Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo was born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, into the Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek) Nation. Her father was Mvskoke; her mother was Cherokee, French, and Irish; the family was working-class and difficult in ways Harjo has been honest about across her memoirs. She left home at sixteen for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe — the only federally-recognized institution of higher education for Native artists, which became, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the formative incubator of the contemporary Native arts and literature world. She went on to the University of New Mexico and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her MFA in 1978.

The poetry

Harjo’s published volumes span four decades. The principal ones:

• She Had Some Horses (1983). Her first major volume; the title poem an incantatory list-poem of remarkable power.
• In Mad Love and War (1990). Her second major volume; American Book Award winner; integrates explicit response to the Anna Mae Aquash murder and the broader violence against Native women with extraordinary lyric intensity.
• The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994). Mvskoke and broader Indigenous mythology pulled into the American present.
• A Map to the Next World (2000). Increasingly cosmological in scope.
• How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002). Career retrospective.
• Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015). Her work consolidating; the title poem a major piece.
• An American Sunrise (2019). Centers the Mvskoke removal — the forced 1830s march from the southeast to Oklahoma — and the continuing reverberation of that displacement.
• Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (2022). Selected by U2’s Sandy Sturken from the lifetime work; a culminating selection.

Her poems recur to certain figures — horses, the moon, [[sun|the sun]], the wind, jazz musicians, Mvskoke deities, ancestors, women murdered and refusing to stay silent. The voice is often incantatory, sometimes prose-like, often shaped by the rhythms of her saxophone playing. The work braids Mvskoke cosmology, contemporary politics, family memory, jazz, and a sustained refusal of the erasure American culture has tried to inflict on Native peoples.

The Poet Laureate years

In 2019 the Library of Congress appointed Harjo the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States — the first Native American to hold the position. She was reappointed for a second and then an unprecedented third term, serving until 2022.

Her signature project as Laureate was Living Nations, Living Words — an interactive online map of contemporary Native poets across the United States, with each poet representing the indigenous nations of their tribal lands. The project (housed at the Library of Congress) features dozens of contemporary Native poets — Natalie Diaz, Layli Long Soldier, Heid E. Erdrich, Tommy Pico, Sherwin Bitsui, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and many more — with audio recordings, written poems, and biographical statements. The project decisively visualized what had been increasingly clear in the Native literary world: that Native poetry is not a historical category but a flourishing contemporary one.

The musical career

A note that is sometimes underemphasized in biographical accounts: Harjo is also a serious jazz saxophonist with a career going back to the 1970s and several albums (Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century with Poetic Justice, 1996; Native Joy for Real, 2004; Winding Through the Milky Way, 2008; Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears, 2010, with Larry Mitchell). The poetry and the music are not separable in her practice; the rhythmic phrasing of the poems carries her musical sense.

The memoirs

Harjo has produced two substantial memoirs that complement the poetry:

• Crazy Brave (2012). Her childhood and young adulthood; the difficult family circumstances; the move to the Institute of American Indian Arts; the becoming of the poet.
• Poet Warrior (2021). A more reflective second memoir, written in maturity.

What this gives the platform

Two contributions:

1. A continuing voice. The Mvskoke tradition is not a historical category. Joy Harjo is one of its continuing voices, in the present tense, making art and politics out of it. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s commitment to indigenous traditions has to engage living indigenous voices, and Harjo is among the most accessible.
2. A model of integration. The poetry, the music, the political work, the institutional service — all of one piece. [[0mn1one|The platform]] values this kind of integrated practice and finds in Harjo a particular model of it.

See also

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• Subset of: [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Joy Harjo. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975–2001. Norton, 2002. Source class: book / primary, retrospective.
2. Joy Harjo. An American Sunrise. Norton, 2019. Source class: book / primary.
3. Joy Harjo. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. Norton, 2012. Source class: book / primary, memoir.
4. Joy Harjo. Poet Warrior. Norton, 2021. Source class: book / primary, memoir.
5. Joy Harjo. Living Nations, Living Words. Library of Congress, 2019–22. https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/living-nations-living-words/. Source class: institutional / project.
6. Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings. Norton, 2015. Source class: book / primary.

Lenses still to grow

• The Mvskoke Nation as a continuing community — currently underrepresented here.
• The 1830s removal of the Mvskoke and other southeastern tribes (Trail of Tears) as a piece of history.
• The Institute of American Indian Arts as a continuing institution; its role in shaping contemporary Native arts.
• Living Nations, Living Words as a continuing resource — the contemporary Native poets it features deserve their own entries.
• Anna Mae Aquash — the AIM activist whose 1976 murder Harjo’s In Mad Love and War responds to.