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- It is my pleasure to welcome you to another event of this semester's series, Point-Counterpoint. The central topic that concerns us is politics and poetry. My name is Ilan Stavans. This is an effort to understand how thinkers, artists, poets, activists think, how they've come to think the way they do, and to allow them to speak to us directly. The Point Counterpoint series emerged in 2016 in response to a sense of a disjointment, a fracture that took place in many colleges and universities nationwide, where we felt, many of us, that the country had broken apart, or at least there was an abyss in the center and that the left didn't listen to the right, and the right didn't listen to the left. The task was to be able to understand those that think differently, and that they represent something that is not exactly what how we see ourselves. The series is made possible by the Seminars of the Opposing Views Fund established by the members of the class of 1970 at Amherst College, with continuing support from individual alumni and parents. This year, we have had a stellar lineup. We started with David Brooks of the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Jericho Brown. After that, we had a wonderful discussion on the relationship between Robert Frost and President John F. Kennedy by biographers, Fred Logevall from Harvard, and Jay Parini from Middlebury College. Today, we have U.S. poet laureate, Joy Harjo, and next week I invite everybody to come Thursday at 7:00 p.m., for a conversation with socio-linguist, John McWhorter, on his about to be published new book called Seven Nasty Words, What is the nature of the offensive language? What role does offensive language play, how is it used, how does it change over time and our different groups in different languages as the things get transformed,. And after that, at the end of April, we're going to have the editor of the Washington Post recently retired Marty Baron, also be in conversation with us. I want to thank, before I introduce our distinguished speaker, I want to thank my colleagues, Christina LaDue and Victoria Nardone, who have been instrumental in the technical, in the publicity side of this series and who are behind the screen, but very much essential for this to take place. It is my enormous honor to introduce and to be in conversation with Joy Harjo. She is an internationally known award-winning poet, writer, performer, and saxophone player of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and was appointed the 23rd United States Poet Laureate in 2019, a position that has been renewed twice more, and it lasts until April, 2022, where hopefully there's going to be a big event at the Library of Congress where the position originates, and from which it is managed, and she is the author of many books, many books of poetry, including, and some of them not only are wonderful books, but have terrific titles. The Woman Who Fell From The Sky, What Moon Drove Me To This, A Map To The Next World, and rather recently, An American Sunrise, a book about which we will be talking. She is also the author of the memoir, Crazy Brave, and the anthology, When The Light Of The World Was Subdued, Our Song Came Through, a Norton Anthology of Native nations' poetry. Aside from this, she is the creator of many musical albums, one just recently released, called again, a beautiful title, I Pray For My Enemies. Joy, it's wonderful to have you around, and I want to ask you a number of questions in a number of directions. I want to start with a question of what does it entail to be the poet laureate? I understand the distinction, but I am interested in finding out if your writing life, and your creative life as a musician have changed because of the responsibility that comes with representing, whatever it is that you represent.
- Well, first of all, there's really not a job description per se, and I was told that every poet laureate makes their, every one of us is different. So we make our own, you know, we meet, there's an orientation and start developing, you know, are we going to have a project or not? You know what, you know, is it, maybe some people don't want to have a project, because essentially it's an honorary position. So of course I had several projects in mind, and we can talk about the project later, my project, but I'm essentially doing what I've always done, except with a lot more visibility, so to speak. I have been traveling around the country and the world since I started writing as an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, and writing poetry, performing. And then when I was almost 40, I started playing saxophone, and then started adding music to some of my performances. But I remember when, before the position was announced, I called Tracy K. Smith and said "Help." Yes, but I wanted to know, you know and bottom line, it's like, hang in there, there's, I guess there's been a lot, because of the visibility, there's a lot asked by the public. You know, there's a lot asked from the, there's a lot asked of the poet laureate, U.S. poet laureate. And I asked her, "Did you get any writing done?" She said, "I got one poem written during --" she had two years too, she did two years of the, and wonderful, I, you know, wonderful U.S. poet laureate. And she had one poem done. And I remember thinking, okay, well, but then we had the pandemic hit, which was one reason the poet laureate position was extended for a year because there's been a year where we've all pretty much been under quarantine, the whole world, except Oklahoma, but everyone has been in quarantine and shut down, which has shifted, I mean, it's been an immense shift in our, in thinking of humans and humans' place in the world, and disease and connection. We realized how absolutely we are connected with everyone in the world. I mean, think of it, a pandemic that is touching everyone. So during this time, I would have been traveling every week through this year, almost every week. And so this time gave me, it gave me time. It gave a tremendous pause. And for me, I went inside, it gave me the space to go inside and I finished three projects and wrote a memoir, finished another Norton anthology called Living Nations, Living Words that will be of contemporary Native poets, and a new music album.
- Does it feel then as if you are grateful to the pandemic in spite of all the alienation, and the distancing, and the illness that you talk about, grateful for the reprieve, the capacity to look inwards, the more time that you have for yourself?
- Well, that's not the only element, of course, there's death and destruction in our Muscogee Creek Nation. We lost so many culture bearers, and the culture bearers, those people who know essentially the poetry of our language, the speakers, those who carried the culture close to home and close to have maintained it. We lost several of those people who, you know, set the standard, cultural standards, and of our tribal nation, and that's not just, that's everywhere in this country that happened for, you know, for many of us, for many of us in Indigenous cultures, because comparatively, we suffered often twice as much as some people from deaths and the pandemic.
- The pandemic, as you mentioned, has hit tragically all walks of life, and of course it has also hit populations of color, and Native Americans in Latin America, where I come from, the Indigenous population has been also affected terribly, and I'd love to, when this, the poet or the spokesperson, or the, a carrier of a nation of an Indigenous Nation dies, how do you see the loss? What is it that is dying, the memory of that nation?
- It's not, it's a part of memory. It's people who carry, because so much has carried orally. And it's the people who carry the basically libraries, you know, they carry song libraries, or they carry libraries of our traditional knowledge, that aren't written in books, and there's a reason they're not written in books, because they don't necessarily belong in those spaces. Books are a certain kind of space that don't always have a direct relevance to our Indigenous culture, even though of course, most of us have been educated. We have American educations. You know, a lot of people go home after that, and run kind of along different tracks. But these, when I say culture bearers, these are people who, you know, have maintained, have maintained even alongside of being down the road from Walmart, or all of this other that we negotiate and navigate, just like many other peoples, but they're the people who hold what it means to be Muscogee Creek, in the utmost, those root teachings.
- I would like to, I would love for you to reflect, Joy, on the maybe parallel, but I don't know, life of oral poetry and written poetry, among Native Americans today. Is the oral tradition in poetry a vital, vigorous one? Has the written word mostly taken over? I know you produce these wonderful anthologies that Norton has been bringing out, and we see the poems on the page, is oral poetry still very much part of the culture?
- We're all dealing with how English is, and written language has pretty much taken over most of the day-to-day expression. But with the Muscogee Creek people, I think we have about 40% Muscogee literacy, which is pretty high, but it can't stay that way long without major efforts. In Hawaii, the Hawaiian language, I know they've had great success with their immersion schools, just like they modeled their programs on the Maori. But I think most poetry, if you look at all the poetry in the world, that I would guess that most of it is oral, or occurs in oral forms, often with music, sometimes oratory, you know, otherwise poetry, just poetry, and less of it is written in books. But I remember, I was a student, I went to high school at an Indian school. It was a Bureau of Indian Affairs school then, called the Institute of American Indian Arts. And now it's a full-blown arts college in Santa Fe, but I remember in the late '60s when we were, we had an incredible arts education. Our academics was very lacking, but there was this incredible arts education. And then we had the military terms, and that colonized sense of, okay, militarizing interactions with Native people. And we were not, even in the late '60s, we weren't allowed to speak our Native languages, but I remember being in an English class in which we were being taught out of fourth grade readers, which was very very boring for teenagers who wound up being at the cutting edge of American art, contemporary art. And so it was very boring. I remember now, when I look back, and look at the faces of the other children or young people in the classroom, everybody was within a generation of orality in the '60s. A generation or two. And that was so present in the notes we passed each other, while we were being taught about, you know, reading out of fourth grade readers, and the stories that people told, and the way people, the students loved language and orality, and or sarcastic, ironic, and there was such a contrast with how English came down upon us, and the experience of ourselves using English outside of that, and also people expressing in their Native languages.
- Is there today a poetry emerging from the Native American nations that is not in English and that travels beyond the individual nation to other nations and sometimes it's even translated or much of the poetry that is coming out because of the influence of English, because of the influence of American education of acculturation and assimilation is now done in English?
- English allows us to speak across language lines. I mean, that's what's great about it. Yes, it was a tool of colonization, hence the name of my earlier anthology, an earlier anthology, that Gloria Bird who was also a student way back at that school, she and I edited, and is that, English, yeah, it was a tool of colonization, and you know, somewhat a trade language, but at the same time as a trade language, it enabled us to speak to each other and with each other, just as it does now, just as I'm speaking with you, Spanish another language like that, you know, French, even, another language. So yes, there are people, there's a new anthology out. I think it's called Dine, what is the title of it, anyway, it's Navajo, or Dine literature, a new anthology, which is exciting. There are several people writing in Navajo language who, or incorporate elements of Navajo language in their work. So it's pretty strong there. I know Rex Lee Jim, often, I think he writes mostly in his language. I've noted that many Hawaiians, there's similar, lot of active creating in that language going on, but especially in music, I noticed that a lot of my Muscogee, which I know less of Muscogee language than I do Navajo, because I lived out there for years, and studied the language, as I started writing poetry, and I think the influences in the early poetry is, most of my language use has really been in songs and songwriting.
- So, when you, when we communicate, you and I, and you communicate with others in English, do you get the sense, Joy, that you are living in translation, that this is a language that came to you, upon you, that arrived and that there's another language in the background, or there's the language in the roots that palpitates and wants to emerge? What is your relationship with English in that sense? Is there a love-hate relationship with it?
- It's what I know. And yet I think, I came to poetry because I needed another language. I came to poetry because I needed a language that went beyond, past this all, or how are you, or just the ordinary transactions of everyday living. I came to poetry because I wanted a sacred language, a language that was more the experiences that I had that had no, there were no words for, for many of my dreams, Crazy Brave at one point, in one of its incarnations was about twice as long as the final published version because of the dreams in it. So I cut out most of the dreams, and then I try to embed them, so I don't sound so crazy but yeah. So, yeah, so English, so poetry, to me becomes maybe another kind of language. It's sort of like, yeah, we have a lot of tribal languages, there's a kind of everyday language you use. And then there's a language that, it's another level of the language that's used in ritual or those kinds of other kinds of transactions that are meant to place you in another kind of state of mind, so to speak.
- I want to ask you one more thing language here, before I move on to another topic, Joy, I'm very interested in Spanglish, and the mixing of Spanish and English, and the fact that almost 60 million people in the United States speak this hybrid language, that is neither one or the other, but a mestizo, in-between language. And I wonder if there's a similar phenomenon among the Indigenous people, the Native Americans of mixing the words, or syntax, or parents of the original nation's language with English as a way maybe to reclaim certain space in a sentence, but also in the mind?
- I don't know if it's done with the idea of reclamation, but I always remember when I started writing poetry, we were all running around together, Ricardo Sanchez and all of that. But there are certainly ways in different reservation cultures, depending on the part of the country and the tribal nation. There are certain ways that people incorporate or kind of ride an English with the, there's very particular expressions for different, and even ways of speaking or accents that you don't hear. You won't hear it out in the world, but it happens from the inside. And when I lived in Hawaii, I lived out there for 11 years, mostly because I loved it out there, I didn't have a job out there. I learned to race Outrigger canoes, and then I got a job at UCLA, and I would commute. I would commute. That's when you could get a really cheap pass, you can't do that now. And I learned pidgin, pidgin, I could speak, you know, I didn't speak it to everybody, but I could speak, and I know a lot of the phrases, and those are the amalgamation of, it's been contributed, every culture's contributed to it, the Hawaiian language, Chinese, or you know, and Japanese.
- You mentioned that a little while ago dreams, something that might show up. Could you talk to me about the type of dreams that you have and do your dreams, have your dreams changed as years have gone by, and how much do you pay attention to your dreams? Is there an oracular element in your dreams that tells you how to write or what to do, that allows you to communicate with aspects of your ancestry, or of yourself, that daylight doesn't? In general, just the role of dreams.
- I think that my poetryscapes and the dreamscapes are very similar. What I love about poetry is how one of the major tools, or maybe one of the major elements is the use of time, along with rhythm and the musical element, but even how you can layer time. That's major. That comes from dreams. I've been an avid dreamer since, maybe we're in a dream right now, sometimes I like to live like that and think, okay, I'm in a dream, I am in a dream because I know at death, it will be like a page. I've died many times in my dreams, and I know what happens. And then it's like, it's lifted, and you're standing there watching, thinking, okay, you know, watching the story when you watch it, and it dissolves. But since it was, I don't even know where to start, or if I should even speak about it, I do so a little bit in my new memoir, because I am looking back and I have a kind of authority, because I'm a great grandmother, that gives me more authority in the world, but yes, I traveled, I was a dream traveler as an infant. And that's how I could make sense of what didn't make sense in my life here, you know, emerging into this place, Tulsa, Oklahoma with my parents and the history here, the history of our peoples being moved here. And then how that gets played out in the political realm, and then the realm of being a Native family and so on. But my dreams took me all over the world, and I didn't have names for what I saw. I remember asking my mother about , and she's like, we didn't have, you know, this is before Google. And my mother was not someone to go to, she was a songwriter and she, she didn't go to the library and look at card catalogs, I'm the card catalog age, but I would ask questions like that because that's where I had been. And I had watched a whole scene come down with prisoners and how they imprisoned people, and what things that were done. I would come back with all of these dreams from traveling all over the world, or these stories, it turns out my grandmother was like that too. And I didn't know what to do with them. I remember thinking, okay, so I would draw, I was always drawing, and I would draw houses that I had seen and places. And for me, creating became a way of making a pathway between those realms and this realm, which could be a dream or a series of dreams. It became a pathway, you know, kind of a pathway. I mean, I've had moments where I've had series, series of very intense dreams in other places, and I'm not often who I appear now. So they've taught me a lot. Some of them are oracular, I've had some of them with my eyes wide open, and, but I think that's just part of being an artist. You know, I think it's just part of being an artist, whatever kind of art you're involved in, it's because where does the stuff of our creation come from? You know, there's the dreams of stones, there's the dreams of plants. There's the dreams of the Earth herself, you know, they're the dreams of ancestors that are wound through our DNA that emerge. And that's how I think of them. It's kind of, for me, the language of poetry is absolutely connected with dreams. Even the word dreams doesn't sound like enough. Like we need another kind of word, vision isn't it either, but another kind of word, and maybe there's a language that has that kind of word.
- When you say, Joy, that time is different in this dream where you and I are entrapped in the dreams where we escape at night, can you elaborate a bit? Is time in this dream, I don't know, linear, and progressive, or chronological, and the time in dreams moves differently?
- Well, I think even here, even here and now, there's different experiences of time. I mean, look at the way children and infants experience time. I remember experiencing time as an infant, and how deep and how wide and a day was an eternity. And then, you know, when you are a young child, everything is huge. It's immense, and you experience a space, I guess you would include space in that experience with time because maybe they are in this reality, they're always connected in a very, usually stable kind of manner. And then when you get a little older, and then when you're my age, it's quite speeded up, but the way I slow it down is, it's speeded up, even as you can slow it down with, when you write, when you enter into the kind of space that you do creating, and what I love about creating, whether it's with improving with the saxophone and then making the space for the improv to happen or writing poetry, or writing a story is, I can't know where I'm going. There can be a kind of intent which can act like a rudder, like I was asked to write a poem for the, and to acknowledge the 100-year-anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre that happened here in May, of 100 years ago. And so I went into the space to find, to see what I would see almost like a dream. And I didn't know where it was going to go.
- When you write, because we want to go to your music, which I love how you put the two worlds together. And I want to ask you first, when you play the sax in jazz and the blues, you talk about jazz and blues in your writing, it seems to me that what you just said is that when you sit down and write a poem, you don't know, this is what I got, but please correct me. You don't know where the poem is going to take you. You don't have the poem in your mind. You're letting yourself go as if you were opening a faucet, or opening a door, and then seeing where it's taking you. What is the process? Is there improvisation that is similar to music in the act and art of writing your poems?
- Probably yes and probably no , that would make a good song. Because, you know, I say that I just go in there. It's, I'm not always blind. I might have a form in mind, I'm always feeling rhythms, probably with anything it's rhythm for me that I'm just kind of following a kind of rhythm. And then there's been some kind of thought process that's been going on, maybe for days. I keep notebooks. I write down quotes, I listen, and, you know, so there's something that's usually building. And so I've been circling around it. Every piece is different. Some things just come upon me. And there they are, I mean, I revise. I'm always revising. And there it is, but they're all very different. As far as the idea of improv, the improving with words horrifies me. I admire those artists, those rap and word artists who can just lay down a rap, improv a rap. That to me, that is maybe because I don't know, but actually revision is kind of like, it is kind of like improv, but not quite.
- How so?
- Well you're listening, but then you're going back to, it would be like being able to stop an improv and go back and say, okay, I want to fix this moment. And that's perfect, yeah.
- How do you know, Joy, when a poem is finished, you know in the process of revision, how far did you labor a certain text, does the text at one point surrender and say, I'm done? Do you get exhausted and say, "I'm exhausted, "therefore this piece is done?" Or in the process of revising, do you polish and narrow or I don't know, sculpt in such a way that you hit the heart of whatever poem theme you are after, and you know that you've hit that heart?
- It's like building a house, or building a room, or building several rooms of a structure. And so then you know all the structural pieces are sound, they work, there are no extra words, no extra phrases. You've pulled out everything that doesn't work, and the other day it came to me, and I really liked how this felt is like, it would be almost like you have this room here, and an extra word would be like a two by four, just going across the middle. So no, you don't need that, you take it out. So you have that sound, everything moves right together. And then it kind of, you know it, you can feel it and it's coherent. And every once in a while, even if something's published, I don't do it with everything. But especially ones that I perform a lot aloud, I shift, sometimes I shift because of speaking them or singing them or performing them, I hear how it can be even more refined.
- So going back to the idea of the oral and the written, if a poem is written, you might still feel that it could be revised slightly?
- Definitely.
- Not because it's polished, it's finished.
- Right, no, and usually, I mean, I don't labor over all of them like that. It's just tweaking. It's tweaking, usually.
- Tell me, Joy, about the two sides that the musician and the poet, do you find the music in your poems the same way you find the poetry in your songs? In other words, there's two sides, kind of cross fertilize each other, does something come to you in the form of music, and you allow it to come through to emerge that way, and something else comes to you in the form of a poem, and you allow it to be born that way? Or how does it work?
- It can, it works all different kinds of ways. Sometimes it's like that. Sometimes it's a song, and I know it's a song, poetry I have another whole approach, although some poems become songs. That's why in conflict resolution, I have a lot of poems or songs, and I put in parentheses song, you know, because there's a different approach. I think I did that once in one poem with An American Sunrise. And sometimes it's just I'll do it, I'll have a rhythm track. I often start with rhythm tracks, and even with a poem even if it's a rhythm track in my mind, is it becomes kind of the structural, it's often for me the structural element over which, you know a poem is built. It may not be a European verse form, but it's a resonant structural form over in which the poem builds, or builds, accumulates, and builds itself.
- And when you work on the revisions, you're also working on the music of that one, if one has its own music?
- That's right. And that's one thing I love about poetry is I feel like I'm making music or phrasing, phrasing is so much a part of it too. And I think my attention to phrasing has become even more acute since I learned to play sax, and then the sax took me back to singing and into phrasing, really. I can see that it's made its way into my poetry, like the poem, I love reading the poem, how to write a poem in a time of war, because then I hear that, I can hear the saxophone phrasing in that poem.
- There's a poem of yours that I love. There are many poems of yours that I love, but one of them has become iconic, An American Sunrise. And that has, at the very end, I have the book with me, a line that is very powerful, 40 years later, and we still want justice. We are America, we and the word we plays out, rings through the poem in a variety of ways. And you have turned that into also music leads, and I'd love, we would love to hear it, but I'd love to also explain to us if you can how it went from a poem to the piece, if one started the relationship between the two?
- Okay. Yes, well I had the poem and there's music wound through it, and it's a form called golden shovel, invented by Terrance Hayes that pays honor to Gwendolyn Brooks. So you'll hear the last word of each line in the original version, you know, is when you read the last word of each line, you have a line of Gwendolyn Brook's poetry. And so my co-producer of the album Barrett Martin was releasing a kind of an ethno musicological memoir of all these places he played and learned music and so on, and asks did I need a song for the contemporary Native section. I said, okay. So I went through some recordings he and I had done, we were both musicians living in Albuquerque around the same time. And we went into his friend's studio, and recorded a bunch of percussion drum tracks, and I played percussion and he was playing, you know, and so I pulled out one of those tracks and listen, and then I performed An American Sunrise, the poem, over it with some of the voicings, and then laid down saxophone, and then I sent it to him and he laid down other parts. So when I was doing my new album, he wanted to redo the horn part, he wanted to redo, sorry, the drum part so he can differentiate because I was using, so we went back, I kept the original voice, and then we added some layers to the voicing, and then I added a whole new sax part. And then we brought in his friend Rich Robinson from the Black Crows, did a really killer guitar solo in it. But that's how we built this song up. Others are a little different.
- Let's listen.
- Okay, here we go, hang on. An American Sunrise.
- [Joy] We were running out of breath, as we ran to meet ourselves. We were surfacing the edge of our ancestors' fights, and ready to strike. It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight. Easy, if you played pool, and drank to remember, to forget. We made plans to be professional, and some of us could sing. We drove to the edge of the mountains with a drum. We made sense of our beautiful crazed lives under the the starry stars. We learned the devil the Christians say, we were the heathens but needed to be saved from them. Thin chance. We knew we were all related in this story. A little gin will clarify the dark, and make us all feel like dancing. ♪ Make us feel like dancing ♪ ♪ Make us feel like dancing ♪ We had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz. I argue with the music as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June. Four years later, and we still want justice. Four years later, and we still want justice. We are still America.
- Are you the first poet laureate that plays jazz?
- I don't know. I know I played, I had my inaugural performance in DC in September, I brought a band with me with a saxophone and the, but I was told that, well Juan Felipe Herrera I guess, at one of his performance had lost lonely boys. So, but I'm yelling one, I play music, I play, you know, I had an instrument.
- You did it yourself. Playing jazz, I have several questions that I have connected with this, do you hear yourself in dialog with the poetic American and Native American tradition the same way you hear yourself in dialogue with the jazz, American jazz tradition, do they both, are you seeing yourself in both? You see yourself instead on the, mostly as a port that plays jazz, how do you see yourself, vis-a-vis these two traditions?
- I had to see myself as the horn being the same thing as, it's the same voice. It's the same voice as poetry. It's the same singing voice. I always wished I could sing like Aretha Franklin. So the horn gives me, you know, the horn allows me to a kind of voice freedom. You know, it's just, there's a kind of freedom, or is it as Colette said, what is it, discipline is the key to freedom, or something like that. They're not quite that. And so there's a lot of discipline that goes into that at the same time, but it's the same voice. You know, American music, of course, the original American music, blues and jazz, my tribal nation was part of the origin story, and we've been left out of the origin story. So when I play it, it's my version of jazz, or probably wouldn't call what I'm doing as jazz, it just sounds jazzy. But it's, I always say, well, I'm playing Native music. You know, of course it's mostly African European elements, and our people were part of it. Congo Square was a Muscogeean village of people.
- There's, it's very different to be in the solitude or in the loneliness, I don't know, there's two words sometimes play with each other or against each other, when one is a poet, or a writer, Joy, when one is in a band where you have other instruments, other musicians, there is a collective effort there in the act and art of making music, and the type of music that you are giving us that is different from the kind of retreat or it's the way the self is alone as a poet. Do you see them as very different, the act of creations of both of them?
- Probably, although I tend to create my music kind of alone and then I get to go out and play, and then I have a good time. I thought about, I've been listening to Sun Ra lately, and thinking I would love to start a kind of orchestra, you know, that would really intensely include elements of Native musics along with jazz, blues, and the rest of it. But it started messing around in my mind, that idea, but yes, the poet to write poetry, the space is so interior and the way that I had to learn, I learned to get over too much stage fright, I've learned that it's energy ultimately, was that I had to make the stage the place where I write poetry. I had to make it a kind of intimate space in which creativity can happen. Just like I've learned to do with interviews, or whatever it is to try to make it that kind of space so that I can move around creatively in that space whether it's with a horn or with the call in response of a Q and A, or, you know, I've had to learn to do that because it was even to get up and read poetry as a young woman, that was difficult to stand up and speak. You know, it wasn't always the easiest thing to do. And then to add a horn, the horn just like, the horn makes it loud.
- You say in the introduction to the anthology When The Light Of The World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, that there is no such thing as a Native American, and there's no such thing as a Native American language. I think I know what you are hinting at here being a Latino and a Latin American, but I'd love for you to develop it, what does it mean that there's no such two things, a Native American and a Native American language?
- There were over right now over 574 federally recognized tribal nations. There are other tribal nations that are genuinely genuine peoples, you know, with the history, and with roots that are state recognized. Many of the state recognized so-called Native nations are not Native nations, rather their 501 s of people who want to be Natives. But there's a general term, you know, Indians, I grew up with American Indians, Native American is a term that came out of the Academy, the academic world, which often what's going on in the academic world that's called Native has nothing to do as you know, essentially with Indigenous communities.
- Do you like that term, Joy?
- You know, I don't, I didn't like it, I still don't like it, and I understand there is a term needed for, you know, to generally speak of everyone, but what's behind that is so many people think, well we just speak, you know, do you speak your, I remember getting this a lot. Do you speak Indian? It's like, wait a minute. There's a Muscogee language, I know some Navajo, I know some Hawaiian, there's over about couple hundred, two or 300 Native languages, Indigenous languages. I use Indigenous or Native, or as in the anthology that's coming out of the poet laureate project, you know, Living Nations, Living Words, an anthology of first people's poetry. But we go by our tribal, like Muscogee Creek, although I've been at gatherings of traditional peoples in, you know, from the ceremonial grounds, and I heard one elder talk about how well, actually, that's not how we called ourselves. We called ourselves by our clan affiliations, you know, clan meaning a part of a group that's related in another kind of way.
- So do you think that that term, Native American is falsified, what is he trying to hint at? Or it's inevitable that we would look for a generality or a generalization, because of the nature of the multiplicity that the Indigenous population represents?
- I mean, it makes sense that people are looking for a term of generality, but generally we have not been usually in this, in the culture, in the layers of culture, and the layers of American cultural memory which don't go, America's a very young country, is that, you know, we were disappeared, you know, our stories, the stories of the founding of this country have been falsified or disappeared, because for this country to have, you know, this country built itself, yes, on a foundation of ideals and democracy, some of them, many of them borrowed from Iroquoian and Muscogeean culture, or cultures, is that the reality of the narrative would have to include, yes, this country was very populated with people, human beings, not as the Papal bulls proclaimed, as human beings who yes, have culture, have astronomy. You know, that is no, the way the founding story is written, you know, is that we were heathens, and that we were not human beings, and therefore, or not Christian or human beings, therefore, how could we, you know, they were given dominion over us in the country. That's the narrative, that the unspoken narrative, that still continues to unwind, and in a country in a narrative of America, in which you do not see us as human beings, we are not seated at the table. To have Deb Haaland, as the new Secretary of Interior is miraculous. You know, that in a position that to have her in that kind of position.
- Do you think, Joy, that history can be corrupted, that the trail of tears, the silencing, the disappearing, the eclipsing with effort, with education, with goodwill, it can be turned around or it's an inevitability that is here to stay.
- I don't know how much you can change history. I know by my dreams tell me yes, that you can shift the story. You can go back. Even in conflict resolution, I have a whole piece in there that's a dream that happened and which the guardian of the dream says, "You can go back and change the story." In reality, that dream came back around in reality in what went down behind that dream. We didn't, no matter what we did we couldn't change the story played itself out. And then maybe that's the thing. That's what I've been thinking is that maybe there are larger resonant rings of the story that we cannot see that are changing. And they change in different kinds of times so that I don't know that we can correct history but perhaps reckon with it. And we reckon with the stories. And if you don't hide the stories, if you don't suppress, I think you see what happens in suppression. Suppression is a temporary device, politically, you know, family, it's because what happens is eventually truth. You know, anything that has a history, it will emerge. And the way it usually emerges with pressure and suppression is violently. So it has to be more, you know, this list is sort of like what we're seeing, you know, with the Black Lives Matter movement is that the stories, the real story has to be, what's the real story is out there, as painful as it is to acknowledge, and even to acknowledge all of our parts in it at least we're free. We came free of it, doesn't mean we're free of responsibility but now we know what we're dealing with which has probably been the terrible gift of the last years is, okay, you know, we thought we had progressed but apparently there are remnants, terrible remnants of hatred, and so on that have been around since the founding of the country, since the Civil War, that have not been reckoned with.
- Because where you come from, and we're coming here to the close, and I'm appreciative from the bottom of my heart, the humility and the honesty, and the eloquence with which you have presented, your present always your ideas, because of where you come from, because of who you represent, because of who you are, because of the history that is behind you, and ahead of you, is it inevitable that you are a political poet? Do you consider yourself a political poet, or the politics just comes with it, but you're not deliberately thinking of yourself as such?
- My poetry emerged as political poetry, because my poetry, I didn't start writing poetry, I loved, I was not a speaker. I sat in the back. I never said anything. I watched, growing up. I saw violence growing up. I saw all kinds of things, but I never spoke much. And then I was a student at the University of New Mexico, I was a pre-med, I'm still always in a healing mode, and with a minor in dance, and I went back into art. And because that's what I always did. I was always involved. I was always drawing. And I became part of, certainly the first the Kiva Club, which was a Native student club started out as a social club for, you know, Natives together, socially, but we became the central clearing kind of, the center for in Native rights movements. We became a center in the Southwest for Native arts movements, because of, we can not be quiet about what we were seeing going on with the racism, the hatred, the violent acts against Indigenous peoples, and we knew that we could not, as students, we can not be silent. And my poetry started then, my poetry became, it was, I still don't, as I say, in Poet Warrior my new memoir, I still don't understand it. I love poetry, I love my mother's songwriting, but for it to emerge or what, on of the sparks of it was hearing Native poets for the first time, real poets, you know, James Welch, Simon Ortiz, very political poet, Leslie Silko. And then my voice, the poetry of voice, I think it came and dragged me along and said, "Okay, you don't know how to listen. "You don't know how to speak, and I'm going to teach you." And I could see my poetry voice, spirit being, you know, the other ones standing around shaking their heads, like you have a big job ahead of you, but my poetry came out of a deep regard and love for justice. And it came down through my ancestry. I am a sixth generation, I thought it was seven, but a sixth generation from Monahwee who fought Andrew Jackson, against the illegal move of our peoples, and he wasn't the only one he fought with the warriors, and the warriors can be mad, you know, the people took a stand just like, I think anybody else would if somebody was coming into your home, and stealing your children, and moving you out by gunpoint, you know, who wouldn't take a stand? And then we were moved illegally, and all kinds of stories from this country. So my poetry, it was almost like that urgent, there was an urgency that didn't start with me. You know, it started, it came through my parents, it came through grandparents, and it's this need for the story to be told, and for, to be sung, to be told, and for there to be some kind of reckoning with history.
- My last question, and with it, I want to go back to many of the points that you have made to that little girl that you were, that was silent and that listened before she found her voice, to the usurpation and the silencing of your people across history, the way that you play in individual poems with the music and music is always also the space, the silence between one note and another, and in a poem, the space between a word and another, so I'd love to bring you back to your connection or relationship today, being so present, so distinguished, so vocal, so iconic, to silence, at a time when many of us have spent a lot of time in our own homes, the silence of our own conditions. How do you relate at this age, and after having traveled the way you have traveled creatively to silence?
- When you said silence, I almost got tears. 'Cause there's so much that takes us away from that. But actually that's one of the primary ingredients of poetry. Maybe that's the field in which the poetry, all poems exist is in the field of silence, because it's in the field of silence that you can hear everything. You can hear the beginning of the world. You can hear the emergence of several worlds, and you can hear the nothing of nothing. And that's where we all come from.
- Joy, I have loved spending time with you, and I have also heard a lot of voices in my head as you were speaking, I'm very thankful for myself, and for everybody who joined us tonight, for the opportunity of engaging you. Muchas gracias.
- Hmm, thank you. Muchas gracias to you too for this opportunity, and a chance to get to know you, and to speak with you and the audience. Thank you, .
- Hasta luego.