And I was amazed that she looked, she just looked, she looked almost like she was going to stand up and walk out of there. Well, a few years ago, I'm just laying there right before I go to sleep. And there she was. And we just talked.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
We just talked for a moment and said, hey, it wasn't freaky. I mean, it was, I saw her like in my, it was like she was there. And we just said, hey, how are you doing? I said, yeah, you know, at your funeral, you didn't even look like you were dead. We just talked for a moment, and then she was gone. She was just visiting. And then there's some people that you would really, like my father.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
My father doesn't come to me that much. One time I was sitting, I was going through something, and he was living in New Mexico, and I'm sitting there real quiet. That's when you can hear them. I was sitting there real quiet, and my father came and said, I'm so proud of you. And the other day, it was on his birthday, it was February 28th, and I was really wanting to hear from him.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But also a kind of depth that isn't always present when you're in the realm of chatter.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But that's, you know, I figure, I get a sense that he's not around. My mother is around, though. I mean, people are different. Yeah. But they're always, you know, we do talk about our ancestors, at least in our culture. And I think, you know, obviously by the time you're a great, I'm a great grandparent now, is you see things and you know things go on. You watch them reappear.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
You know, you watch things reappear in the children and the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. And you know it goes on that there's a continuum and you start to see, you get insights into the whole thing. And so they're around, you know, some of them, some closer, some not. But I feel like I stay in touch with that. Some people don't. Some people, it's not in their realm.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
You talk about belief systems. It's not in their realm of belief, even though somebody might be standing right by them wanting to talk to them. Or they find ways to do it, you know, and they find ways to do it. But, yeah, I think it's just part of living.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Now I'm going to cry. holding my daughter after she was born.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah, then I think of my son too, you know. But I say my daughter because I lost her recently.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Oh, I'm so sorry. So often what I do, often what I do, I go back to when she was a baby. But I was so happy. And I know that she would rather me think of happiness. Yeah. She would rather have me think of happiness. Yeah. She's made that clear.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And I was so happy, you know. I mean, it's funny.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
It made no sense that I had a child at that time, but her spirit came to me, and I, you know, and I was so, even though I was going through stuff, I don't need to go into that right now, but when she was born in the midst of all of this, you know, wounded knee was going on and, you know, a lot of challenges, but it was just, I said yes, and I wanted her, and I welcomed her, and I was...
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Thank you. This was fun. Kind of.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah, I needed to get away from adolescence. I know I always feel for those kids when I've gone in and talked to them and vibed with them because, you know, I still understand that period, which is a time of, I think of adolescence as being like a chrysalis moment. Like here you've got the caterpillar and eating leaves and
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
experiencing the world as a caterpillar, and then they build this chrysalis. And the chrysalis is where they essentially liquefy and then reform. So it's a time of chaotic form of, you know, I was this, but I'm going to be something else. And I would imagine in that chrysalis period, the known parameters have fallen away to some extent, to some extent. And then the butterfly emerges.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And that's how I think of adolescence, is being in that chrysalis stage. But in that stage is a lot of innate power, any time of transformation, whether it's a transformation of a country, a transformation of a human being or of a butterfly, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. There's a lot of power, creative power in that. But I'm fixated on that closet for some reason.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
What did the closet look like? I could go in and it had a door that shut, you know, with a door handle on it. So I could go in there and sit. I would sit on the wood floor because, you know, I didn't have a chair in there, of course. And I could sit in there and have peace. And you know that people aren't going to come looking for you like, you know, they might look for you elsewhere.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But, you know, we would, if my mother, and I know she wouldn't like me saying this because she's proud of me and what I've done. But if she saw us with books, she'd say, get up and do something.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Recently, to me, this is the biggest risk. I sat in at the Blue Note in New York. And when you say sat in... I played a song. You played? To me, that was like bungee jumping from the bridge of the Royal Gorge.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yes, that we had to be doing something. Yeah, we needed to be doing something because there was always so much to be done in a household with all of those kids. So I understand that. But I wasn't in there to escape doing things because I contributed. I was there for my own peace of mind.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
That's interesting. That's like it's related. It's like falls right in line with the first one. What place shaped me? You know the places that shaped me? Okay, a couple. There's places in the physical realm and places in the dreaming realm.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And the physical realm was going to the lake. Like my father, I loved the water. So we would go over to Fort Gibson Lake. My mom would cook fried chicken, mashed potatoes, all that really good stuff. But again, it was taking us out of the ordinary, in a way, taking us out of the ordinary world to the water, the place of water. I think of my father.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I think we all have predominant elements in our being. And my father, I've always felt, was more water and my mother was more fire. And I feel like I'm both. I'm very much both.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah. So the other place is in my dreaming realm. And I've dreamed, even as a little kid, I would dream places that I didn't know the names. I would come back knowing names of places, and I still do that, that I didn't know. There was no way.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Maybe I was four years old or three years old, and I didn't know the name of those places, but I would come back knowing those places because I had gone there in the dreaming realm and experienced life in a very, very different way.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yes, I'm trying to remember. It was in Egypt, and it was a long time ago, and it was like I was with different people and I was somebody else, but they made a kind of prison out of like adobe, and you could see the prisoners' faces through the adobe, and they had basically cemented them into this wall. It was a really horrible way to deal with people.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
You know, it was long before I even read about it. I didn't know there was an Egypt. I mean, I was a little kid. Yeah. I was a little kid in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I like going places, like going to the moon or flying, you know, like having that sense of flying somewhere. I mean, it still happens.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
You know, it still happens, and I don't really understand it, except that it's made me realize that we're in it deep, and there's so many layers to consciousness. Yeah. Thank you for that.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Oh, this is only, this is just the first round.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I'm going to go in the middle again.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
There have been some major crossroads. My mother took me, I was about 15 or 16, when she took me to the Bureau of Indian Affairs office and told them that I was going to go to Chilocco Indian School, which was a decent Indian school up near the border of Oklahoma and Kansas. And actually, my husband went there, and I would have met him earlier.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But as we were going out, this was a major crossroads. As we were going out the door, the agent said, we have a new school. It's out in Santa Fe called the Institute of American Indian Arts. And it was then mostly a high school, and it was for the arts. So I applied with art, with drawings, and got in. Wow.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And so it was either that, if I had not gone there, if I had stayed there, it would have come to no good.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Oh, it was, I had really kind of, I had lost any regard for myself because of what I had gone through at that point. I just felt almost worthless. I think part of it was I watched what happened with my father, Muskogee Creek Man, in the world. You know, being native in Oklahoma and the whole deep history there. There was a heartache there, I think, a deep heartache.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And then there was the stepfather coming into our lives who, I've tried to understand him, but he really had no regard for our lives. His interest, of course, was my mother. And it seems like repressing her, repressing her, and in turn repressing us. And people don't do well under being oppressed, whether it's by a country or by a person.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Every poet has their themes, and I realize mine is transformation, what happens in those transformative spaces.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
But when I wound up at that school with Native students from all over, and we were all artists and doing art, I was in my realm. I was in my realm of creativity and people who, you know, I could talk in class there. I could not talk in class elsewhere. It's just that there was, I felt I was in my place. And before I had felt almost misplaced.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Well, I had something with my life with my dad. I mean, that wasn't a walk in a park because he was so good looking and women were always after him. It had its problems, but they were my parents and they loved each other and there was music. It was maybe healthy dysfunction. I don't know. There was dysfunction, but there wasn't the mean spiritedness. Mm-hmm. And the cruelty.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
I mean, I came home one night and my brothers and sister were huddled in my room because they had watched him make my mother play Russian roulette in front of them.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
And I got there and they were terrified. And I was terrified for my mother. I felt like her guardian. So I felt a little guilty leaving. But at that point, by the time I left, she had kind of gone over to his side in a way, maybe to survive. I think to survive because I always knew that it was different because I always knew my parents loved me. And that makes a difference.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
That makes a difference in your force field if you know that whatever happens, that they love you. So I knew there was that, and I had that to go on. But to deal with the other and to watch things go down, but I couldn't protect anybody. I already learned that. I couldn't protect them.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
So sometimes I feel bad that I wasn't the magnanimous maternal, staying there like the mother hen, but it's not me.
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Joy Harjo thinks writing can heal regret
Yeah, it was, it saved my life. I'm still part of it. I later taught there. But overall, it was, you know, amazing. The late 60s, Santa Fe, New Mexico and art and being able to do art and be who you are.