Politics Of The Heart
by Andrew Peterson


Creek poet Joy Harjo is uncompromising when it comes to her attitudes on matters of Native American survival.

 "Being Indian in this country, I don't care who you are or what you do, whether you're a poet or an auto mechanic, you have a responsibility to pass on culture and to pass on hope," she says.

 Harjo, the author of four books of poetry (most recently In Mad Love and War), believes her success as a poet gives her a particular responsibility to help young Native American students in their early efforts to become writers.

 "I try to do workshops in places where Indian students are, to support and inspire them. I work with a lot of Indian students and keep in touch and encourage them."

 Her understanding of the complexities inherent in contemporary Native American life comes both from her own experience and from the demanding work of translating that experience onto the page. When she speaks, you can hear in her voice the same mixture of hope, anger and urgency that echoes through her poetry.

 "We've gone from being 100 percent of the population, to being one half of one percent in this country," she says. "And there's an incredible destruction in that. We're very precious, in terms of resources and values. There's not that many of us. So we bear a responsibility. I think we all feel that keenly."

 While Harjo's poetry speaks specifically to the experiences of Native Americans, at the same time it reaches out to a common ground which transcends ethnicity. While many of her ideas carry political overtones, she says that as she works she doesn't make distinctions between the personal and the political.

 "I don't think I write particularly political poems, but then they become even more pointedly so because in a way they bring politics into the heart," she says. "Really there is no separation. I think that in any native culture people will tell you that there's no separation between the spiritual, the political and the creative."

 Given the state of American culture, she says, "just to be a poet or a writer in this country is quite a feat, whether you're native, or African American or whatever. It's probably one of the most rewarding things you can do, but it can also be one of the most frustrating. You're working within a dominant culture that doesn't value the artist."

She pauses for a moment, then amends her statement. "I think the people value vision and value regenerative spirits and voices. But I don't think the culture as it is, the industrialist, capitalist culture, promotes that at all."

 Harjo was born on the Creek reservation in Oklahoma, but went to high school at the School for American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since then, she's developed something of a reputation as a traveler. Last year she left the faculty of the University of Arizona for the University of New Mexico, where as a professor of English she teaches poetry workshops. In addition, she plays tenor and soprano saxophone in an Albuquerque jazz band, aptly named Poetic Justice.

 While she emphasizes the importance that Creek culture holds for her (she returns to Oklahoma periodically to participate in ceremonies), she points out that she's lived more of her life away from the reservation than on it. She's says she's more familiar with the Navajo language than she is with Muskogee, the language spoken by her people.

 In this regard, she shares something with a number of other Native American writers, who sometimes find themselves in extended periods of separation from their places of origin. But despite this distance, or perhaps in reaction to it, Harjo says there exists a strong sense of common purpose among this country's far-flung Native American writers.

 "I feel a tremendous sense of community," she says. "I may not see a lot of these people for some time. But I always get the sense that on some level we're all working together."