Joy Harjo: Building the House of Knowledge
Photo Credit: Matika Wilbur
“Humanity is messy, each of us starts with ourselves, it's horribly messy and then multiply that times millions. And that's an incredible, lovely mess.” So says Joy Harjo, the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, and the first Native American to hold that post. She is the author of nine books of poetry, several plays, and childrens books, and two memoirs—and is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee nation, with an innumerable number of prizes and fellowships at her back. In this episode, we sit down to discuss her second memoir, Poet Warrior, which just came out. It is beautiful—not only the story of her life, but a vehicle for deep wisdom about language, metaphor, and ritual. We—as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as humankind—exist in a collective story field, Harjo tells us. Everyone’s story must have a place, a thread within the larger tapestry—and our story field must constantly shift to include even the most difficult stories, the ones we want to forget and repress. But, as she remarks, the hard stories provide the building blocks for our house of knowledge—we cannot evolve without them.
To move forward, we must find ourselves in the messy story of humanity, assume our place as part of the earth in this time and in these challenges. For Harjo, it is when we turn to song, poetry, and the arts that we are able to re-root ourselves in the voice of inner truth, a knowing that has access to stories past, present, and future. And it is this wisdom of eternal knowledge that will help guide us forward—if we only stop to listen. Speaking of listening, you can find the episode here.
Joy is also the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Jackson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harjo is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Rasmuson United States Artist Fellowship. 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. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. You can learn more about her here—and find her at a live event here. (She’s a saxophonist!) Follow Joy on Twitter and on Instagram.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Finding ourselves in the messy story of humanity Approx. 7:09)
Returning to rituals of becoming (Approx. 34:52)
The story of mothers (Approx. 40:44)
TRANSCRIPT:
(Slightly edited for clarity.)
ELISE:
It is such an honor, I've wanted to interview you forever. So, I am very honored and grateful that you took time and I know that this book will be resonant for so many people. So, thank you. And thanks for helping me define, I guess, what this podcast is, which is conversations with people like you, which does lead me to my first question. So, I grew up in Montana in the American West and certainly reservation adjacent, in reverence of Native American culture. Also, obviously I was swimming in stereotypes about Native American culture as well. Now we seem to be at a point where it's…do you ever get frustrated that we've broken…we’re breaking toys and then bringing them back and leaning on Native American culture asking: “Can you fix this? Can you fix the planet? Can you teach us about reciprocity and balance? Can you reconnect us to the earth?” Does that frustrate you?
JOY HARJO:
Well, the whole story, the whole American story for all of us I think gets a little exhausting. But especially if you think about an Indigenous cultures and peoples being the root and how so much of it has been repressed. Because it doesn't make for a beautiful, tidy, American story. And yet we're here, we're over 570-something nations, vibrant cultures. Yes, we've lost a lot, but we have also, like any living culture, any living culture has to have a flow in and out, otherwise like a lake, it gets stagnant. There can be stagnation and that holds for cultures too, whether it's so-called American culture…and what is that anyway, exactly? But it's a stream. There are many cultural streams that make American culture, but yes, it does get frustrating because still—and this has happened to me when I perform and talk about this, that, and the other, and sing and play saxophone, talking about how blues and jazz or, Native music, or Southeastern native music is part of that. And then I will get a question about teepees or something like that. I will get a question that tells me that nobody heard a thing I said. Because these images and broken tropes are still central. I was talking with somebody the other day who was teaching at some institution and they were so frustrated. They had somebody come up to them who said, “I thought you were all dead.” A Harvard grad. A Harvard graduate.
ELISE:
Oh God, no.
JOY:
I know, but it didn't surprise me. There's a group called Illuminative that's actually been funded and has gone out and gotten actual research and marketing research numbers about attitudes and ideas of Indigenous peoples in this country. And something like 30% of those interviewees said the same thing—or, they have these misconceptions, or we don't exist to them unless we exist within a particular kind of framework.
ELISE:
No. And there's such a desire, I think out of obviously rampant guilt and intergenerational trauma on all sides,—both being oppressed and also being an oppressor, and this idea of what belongs to anyone, which, as an idea is also kind of insane. Like the earth belongs to all of us and none of us. And so then you also understand this instinctive desire to feel better, right? Cause people don't know how to metabolize or process our history. And so it's so much easier to just put it away and pretend like it's not there—or, have this desire to sort of want to see some sort of full circle solution where it's like, oh, and now we'll be led back into the right way of being—that just doesn't allow really for anyone's humanity or, it just doesn't let people live.
JOY:
Humanity is messy. Each of us starts with ourselves. It's horribly messy and then multiply that times millions. And that's an incredible, lovely mess.
ELISE:
I love in the book where you talk about to your sense of belonging. It's talking about your Aunt Lois, who was a painter, and you write about how everyone needs to feel the sense of place and kinship and how, you write: “Without it, we are lost children, wandering the earth our whole lives, without a sense of belonging.” And then you talk about how even countries can be lost with no roots in the earth. And it feels that way, right? It feels that way acutely. How do you imagine that we start to re-root, or repair, or reconnect, or find ourselves within this messy story of humanity?
JOY:
In a way we have to kind of take the, you know, I'm a writer, I write all kinds of things. And so if a story's not working right, what do you do? You take it apart, and you say—I'm in the middle of a project too, so I'm doing that to myself—this doesn't work. We take this part out, you know? How do we revise this? Yeah, this is part of the story, but a lot of it has to do with its intent. You can go to a movie and it just doesn't work. Well, why? It’s because the intent or the so-called mission is not in it. It could be two words, or three words— it could be “love hurts” or something. But it has to be there. And we know when we go to read a novel, or go to a play, or a movie when it's not there—we come away with no way to anchor, no way to anchor to the intent. There's no intent anchor, so to speak.
And so in this country, what's happened: The anchor of course is land. You think about why people came over here in the beginning, and they wanted a place—I’ll be nice—they wanted a place to raise family. Most people… why would you leave your home? They were land developers. Some of the earliest people were land developers. They saw opportunity, just like some people are seeing going to space as an opportunity to land own—you know that’s behind some of this spatial stuff! They see it as an opportunity for money. But most people, they came over here for they wanted to feed their kids and to be part of a story that included them. And then here we are, we had huge, you know, different nations. Over 570—there were more then. There were different languages. The difference between going to Italy or Northern Italy and Southern Italy and so on. It was a very rich, cultural, exciting mix. When I went to India, India reminded me a lot of what this country would have been like had there not been genocidal policies and massacres to try to destroy the people who were there and then plant a culture, I guess, essentially at first a puritanical culture to plant that culture on top of it, and attempt to make ruins out of the peoples and cultures who were there.
Well, it didn't go so well because one, we're still here. There is evidence. We have all of these grave sites with native children who were sent away, forced away from their families, even little children, babies, little kids, you know, for re-education. But one of the first things we'd have to get rid of is that sense of the caste system, in which there's a hierarchy that was put into place, when that redistricting—it was not even redistricting, it was a supplanting of one group of people over another. That's what needs to go. Because it serves no one, even those who like to think that they're in power. It’s harmful.
ELISE:
No, it's awful. So interesting too, like the boarding schools that you mentioned, this effort to break the backs of tribes, and this quote unquote “civilizing force” of whiteness—to whatever effect or end. And so, we're also at this place where we're all global citizens, and we recognize that in order to endure our time on this planet, to survive, in some ways we need bridge-building that we have never seen before. And then similarly, it's this drive of individuality and learning how to understand that Kimberlé Crenshaw idea of intersectionality and that we are all completely unique with this Venn diagram of different identities that collide in our bodies. And we each have our own story, and our own purpose, our own gifts to express, and so there’s need for both, right?
How do we belong to a whole, and then how do we also find our place so that we're not just “one,” And it's a really interesting moment—you mentioned Italy, right? So, we don't really distinguish between Italians, right? There are Italians, or if they're here, they're white; how do you imagine that we start to, and maybe it's through story, maybe it's continuing to bellow air into the stories of different people so that we can remember that we're different. And yet all here together. I loved when you speak to the old ones, your ancestors, and they remind you that you were born of a generation, this is a quote, “you were born of a generation that promised to help. Remember each generation makes a person you came in together to make change.” So maybe you can put that all together in a question, but how do we hold both lines?
JOY:
I had a really good answer going there, and then I lost it. But yeah, we are in this collective story field and we're all of us together in a world of duality and polarity—but everyone's story has to have a place. I think one of the most surprising things that happened to me in writing Poet Warrior, one of the moments I get surprised—I wouldn't write unless I get surprised or find things that I didn't know—I mean, why do I do this? Why do you do what you do? Why do I do what I do? It's because we're traveling along in our story and we each have our individual stories—and then we're part of this larger story. And it's like you travel along to find moments that illuminate—and sometimes they're really small moments, and sometimes they're immense. But we search for those like we search for sunrise, the light when the sun comes over the horizon.
And one of the moments when I was writing Poet Warrior, that totally surprised me was my evil stepfather. I mean, he wasn't totally evil, but he wasn't helpful except for driving me inside to develop my inner life. And so he was helpful there. I remember after he had passed, I didn't want to go to his funeral, I told my mother. But my mother asked me to. And so I did to be there with her. And I was gently held back when they asked, “Does anybody have anything to say?” And I started to stand up, but afterwards I was sitting out with my stepsister, his daughter, who was close to my mother's age. And she was always there for me. And we were sitting out there and she was telling me stories. We were trying to understand him to let him go. And I was writing this, and then the line came, “Even the monster has a story.” And then I write that. I think, this happens a lot. Right. Well, cool, thank you! Who am I, you know, thanking for that inspiration, that line. You know, where does art come from, you know, that place art comes from—and where does it come from? It comes from part of this web, this story web we’re all in.
ELISE:
No, I love, I loved that. I was just looking back at that phrase this morning: “Even monsters have a story.” And then you talk to about, I think it was when Tiffany, who is your cousin or second cousin, Donna Jo, the barrel racers daughter. I always wanted to be a barrel racer. So you talked about… Tiffany is in jail and you tell her, you ask her to write her story, right. And to send it to you and she can seal it so that you can't read it. Or I guess she allows you to read.
JOY:
Do you want me to read that?
ELISE:
Yes, that would be amazing.
JOY:
When Tiffany was in prison we wrote back and forth. She wrote that she was tired of carrying the burden of her past. I had materials sent to her to write her story, as a method of getting at the pain that was haunting her. I would be a witness, I told her. Write without censoring. If there were any stories that she didn’t want me to read, to write it anyway and staple the pages together. I would not read them. This was about bringing everything to the surface so it could be let go and have no more power over her.
From prison, my cousin sent me packets of pages and pages of stories. Many of the stories occurred in the first fourteen years of her life when she was a child in Okemah. There was page after page of handwritten emotional prose detailing sexual abuse and other violence as she grew older, documenting a lost trail through failed relationships. It was quite a catalog of abuse and addictive behavior.
We are all here to serve each other. At some point we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which his mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.
So that goes back to the question earlier about the story of America, or this story we're all in together. It's like, no you don't—as some people would like to just throw out everything that is not glorifying a certain color track of history in this country—it’s like, no, we need all the parts, because it's those things, those difficult challenges we've been through that give us our building materials, so to speak.
ELISE:
Yeah. And as you said, after the funeral, telling the story so that you could understand. It seems like those building materials can only be forged from the part— not the parts that are useful, it's all useful—but we lack that durability and resilience to even want to go there. Right? It's hard. It's really difficult in our own lives and then in our history to process. But I agree with you. It’s the only way forward, to look at it, because then otherwise it haunts us. I would imagine.
JOY:
Yeah. I keep thinking about…there’s been a lot of that gone down this last year or so. And I remember here, in the middle of the pandemic, we were marching with Black Lives Matter, down the street and going right over and gathering right at, Greenwood, you know, the massacre, the big Tulsan massacre area. And I realized, that really it's about people. Everybody wants to be part of the story, a valuable part of the story. And the overall story field, it has to shift to include these difficult stories. Somebody told me the other day, they were somewhere talking from somebody from Tulsa who said, “I want nothing to do with that other story. You know, I just pretend it didn't exist.” Again, that's what happens. It’s no, it's an important part. It was difficult. But look at what came out of it. All of these events happened to gather people together.
ELISE:
And it seems like it's shrapnel, right? Like it will work itself to the surface and it will be painful, but there's sort an inevitability—you can't just bury these things. They will come out. It's funny even thinking about Tulsa. And I don't know if you saw that show, the Watchmen on HBO, but it's about sort of Avengers style, Tulsa massacre, and then all the police are in masks. And it's such an interesting show because it came out years ago, but it was in some ways, a foretelling of this strange moment in time that we all find ourselves in. And, you know, I wonder like when you talk to old ones or when you time travel in your mind, or your dreams, as you have, I think you, write since…it’s always been how it's been for you, right? As a child. And you think about this concept of time, and the way that these things are revealed to us over time. Like, how do you…and being alive with your ancestors in this moment as they speak to you…how do you think about that in the context of your life?
JOY:
I think it's true for ultimately everybody, but we don't always stop and think about it or sometimes a belief system will get in the way of— well, that can't be so, or it's just my imagination or whatever—but we live in so many different kinds of time. There's linear time. We say, okay, today is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I have this appointment at such and such. Then you can measure a child growing up on the wall. You know, you measure time, you measure time in all kinds of ways. You know, my mother used to measure time from when she burned her hand in the fryer. There's different time markers that we have. But even at the same time, as sitting here, speaking with you, there could be all kinds of time and memory, I mean, memory is timeless. Thing move around.
And even history, we walk in and out of history all of the time, our own personal history, but in a place. And sometimes being in a place, that history needs healing, it needs rest. Just like some memories are so full they need, they need to rest. Some memories need to rest. They need to be acknowledged. And then they need a place to lay down and rest for a while so they can get up again and be useful. You know? And I think about Greenwood, I think about my own people being brought here, forced here, by a president who refused to obey, you know, congressional order—because of similar political times that we've been going through, that we went through in the past four years. Yet, you know, we were forced here. And so that time before is still very present.
The present time is, and even the future is possible futures, but maybe even the past is possible past. Because sometimes I get the sense that we're constructing the past, even with the way we think about it in our memory, and the way people write about it, and even false narratives that we construct, we are… that's interesting! Even, as we're constructing a present where every one of us is actively involved in constructing a present, even as we're involved in constructing what we think we're doing. We think that we're constructing a future, when really, it's all happening simultaneously.
ELISE:
It's fascinating to me in the context, too, of your experience conversing in dream worlds. There's a culture here that’s very much fixated on this idea of: you're here and then you're gone. And regardless of what you might believe about afterlife, the people who we love continue to endure in our lives. And we talk to them, regardless of whether we think that that's real or not—there's this idea of anything that happened before can be erased, or that it's not something that we carry forward, or that those relationships cease, even if the other person..but I'm sure you're very much in conversation with your stepfather even, or your mother. But it's a funny way that we have of sort of pretending like what's in the past is gone and done, but it's not—it's ever present.
And as you sort of say, which I think is such a fascinating idea—and the way that we've told our story incorrectly or incompletely, or sometimes a fabrication, it changes our future. I also feel like life is sort of like you're, you're trying to understand within a larger context. And it's like: How quickly can you get the kindling? How quickly can you sort of learn the lessons from these teachers? As you write: “Even when we just stand in the presence of our teachers, we are taught.” Can you read to us on page 44 of Poet Warrior, where you talk about inner knowing,
JOY:
Okay.
As I near the last doorway of my present life, I am trying to understand the restless path on which I have traveled. My failures have been my most exacting teachers. They are all linked by one central characteristic, and that is the failure to properly regard the voice of inner truth. That voice speaks softly. It is not judgmental, full of pride, or otherwise loud. It does not deride, shame, or otherwise attempt to derail you. When I fail to trust what my deepest knowing tells me, then I suffer. The voice of inner truth, or the knowing, has access to the wisdom of eternal knowledge. The perspective of that voice is timeless.
ELISE:
I love that. And that's the inner voice that kept prodding you into poetry, even though that probably seemed like the most natural thing. I love your discussion of poetry, too, which I definitely want to talk about. But also strange, right? Like sort of an aberrant or unusual path to go and become a professor of poetry and a poet. And I love as you say that it's such a timeless, inner voice. And so many of us are disconnected. How have you stayed attached? How do you continue to come sort of home to that?
JOY:
We all have that inner voice and we all, every one of us, deals with it or doesn't. And I think the arts, especially people who are creative or delve into creativity, it's… there you are. You're musicians. You are there, you are in it. That’s your playing field, so to speak, and those are your materials, and you go in and bring things back that everybody needs. And you don't always understand it. And to become a poet. I mean, who sets out to become a poet? It's certainly not usually somebody in a Native community. For one, people see the university as a way to make money. You need to make a living because you got to find a way to make a living and to do something that will, that will be beneficial to everyone like education or law.
But what use is poetry. And I've come to think of it as a kind of calling. You deal directly with time—it is one of your tools. A poem can have several kinds of time moving in it. And so it’s compelling, and that's what makes you have to stop and listen. I get concerned about all the devices—they can be scattering. And I know, because I have to watch myself. I can get off on the internet road and take all kinds of directions. It’s very addicting, but it's made to be addicting just like processed food. It’s addicting! What's going to get the most traffic. That sweetness, sex, rock and roll. You know, what's going to drive people to your site, you know, and so on. And poetry, it's like: Wait a minute, I'll have to stop and listen.
ELISE:
It's funny…poetry is intimidating to me, you know. I was an English major: Iambic pentameter and Haikus and all the canon of white men, who defined it as a concept. Shakespeare, you know. But as you write, it's sort of the common language that we all share. But it's been shuffled through devices in a way that makes it feel inaccessible or more like a puzzle that needs to be deciphered, that feels inaccessible unless you have the right tools. And then you talk about how you naturally made poetry on the playground and jumped rope to it. That it is this at its root. These words strung together are our most basic and essential language. And we we've lost access to them by feeling like there were strangers to them or they're intimidating. I loved that discussion and idea.
JOY:
Yeah. It’s built in. It's built in. And I think about that separation or what happened so that poetry became so far away from us, when it's absolutely essential. And I have performed, and read, and met with people, and poets, and also communities from all over the world. And it seems like every place, and even at Indian school, poetry was essential. Everybody read or wrote or listened because there's something about how you can express yourself in language. It’s oratory, and ultimately all this writing has oral roots, roots of orality. But all our ears get bent. Like I know, I talked about sitting under my mother's table and my ears bent—for our ears are bent beautifully for metaphor. Metaphor can reshape our minds, tones up our imagination so that when I've spoken with… and I've heard this in Hawaiian, Hawaiian language speakers and people who work with Hawaiian language and way back, one of my jobs early on was working with the Navajo language organization. I used to speak Navajo fairly well, I can't now. And Muskogean, Muskogee Creek language. They all say the same thing. Those speakers versus how many times it's being taught now is that the language, and also English, is that we're losing our sense of metaphor.
What is the sense of metaphor? In a sense it's a lot like landing on the line where “even the monster has a story”—or something opens because you put images or words together that makes something that opens a door that hasn't been opened before. In imagination, in your memory, on your tongue, and your ears. And we're losing that. I mean, you think about texts, language—a lot become symbolic, even symbolic language.
ELISE:
I love that you said that, too, because so much of our language now: It's legalese, or it's the way that scientists speak to each other. It's how doctors speak to each other, again, other devices, which are incredibly inaccessible. And then we think about the science communications crisis that we find ourselves in this moment in time. And it's exactly that: It's a lack of metaphor. It's a lack of common language that allows us to understand the world in the context of our own emotional lives. And the way that we're speaking to each other—that has all been taken out—you're so right. I think that it feels essential to our survival that we bring that back.
JOY:
Yeah, I think so too, because I mean, that's what gives color. There cannot be a healthy and profound whole without that individual, without diversity. That's what gives color. And I was in some meeting recently where a young woman meant well, but she said, “I've always believed in the melting pot.” And I said, you know, when I was a kid. I was about nine years old. I took all of my crayons and put them in a pot. I decided I wanted to see what amazing color that I had never seen before was going to emerge when I mixed all of my crayons together. Obviously I hadn't studied study color theory yet. But I put it all in, and it was a big, gray mess.
No…melting pot, that doesn't work because what gives us vitality, and what gives us life, are the differences, which Audre Lorde was very good at speaking about. It’s the differences, which can be the challenges, but they're also the ways, you know, those bridges between each other, make spark hold in you. It's almost like making new synapses, you know, growing new synapses of understanding where these this diversity is.
ELISE:
It might be one big tapestry, but it's each individual thread that gives us its vibrancy and makes it make sense. I mean, like gives it all of its context and its texture.
I want to talk about your mom. I want to talk about ritual, too. And the importance of ritual and, and how that, I think, with metaphors is also gone. There is no culture of initiation, there's no culture of rites, sort of this way of bringing, you know—you talk about it in the context of becoming a woman and how terrifying that was. You talk about it like a snake, shedding its skin, but these needed, needed rituals for becoming—how do we bring those back? How do we start to, I mean, I think we've lost the crone. I love to talk about the crone and sort of the way that we've abandoned that stage of a woman's life when she is best suited to start bringing up younger generations. But how do we start to re-engage in that cycle, or create the ritual of life, so that we're not all learning these things on our own, in silos, you know?
JOY:
Yeah, we really need those. I mean like birth rituals—the whole book ends with me, taking my seventh generation granddaughter into my arms. And there's always that ritual, of everyone, but especially the older people, like the older grandmothers and even grandfathers holding the child, looking at the child, blessing the child, you know, seeing who the child is, what they're bringing into the world. That's a kind of welcoming ritual into this place. Like every mother, you know, the mothers do when that baby, you know, and the fathers. And so there’s that. I've thought a lot about the ritual of passing on recently. And we just lost a brother-in-law to COVID. I just lost a brother-in-law. And about that ritual, you know, so many of the rituals, the body gets it's that body gets taken away. Even at birth. I checked myself out early in the hospital because they took my daughter immediately. And I got up and walked and said, “I want my daughter.” And then they got angry at me, and I thought, Wait a minute, this is part of my ritual, so to speak. And there's been an interruption. And that same thing has happened to death, where we don't get to sit with the bodies. So it used to be that the family did the rituals that were supposed to be done with a body laying there, in the family, getting to be around. We did the rituals, but the body was over in the mortuary. And, there are so many points of becoming.
Those are two of the most powerful, you know, when you move from here through the door of death, and you come here, and another one is the coming of age, I mean, there's so much power. That's the other thing there's power around. There's a lot of innate power and sacredness in coming of age, because you're shifting and it is like your whole body changes. You become somebody, you become somebody maybe you've never known before. Well, our, our children need that doorway, or children—slash—young people. To say, here: These are the things that you need to put away, and we are holding you to a standard. And, we welcome you into this next level of becoming. Just like when we get up in the morning. I've been trying not to, you know, open my phone and look at the weather. I mean, I can look outside, but it's like, no, I don't want my phone to be part of my morning ritual because I want that space to think. To feel out and to listen. And then, you know, to say, thank you or ask for a blessing, go out with the sun and ask for a blessing for the day for, you know, for this earth. And then the same with sundown. The animals all have sundown rituals. So it gives a kind of meaning. I mean, I think that's why football and sports have such a place, because they are a massive way that people feel connected one, and can participate in a kind of ritual.
ELISE:
It makes so much sense. And it feels like we're missing it. And then we're not marking the passage of time. As you mentioned, sort of the disconnection that we have from death, not sitting with people's bodies, not dressing them, bathing them, how death has become so sanitized in our culture. So abstract really it's like, that's the other thing is it's like these things just become ideas. And then when we lack the language of metaphor, we lack the language of actual experiencing and touching. We're becoming completely disconnected from what's happening around us
JOY:
Sound and poetry bring that back. They're essential, essential to, to ritual and you can make a little, you know. Even with a kid, a kid, you know, just being present, just being present and marking that time. And that's so crucial. Your little kid needs attention, and you're on the phone or you're watching, you know—I have to watch that, we all do—because this other force is distracting us.
ELISE:
Yes. To a different reality. All right. In closing, when you talk about your mother—wanting to save her and recognizing that she could sort of pull you down with her, the sort of the limits of your own power to interfere in her story, will you read to us on page 89, where you talk about how the word mother wants to take over this whole story?
JOY:
The word “mother” wants to take over this whole story, and there is no combination of words, sentences, or paragraphs that could carry that weight, that story, and how it was borne from one mother to the next, from generations, from the beginning.
When I speak with a close friend, she tells me that her mother is taking over her book of poetry, and the book isn’t supposed to be about her, though she is part of the history. Is this the nature of mothers and mothering? Does each generation carry forth the wounding that needs to be healed, from mother to mother, cooking pot to cooking pot, song to poetry, and poetry to beadwork, until one day in eternity we will understand what we have created together?
ELISE:
It is so powerful and, I'm writing a book myself and my mother, my mother is taking over my book too, in a way. But it's impossible! You know, when we think about mother being matter, being the root of it, mater, when we think about the planet and sort of women as vessels, like as the people who really carry forward life. What is it? Is it that also in this patriarchal society, to sort of want something different than your own mother, or to you serve her ambition or to achieve, or to just separate, like when we're taught to stay attached as women like that, that's sort of who we are is this vessel of nurturance and care and that when we separate from our mothers, or have to let them go in some way, or let ourselves go that we're, it's an act of betrayal. Why is it so heavy?
JOY:
I think you hit on it. You really hit on it. It has to do with the kind of weight, or the hierarchy. We were talking about the hierarchy earlier. Women are at the bottom, they're still at the bottom of this power hierarchy that has been set into place. That has been the template of American society, and many societies around the world, where a mother is at the bottom. And then you get into the brown mothers, or I think Native mothers or Native women are at the very bottom in this country. But you also look at people who work with children get paid the least; childcare, get paid the least. .And what, what is the most valuable resources: Our children, they’re all of our children, they're all our children.
And yet those elementary school teachers, the middle school, junior high teachers are paid much less. They should be paid as much as professors in universities because they are working with children, and given opportunities to continue to expand their education and understanding. And yet they're valued less. And then you think about the environmental crisis that we see everyday with climate change. It is real. And we call the earth, Igana Jaga, in Muskogee Creek, that's the mother earth. And, and it's that same devaluation of the female, which is part of all of us. Every man comes thru the door of a woman. We all come through that doorway. And we are so out of balance because of this devaluation, and even, you know, the contributions and the power of women in, in the place it should be for a healthy, for a healthy society.
And I keep thinking, I got this image of, you know, here's Igana Jaga. Well, she's not the only one. There's a whole planetary circle of female planets, you know, female planets. I just, I had this image who are watching and standing guard. And there is context. Then how do you get context? And I always remember Audre Lorde, the poet Audre Lorde and what she would do—she was helping counsel me through some, you know, probably, you know, some lost love affair that somebody, I don't even remember now—and she said, “What I do is I, I take myself, you know, I come back out of the story. I get, you know, I see this story. And instead of being so in it, then you pull back.” And then I think about how now in this context of Earth, you pull back and you see the Earth. And that was the power of that NASA image of Earth. Out of that image came even the word environmental, or this awareness or holistic, and so on because suddenly people could see, well: Earth is a living thing.
She's very beautiful. She's got a sister Venus, she got her brother Mars, but she has a place and we're part of her. Yes, we all have our individual stories, but there's that story field. And we're linked. We are linked. But we're going to be lost if we don't realize that we're linked and realize that, or maybe not realize, but assume our place as crucial parts of a healthy, and beautiful, and challenging life as part of Igana Jaga, as part of this earth in this time. And these challenges.
ELISE:
Wow. As she writes in the book: “Wven when we just stand in the presence of our teachers, we are taught.” And I feel that way about Joy’s presence obviously, but also her book, which is so beautiful. And I think it's one of those, as she says, it's just those single lines. I think that comes from being a poet where you're just like: Oh, that hits. And I love the conversation about how we don't have to carry a story that is unbearable, but we do need to use its materials to build a house of knowledge. I think that that's so beautiful. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now of continuing to replay history, the reverberations of history, which will be our fate, I think until we can actually look at it, pause, understand it, and then move forward. There's another part of the book that we didn't get a chance to talk about today where she talks about how she's obsessed with maps and directions. And she uses a medicine wheel. And I thought this was so beautiful. So I'm going to leave it with you.
East: A healer learns through wounding, illness, and death.
North: A dreamer learns through deception, loss, and addiction.
West: A musician learns through silence, loneliness, and endless roaming.
South: A poet learns through injustice, wordlessness, and not being heard.
Center: A wanderer learns through standing still.