Joy Harjo

Native poet, musician, songwriter, and performance artist Joy Harjo (Mvskoke, a.k.a. Creek) grew up in Oklahoma, attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and graduated from the University of New Mexico before earning her M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. The Albuquerque author has written seven books of poetry, as well as the well-received children’s book The Good Luck Cat (Harcourt, 2000). As Patricia West-Barker discovers, Harjo calls her most recent book, For a Girl Becoming (University of Arizona Press, 2009), “a young-adult book in a picture-book format.”

Q: How does For a Girl Becoming fit in your body of work?

A: Everything I do becomes a kind of hybrid, whether I do it in music or in whatever I write. I’m always trying to make a bridge—to illuminate the connections between the spoken and written, between the eternal, ever-present luminosity of life and linear reality. This book does the same thing—it’s in that kind of traditional tribal mode of oratorical speech.

What challenges do you face as an indigenous artist?

The problem that we often have with Native anything is that [people] don’t want to see us. I read For a Girl Becoming at a performance; an agent from New York was there, and she asked me to send it to her. She thought it would make a really good book and really do well, that it had a potential for a big audience. And then, when I sent it to her, she said, “Well, I would be interested if you take out all of the cultural references and you make it for a mainstream audience.” But what is the mainstream? It’s the specific cultural references that make something shine.

Often, what I’ve found is that [people] don’t want contemporary [Native] stories. They want illustrated mythical stories. If we are not wearing our ceremonial clothes, we’re not seen as Indians. If we are not doing powwow or we’re not out on the plaza dancing or otherwise entertaining people, or being “spiritual” in a particularly defined way, we don’t exist. It’s not us now. We are not alive.

I think it’s important to say, “Look, the oral traditions are living. We may put them on paper, but they’re living.”

The granddaughter that I wrote this for is Creek, Cherokee, Acoma, Navajo, Hopi, Spanish, Irish, French . . . I think that what’s important is that we are human beings and that there is a lot of cultural mix.

Santa Fean Patricia West-Barker is a founding editor of TheZenchilada.com, an online magazine of food and culture.

 

[back to the top]