Joy Harjo
speaker
82 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Joy Harjo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
Oh, this is only, this is just the first round.
I'm going to go in the middle again.
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.
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.
And so it was either that, if I had not gone there, if I had stayed there, it would have come to no good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So sometimes I feel bad that I wasn't the magnanimous maternal, staying there like the mother hen, but it's not me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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