Joy Harjo | September 2021

This essay was adapted from the keynote address at the
2021 Virtual AWP Conference & Bookfair.

 

I lay my body down. My mind does not slow for sleep.
  It has no place to rest,
Not in this country, this government, this time of the
  heavy turning earth.
An eternity can exist in a moment, an hour, or in the
  song bodies of humble sparrows
who dream in the tree of life as it breaks through
  concrete and sorrow.

Five trains cross downtown Tulsa.
The man chased by demons screams out. He roams
  this area day and night.
His bad dreams never sleep. They beg our ears for
  mercy.
A ruined goddess dressed in streetlight begs a ghost for
change.
  She wears a crown of cigarette smoke.

Tulsa is the corrupted form of the Mvskoke name for
  “town” or “old town”:
Tallasi, or Tvlvhasse.
Down the street the ashes of a fire we carried in the
  forced march
From the southeast was rekindled beneath the Council
  Oak Tree.
The tree is still there, our rooted story, holding in place
  the memory of fire.

Now a pandemic haunts these lands and the keepers of these lands. Those viral killers approach our minds to plant fear. They act familiar, shake hands, make treaties. They sit down without being invited. We recognize them as part of the great disturbance.

I give my mind the task of holding the door open for the ancestors, the guardians, the winds. When I sing poetry there is no way in for evil.

Once in the middle of the country in the early of my life, I drove my children through the night in our small pickup, back from a winter break in Tulsa, north to Iowa City for the beginning of the spring semester. We stopped for gas a few hours before we made it to Kansas City.

Cold winds had blown and blasted us for hours. Snow was now drift-walking the highway.

My son slid out to clean the windshield. The baby yawned then sleep-talked:

“I was just dreaming someone somewhere else, and I
  wonder if someone
Somewhere else is dreaming us.”

Then she went back to the origin place of poetry, the eternal road between myth and the ordinary, between history and odyssey.

We filled up with gas, kept driving through the icy darkness.

Now here we are together on the verge of shift, in our drive through what feels like the endless night of uncertainty. Nothing will be the same when this is over.

What will we know when this page is done? Who will we be? Will we survive the fires, the hatred, the heat, the rage? The sickness has taken so many. In our ceremonial ground community, we have lost several culture-carriers. Others are on ventilators, turning toward the next sacred story. We have lost so many to acts of hatred and fear, not just now but since the beginning of this story we call “America.” The pandemic has shown us just how far away we have been from ourselves; now we need to figure out where we are going together and how to get there, together.

I bow down to the storykeepers, to the keepers of poetry. I am reminded of the water spider, who when the earth was covered with water, carried an ember on her back so we could make fire to keep the story flickering, lit. Everything is a prayer in the becoming as she approaches us, swimming through time.

Hensci, Estonko, or Welcome to the first virtual AWP Keynote. We are virtually in Kansas City, and as we begin, to give blessing to this event, let’s honor the original keepers of these lands.

Kansas City, long before it was named “Kansas City,” has been a gathering place in the middle. Through time it has been a crossroads for many Native Nations peoples including the Kansa, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee, Missouria, and Wichita. Even the Ice Age stopped here at Kansas City. From this convergence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers emerged ragtime, Kansas City Jazz, and St. Louis Blues. Miles Davis grew up on the other side in East St. Louis. Willa Cather to the North. And don’t forget Charlie Parker. The winds like to play however they can, even with a human blowing horn, as they fly off the Rockies in these post Ice Age fields. They are always stirring something up.

I speak to you from Tulsa, Oklahoma, from the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation. Here we are at the border of three Native Nations that also include the Osage and Cherokee. We honor and acknowledge the keepers of these lands, as well as the keepers of the lands represented by all who are gathered here in this digital room. We acknowledge those past, those present, and those in the future who care for and are of these lands.

Everyone has guardians whose responsibility it is to tend the story. There are guardians of cities, mountains, plants, and animals, for all beings and states of mind on this planet Earth. These guardians are real, and in healthy societies they are active and unimpeded. When the guardians, or keepers of these lands, are forcibly removed, massacred, and their lifeways stolen through the theft and warehousing of children, when female power is no longer standing equal with male power, then all life suffers. The waters become polluted, fires are out of control, storms become massive and aggressive, and the Earth trembles. There is confusion and destruction among all those who inhabit the land, these times.

As we gather here at this crossroads of becoming, we acknowledge the source of the gifts of our living, for without this Earth, or Ekvnvcake, we would be without shelter, clothing, food, or inspiration. Consider that the earth mind, earth architectures, and aesthetics shape the mother root of our imagination here.

Vkvsamet hesaketmese pomvte. Mowe towekvs pokvhoyen
  yiceyvte
Mon vkerrickv heren. Pohkerricen vpeyeyvres

When my third granddaughter’s body was forming, I watched and listened to what was going on in the atmosphere, to give a clue about this incoming family member, what she would need once she arrived here to take on her part of the story.

A powerful story was making the rounds in the Native community where I was living in New Mexico. There was a Navajo woman of a righteous nature who lived far out on the reservation in a hogan, a traditional home structure of the Navajo, or Diné people. She still prayed every morning with cornmeal, tended the altars of living, took care of her sheep, and was loved and well-respected by her relatives and neighbors. She was also blind but could see with her spiritual being. She was visited one day by the Holy Ones. As her hogan filled with the powerful presence of sacredness, the Holy Ones told her, as they towered over her, that they came to give a warning to the people.

We are nearing times where we will experience Earth changes, famine, and strife, because people are forgetting their original teachings.

The Holy Ones instructed her to tell everyone to keep hold of their traditional ways, which meant attending to prayer and minding their attention in all things, because how they act determines the outcome of the people, for all life forms on this earth.

The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth’s peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and stories. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from, and who we are becoming.

I knew that my granddaughter was bringing in special gifts that would assist with these times we are moving into, times in which we are reckoning with our lack of respect and attention to what matters in this place, the times we are occupying now.

I told this story at a performance in Flagstaff, near one of the four sacred mountains. Many of the Diné people there nodded their heads in remembering. For Holy Ones to touch down in that manner is powerful and dangerous; everyone must pay attention.

Afterwards, one of the women came up to me and remarked, “I was there! I saw the footprints of the Holy Ones in the sand in front of the hogan. They were very long and narrow.”

The times the Holy Ones spoke of—we are now in those times. In this time, at the crossroads of brokenness, we are watching and listening for what stories will nourish us.

At this cliff edge of becoming, there will be no turning back.

These are the times that invite tricksters who disturb the waters. It was in a time like this that Robert Johnson, blues guitarist, met the devil at the crossroads one humid night somewhere in the dark of history.

It is in times like these we face the most cunning of tricksters. We might even find a trickster in the seat of power. We have always had clowns and tricksters in every culture. They inhabit the places of power because their role is to remind us that though we may hold and even wield power, power does not belong to us, it is meant to be shared. The Mvskoke trickster is Chofee, or Rabbit. This is a Rabbit story that tells a version of the story of these times we are in now.

RABBIT IS UP TO TRICKS

In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone,
Until somebody got out of line.
We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind.
Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him;
He was lonely in this world.
So Rabbit thought to make a person.
And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see
What would happen,
The clay man stood up.
Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken.
The clay man obeyed.
Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn.
The clay man obeyed.
Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife.
The clay man obeyed.
Rabbit felt important and powerful.
The clay man felt important and powerful.
And once that clay man started he could not stop.
Once he took that chicken he wanted all the chickens.
And once he took that corn he wanted all the corn.
And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives.
He was insatiable.
Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold.
Then it was land and anything else he saw.
His wanting only made him want more.
Soon it was countries, and then it was trade.
The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.
Forests were being mowed down all over the world.
And Rabbit had no place to play.
Rabbit’s trick had backfired.
Rabbit tried to call the clay man back,
But when the clay man wouldn’t listen
Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears.

In the clay man aftermath, we witnessed democracy dangled by an armed mob from the steps of the Capitol. A viral pandemic elbowed through the barrier of forgetfulness to infect we who grew up being told that we had invented a drug for everything.

Thousands confronted the open wound of racial injustice. A wound will not heal until it is cleaned out of all that has infected it, or it will reinfect and poison the body, can even kill it.

Land developers from Europe imported African peoples as slaves for their economic and land development projects, here on Native Nations lands, and all over the world. The American Dream moved from the East to the West to plant civilization based on a narrative that told them that the land was given to them because they were culturally and racially superior, that the Earth was not a living being, rather a storehouse to be raided.

This false narrative continues to infect and disrupt the quality of life for all living beings here on this planet, even those who cling to the raft of superiority, and drag it behind them as we wait at the crossroads, while we figure out collectively the direction in which to go.

No one can own this land. We might institute laws and publish legal documents, make political lines on maps, or divide according to religious ideology, but those claims are without merit to Earth herself.

When we were assembling the digital map for my Library of Congress project of mapping contemporary Native poets, Living Nations, Living Words, we used a map that contains no visible political boundaries delineating states or cities, not even the names of rivers, mountains, or other geographical features. The map is the color of earth and water. We can imagine trees, rivers, lakes, oceans, fields, and mountains. This alternative mapping project—a project meant to change the narrative of our use of language and its relationship to land—is a deliberate shift in the way we approach and experience the story of our living on this planet. The map then is no longer marked by brokenness. There are no fences, no lines of ownership. We see that we are the land.

Once, at a gathering of indigenous peoples in a village outside Quito, Ecuador, high in the Andes, where we strolled and climbed through clouds, a striking Bolivian Native woman stood up and addressed the women’s circle. She asked those of us from the North: “Why do you call yourselves ‘America’? We are all America, from the north to the south.” She continued to assert that the Western Hemisphere is a person, from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, a living being for whom we are all charged with care, with singing into continuation, as the Holy Ones reminded the people all those years back when my granddaughter was preparing to be born.

I am reminded of the power of words, and how they become potent in the work of poets, specifically how the words of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda climbed up the backbone of the Americas into my hands in a book of love poems The Captain’s Verses, a gift from a professor.

Neruda’s poem, “The Earth,” is a ritual, in the manner that all poems, all stories are rituals. Here is an excerpt from that poem.

The green earth has yielded
to everything yellow, gold, harvests
farms, leaves, grain,
but when autumn rises
with its spacious banner
it is you I see,
for me it is your hair
that separates the tassels.

I see the monuments
of ancient broken stone,
but if I touch
the stone scar
your body responds to me,
my fingers recognize
suddenly, shivering,
your warm sweetness.

…

In this poem, the beloved is earth, and the earth the beloved. Every intimate human ritual addresses the back and forth of the flickering dark and light. The poem continues through the monuments of history. The wars of history do not favor trees. I remember standing in the Special Collections room at Southern Methodist University holding images of a Civil War photographer who documented the environmental damage of war. The destruction of human life was monumental, as was the destruction of trees.

The poem ends at an opening, at the beloved’s mouth, which is the same shape as the wounding of the Earth. It is from this wound that we speak poetry, write music, dance, and create art. The poem has made a ritual of the wounding. The poem places us in the wound—the wound of: “your hair / that separates the tassels.” The wound is bearing the fruit, corn is flowering. This is a love poem for the Earth, for the poet who is also earth. Isn’t every poem a ritual to bring one closer to the beloved, attracting us to the fire of living and dying?

What is broken is left in the field to ponder, like the boulders from the Ice Age that litter the flat Kansas landscape. Bones will bleach in the sun and the rain. History will be monuments left in stones and words. Then they will be swallowed up by earth and time.

Poems are markers scattered at the crossroads of time, history, and mythic emergence.

At this particular crossroads of brokenness and wounding, we have turned to poetry. Site visits for poetry organizations like the Academy of American Poets and The Poetry Society of America have rocketed. We have hungered for what poetry offers us in this year of racial reckoning, of the Covid pandemic, of the divisive political warring that divides the country. It is the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, just a few blocks away, where the wealthiest Black community in the country in 1921, called Black Wall Street, was burned down and many killed by white citizens. As the search goes on for mass graves, poems are being commissioned and written as testimony and witness, so this act will not go unremembered, unspoken, so the future generations listen and take heed.

I keep returning to this poem by Natasha Trethewey “Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath,” for illumination, to give ritual to grieving, for moving on. She concludes her poem with “…Ask yourself what’s in your heart, that / reliquary—blood locket and seedbed—and / contend with what it means, the folk saying / (space) you learned from a Korean poet in Seoul: / that one does not bury the mother’s body / in the ground but in the chest, or—like you— / (space) you carry her corpse on your back.”

There are many corpses on the back of this country, and we will continue to carry them until we have the right tools, the right words to bury them, so that the fertile human field of becoming can flower with justice and equality.

To honor our survival and help direct us at the crossroads, this song.

(Instrumental WE EMERGED FROM NIGHT IN CLOTHES OF SUNRISE)

We can change the story, the story of a violent hierarchy that follows in the wake of the Papal Bulls proclaiming indigenous peoples as nonhumans for land and resource theft and slavery, to Manifest Destiny, which opened up the West and the world for the taking, set in place a caste system that places value according to skin color, culture, sexual identity, and economic standing. We can turn to honoring female power without whom there is no life. Rivers, mountains, lands, other animal and elemental inhabitants will be respected coinhabitants.

Once a story was given to me in a dream, after a moral impasse in a creative writing teaching job. I called out to the dark, “How do we change the story?” That night the dreaming took me to that deep inner pool of insight. As artists, we are on alert for such insights because our art demands that we are challenged, never comfortable. We often find ourselves at aesthetic, artistic crossroads. Then we need our dreams to show us the way to change the story. We do not only dream as individuals, but we also dream as a collective.

It is in the times when people dreamed and thought together as one being. That doesn’t mean there weren’t individuals. In those times, people were more individual in personhood than they are now in their common assertion of individuality: one person kept residence on the moon even while living in the village. Another was a man who dressed up and lived as a woman and was known as the best seamstress.

I have traveled to this village with a close friend who is also a distant relative. We are related to nearly everyone by marriage, clan, or blood.

The first night after our arrival, a woman is brutally killed in the village. Murder is not commonplace. The evil of it puts the whole village at risk. It had to be dealt with immediately so that the turbulence will not leave the people open to even more evil.

Because my friend and I are the most obvious influence, it is decided that we are to be killed, to satisfy the murder, to ensure the village will continue in a harmonious manner. No one tells us we are going to be killed. We know it; my bones know it. It is unfortunate, but it is how things must be.

The next morning, my friend and I have walked down from the village to help gather for the next meal, when we hear the killing committee coming for us.

I can hear them behind us, with their implements and stones, in their psychic roar of purpose.

As they come to kill us, I thank the body that has been my clothing on this journey. It has served me well for protection and enjoyment.

I hear—I still hear—the crunch of bones as the village mob, who were sent to do this job, slams us violently.

I feel my body’s confused and terrible protest, and then my spirit leaps out above the scene as I watch briefly before circling toward the sea.

I linger out over the sea, and my soul’s guardian who has been with me through the stories of my being says, “You can go back and change the story.”

My first thought was, why would I want to do that? I am free of the needs of earth existence. I can move like wind and water.

But then, because I am human and not bird or whale, I feel compelled.

“What do you mean, ‘change the story’?”

Then I am back in the clothes of my body outside the village. I am back in the time between the killing in the village and my certain death in retribution.

“Now what am I supposed to do?” I ask my Spirit. I can see no other way to proceed through the story.

My Spirit responds, “You know what to do. Look, and you will see the story.”

And then I am alone with the sea and the sky. I give my thinking to time and let them go play.

It is then I see. I see a man in the village stalk a woman. She is not interested in him, but he won’t let go. He stalks her as he stalks his prey. He is the village’s best hunter. He stalks her to her home, and when no one else is there, he trusses her, kills her, then drags her body out of her house to the sea. I can see the trail of blood behind them. I can see his footprints in blood as he returns to the village alone.

The people are gathering and talking about the killing. I can feel their nudges towards my friend and me. I stand up with a drum in my hand. I say:

“I have a story I want to tell you.”

And then I begin drumming and dancing to accompany the story. It is pleasing, and the people want to hear more. They want to hear what kind of story I am bringing from my village.

I sing, dance, and tell the story of a hunter. He is the best hunter of the village. I sing about his relationship to the animals he kills, and how he has fed his people. And how skilled he is as he walks out into the story to call his prey.

And then I tell the story of the killing of an animal who is like a woman. I talk about the qualities of the woman, whom the man sees as prey. By now, the story has its own spirit that wants to live. It dances and sings and breathes. It surprises me with what it knows.

With the last step, the last hit of the drum, the killer stands up, as if to flee the gathering. The people turn together as one and see him. They see that he has killed the woman, and it is his life that must be taken to satisfy the murder.

When I return to present earth time, I can still hear the singing.
I get up from my bed and dance and sing the story.

We now gather here in the middle, at the crossroads, to shift the collective story, to carry ourselves forward with caches from the storehouse of American literature, including indigenous peoples, and everyone else who for too long has been left out of the American story.

First, we must call ourselves back, the parts of ourselves that have been lost in despair, grief, injustice, and violence. But to do so we need the right words. We turn to the Kiowa poet and storyteller N. Scott Momaday who often stood alone as a Kiowa man in the academy. He understands that words have power to make or destroy a world. He was taught this by the elders who stood before him in the power of ritual and ceremony at Rainy Mountain. He reminds us “A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.”

To call ourselves back we return to the beloved poet Gwendolyn Brooks, born in Topeka, Kansas, who was a lyric witness and beacon first to her South Side of Chicago neighborhood with her poetry, then to the whole country, and the generations who continue to follow and look up to her light and listen. She inspired all of us to make it through. She says:

“When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.”

When you love a wounded country, a wounded earth, then she becomes more than a body… we are rich, sweet, and right. We are part of the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

We poets, storytellers, truthtellers, and keepers of the stories make a coherent shape to brokenness.

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds.

They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back.

Acknowledge this Earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time.

They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the Earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds, and animal people who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training, it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plants.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

Good night digital Kansas City, perched in the middle of the country, between two oceans, leaning towards the Rockies in the distance. A city where the blues took root. A city of railroads, cattle, and jazz. A navel cord place for the singers and speakers, the writers and poets who lived in the concentric circles of this town that continues for miles and years across country roads, and up and down the rivers of life.

Good night. This pandemic, this separation, these losses, these moments of shift and celebration have taught us that we need the gathering together. It is spiritual food. We are a small blue and green planet circling in mystery. Through generations, through war and peace. Through now.

We’re going to Kansas City
We’re going to Kansas City, Kansas City here we come
We’re going to Kansas City, here we come
They’ve got some crazy fine poets there
And we’re gonna hear us some

We’ll be standin’ on the corner, Twelfth Street and
Vine
We’ll be standin’ on the corner, Twelfth Street and
Vine
With our Kansas City stories and our bottles
Of Kansas City wine

Well, we might take a train, might take a plane
We’re gonna be safe
And Zoom to K.C.
We’re going to Kansas City, Kansas City
Here we come
We got some crazy fine poets there
And we’re gonna hear us some

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Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She is serving her second term as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. The author of nine books of poetry, including the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise, several plays and children's books, and two memoirs, Crazy Brave and Poet Warrior, her many honors include the Ruth Lily Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two NEA fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As a musician and performer, Harjo has produced seven award-winning music albums including her newest, I Pray for My Enemies. She is Executive Editor of the anthology When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through — A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and the editor of Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry, the companion anthology to her signature Poet Laureate project. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Notes