Joy Harjo

Beloved Bibliophiles!

At our Bibliophiles Unanimous! Zoom gathering on November 20th, Katie Radditz, Martha Ragland, Elizabeth Domike and I talked about American Indian Authors and Culture. Martha read two poems by Joy Harjo, who was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, from 2019-2022. She is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). Here are the poems:

This Morning I Pray for My Enemies

And whom do I call my enemy?

An enemy must be worthy of engagement.

I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.

It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.

The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.

I sees and knows everything.

It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.

The door to the mind should only open from the heart.

An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

Suicide Watch

1.
I was on a train stopped sporadically at checkpoints.
What tribe are you, what nation, what race, what sex, what unworthy soul?

2.
I could not sleep, because I could not wake up.
No mirror could give me back what I wanted.

3.
I was given a drug to help me sleep.
Then another drug to wake up.
Then a drug was given to me to make me happy.
They all made me sadder.

4.
Death will gamble with anyone.
There are many fools down here who believe they will win.

5.
You know, said my teacher, you can continue to wallow, or
You can stand up here with me in the sunlight and watch the battle.

6.
I sat across from a girl whose illness wanted to jump over to me.
No! I said, but not aloud.
I would have been taken for crazy.

7.
We will always become those we have ever judged or condemned.

8.
This is not mine. It belongs to the soldiers who raped the young women on the Trail of Tears. It belongs to Andrew Jackson. It belongs to the missionaries. It belongs to the thieves of our language. It belongs to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It no longer belongs to me.

9.
I became fascinated by the dance of dragonflies over the river.
I found myself first there.

—Joy Harjo

*

Katie and Jude both had high praise for Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Katie recommended that we read The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. She found this list of “10 Books by Indigenous Authors You Should Read” on the Literary Hub website:

Louise Erdrich, The Round House 

Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories 

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony 

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn 

James Welch, Fools Crow 

Janet Campbell Hale, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture 

Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit 

Winona LaDuke, Last Standing Woman 

Paula Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows

For descriptions of the books, click here:

https://lithub.com/10-books-by-indigenous-authors-you-should-read/  

Dave Duncan couldn’t come for Bibliophiles Unanimous!, but he sent the first two pages from My Indian Boyhood by Chief Luther Standing Bear, who was the boy Ota K’te (Plenty Kill). He said reading those two pages gave him a better perspective on the issue of sports teams using Indians and Indian themes as their mascots.

After the Zoom, Jude sent this:

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I am thankful for all of you!

I’d like to add The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich, to the list of Indigenous authors. I did just get it from the local bookstore and am about 75 pages into it and know it’s going to be great! But the person who recommended it to me told me to be sure and look in the back for the author’s (totally biased) (as she fully acknowledges) lists of favorite books. She divides the (voluminous) list into categories: Indigenous Lives, Indigenous Poetry, Sublime Books, Books for Banned Love, Ghost-Managing Book List, Short Perfect Novels, Incarceration (“The Sentence” has two meanings here)…etc. etc. It is a wonderful list!

Elizabeth shared this prose poem:

The White Paws

The fox with broken legs has a gift others do not. He removes his paws and they go walking through the woods at night alone. The paws stop to touch pondwater, to brush a blade of saltgrass. They tap the backs of passing beetles in the dark. At dawn, they return to the fox, whispering of rabbits curled in damp caverns, of green oak leaves and sand. The fox listens carefully; he gleans secrets of the world this way. He learns of the earth without lifting his nose from his long, broken limbs. Always, when the paws return they say we missed you, always he listens. How young, how simple they seem beside his face which is mottled and pocked. He gentles the paws like children. He hopes when he dies they live on without him. When his bones rattle and shake in wind, he hopes the paws walk through autumn leaves, pad softly through newfallen snow. He dreams they will drift across a black lake dappled with rain; that, above it, they’ll rise; they’ll glow like four pale moons.

—Dara Yen Elerath

Ken Margolis wasn’t able to come to the Zoom get together, but he sent this to me in an email:

It was about fifteen years ago, I guess, that the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation was founded. I was asked to help set up their operation, and worked with them on a part time basis for about a year and a half. Joy was on the board, and was the board member I got closest to. Joy is so attached to the earth, that if she jumped up, the earth would follow her. She’s a poet, singer, entertainer who is committed to her culture. I went to one of her shows in a tavern in Albuquerque. She told stories reside poems, chanted, and pretty soon a band came up, and it turned into music, kind of Indian jazz. My impression of Joy is that her life is a work of art.

*

I was in Mexico when we Zoomed. I talked about how, in my view, the distinction between “Native Americans” and “Mexicans” is an arbitrary one. Mexico is full of Indians! This is too big a subject to go into here, but another name for most Mexicans (and for most of the people in Central and South America is “Indians” or “Native Americans”—even though many Native Americans south of the Rio Grande speak and write Spanish and Portuguese, just as many Native Americans north of the Rio Grande speak and write English. (Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.)

After the Zoom was over, some other books by and about Native Americans came to my mind including:

Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country by Jarold Ramsey

Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo

Naked Against the Rain: The People of the Lower Columbia River 1770-1830 by Rick Rubin

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

Indian Oratory: Famous Speeches by Noted Indian Chieftains compiled by W. C. Vanderwerth

The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander

Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being by Harold Napolean

On the day after Thanksgiving, which on my calendar is designated Native American Heritage Day, I went to the library and found Joe Sacco’s book Paying the Land. I checked it out and read it. It’s great. It’s about the Dene people in the Northwest Territories. YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!

peace & love

Johnny