MNN Column February 2010 (Please note: for now my columns are bi-monthly

This morning I’m in Anchorage, Alaska, and at 7:15AM it’s dark as night and will be until close to 9AM. I was invited up for the first Native Playwrights Festival at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. The playwrights are from native villages around Alaska, and from here in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau. Some of us performed on Saturday, and the workweek began Saturday evening with meetings. We’ve been meeting every day from 8:30 to 5. Then we have work assignments at night. So I’m scrambling to get my column in (as usual!).

I first came up to Alaska in the early eighties to go to the jails and prisons and help prisoners with poetry. Rent-A-Wreck was the only car rental company that would rent without a credit card. And guess what kind of car they loaned me…a refurbished police car! It was just what I needed to drive up and gain confidence of the prisoners! I went to four different penal institutions in the Anchorage area, four, with a population half the size of Tulsa. One was a women’s prison. About ninety percent of the prisoners in the men’s units were native. Black men were next in population size, then the poor white guys who’d come up to work on the pipeline. Most were in primarily for being native, black and/or poor with no money for attorneys, and/or doing something stupid in the wrong place at the wrong time. I did not pick up malevolence, but neither was I placed in high security. I met the brother of a friend of mine, who is now a shaman. He’d been riding around with a party and got picked up. The women were mostly in for taking the rap for their boyfriends, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’ll never forget being led into a room of male prisoners by the jail keep at the Fourth Avenue jail, and hearing him say “I’ll be back in two hours” as he locked the door shut behind me. The prisoners were hungry to speak and sing. Most of them knew poems by heart. There were tears and laughter as they wrote and spoke. All of them responded to poetry because they needed a way to hear and speak their souls. They took to writing with a hungry fervor. I’m convinced that most waywardness is creativity turned backwards.

There's a young moose who has been roaming the grounds of the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Tourists who don't know moose think they're cute with the personality of deer. They are more dangerous than bears. Bears are predictable. Moose will charge, kick, and then dance on you, and not think about it. One woman's cousin just had her scalp pulled loose by a dancing moose. So we had to navigate the young one as we walked out to use the Inupiak village site for a classroom. (There are several kinds of traditional houses in the on-site village.)

My brother has been having a hard time getting his citizenship card. He used to have one. He was turned away because our father’s name had “Jr.” on one document, and not on the other. All the rest of us in the family have our cards. Even his son has his enrollment card. My brother needs the card for health care. He’s been having stroke tremors. But the receptionist kept telling me: “He’s not in our system.” We were here before there was a system. We have been Creek for thousands of years, before cards. I know my brother isn’t the only one who’s been having a problem. I'm afraid he might not live along to get his card.

And finally, don’t forget, be kind to all you meet along the way.

The Knowing

The knowing beyond the practical everyday mind is immense. We have poetry, music, all arts, to access, interact with it and translate it, to know who we are beyond the moment we have breath.

Times of Strange Weather

We are in times of strange weather and unpredictable earth events everywhere on beloved Earth. Because we are of the Earth’s body, we feel unsettled and strange. We are being challenged to grow our minds and spirits to encompass immense changes. We came here to gain understanding that will bring forth compassion. As human beings in a postcolonial world, we can no longer forget our part in the story.

Concert & Poetry Calendar: February and March

February 26

Vancouver Olympics

Aboriginal Pavilion

with Larry Mitchell

http://www.fourhostfirstnations.com/schedule-of-events/?start=100

http://www.fourhostfirstnations.com/joy-harjo/

Theatre of the Soul

9:30 pm and 11 pm

FREE

West Georgia Street and Hamilton Street, Vancouver

March 13

Tucson Festival of Books

University of Arizona

University of Arizona Campus

Tucson AZ 85721

http://www.tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/

Solo Presentation / Sat 1:00 PM - 02:00 PM

March 23

Andover, MA

Merrimack College

http://warrior.merrimack.edu/about/offices_services/PublicRelationsMarketing/news/Pages/Award-WinningNativeAmericanPoetMusicianComingtoMerrimack.aspx

11:30 am - 1:30 pm

Joy is a speaker.

Luncheon for the College Community

Limited seating for general public available contact mackenzieg@merrimack.edu

7 pm

Joy Harjo performs her one-woman play “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light” with Grammy award-winning musician Larry Mitchell

Tickets $10

Free for Merrimack college students, faculty, and staff

March 25
Huron, Ohio
Bowling Green State University Firelands Campus
7-9 pm
http://www.firelands.bgsu.edu/
Cedar Point Center Auditorium at Bowling Green
One University Drive, Huron, Ohio 44839
*Free

Could This Be Performance Art??

Pablo, my neighbor just fixed my garbage disposal. He helps me sometimes, he helps many of us here in the complex. He won't take pay so I bring him kona coffee, make cookies, etc. We always find something to laugh about--

In our condo complex we have a problem with a group of racist, white women who don't like those of us who are shades of brown and other than European ethnicities. They tried to force my daughter and her kids out of the swimming pool last summer, and did the same to a Chicano couple whose grandchildren were visiting. Two of the women were patrolling the grounds and stopped me and asked me what I was doing here.

This morning I told Pablo that this spring I am going to borrow some chickens and set up a (temporary) chicken yard in front of my condo, and a clothesline with clothes on it, mostly underwear. He cracked up, said he'd get a goat. We laughed and laughed thinking about the commotion that would cause. We're planning to do in on a warm day in March. We're going to record it.

MNN Column for January 2010

Some thoughts for the New Year:
--Yesterday, the last day of 2009, went out early in the canoe into Maunalua Bay into waters agitated by the full blue moon. We paddled out toward Portlock, through tricky water swells, with the adroit skills of the steersman Monte Costa. This is what I miss when I back in New Mexico and Oklahoma: being water and canoe, moving through the human field with my water mind.
--Geological time is much like Indian time. In such a wide-angle view of time, colonization has already happened. It was a failed experiment. It was a blip in real time, a tough lesson in the human storyline for everyone involved.
--We humans are small marks in time. It’s the ancestral field that makes a discernable design. Just ask the artists, the visionaries, and others who travel out into the memory field. Ask those who have maintained a tradition of taking care, and paying attention.
--It is difficult to proceed with dignity and grace when you have lost yourself and your children to a prevailing story that doesn’t include you. We are almost never visible in the story. We are almost never on television, in the movies, heard on the radio, seen on the Internet, or visible anywhere, except as powwow dancers, warriors on horseback, shy Indian princesses, or constructed of other images emerging from a past constructed by Hollywood or anthropologists.
--The worst part is that we often believe these images.
--The newest Hollywood attempt, Avatar, despite the 3-D effects and millions of dollars worth of techie shine is the same shameless “wannabe” story as the blockbuster, “Dances With Wolves”. The non-native protagonist literally inhabits an indigenous body as a spy on their naturalistic society, and becomes more native than the natives, winning the girl, all bravery contests, and then returns to lead them out of a holocaustic fire of colonial destruction.
--And while I’m on the subject of Hollywood, kudos to the new series on the Travel Channel, Meet the Natives: USA. Five men from a remote island of Tanna in the Pacific, who still live in a traditional manner are taken off the island to the U.S.. They ask many questions, such as: “Why are we so obsessed with money and possessions? Why do we treat our pets better than some of our fellow citizens? What does "family" mean to us? What do we do with our elderly? How come we make all our important decisions in bars? And what's the point of ironing a shirt?” Only half of what they say is translated. I can only imagine what they are saying to each other in their tribal language as they go to their first cocktail party in New York to “meet the WASP’s” What has really struck me as I’ve watched the series, is the humor and dignity of the travelers. Despite all the glitter and glam, they see the truth of the matter. They are happy to return home with their stories. I wonder if people still living so close to the heart of the earth can believe much of what was witnessed in the lifestyle of the U.S.?
--And New Year’s Eve watched the first ever of its kind native comedy show, Going Native: The American Indian Comedy Slam, a Showtime special featuring Charlie Hill, the Oneida comedian as MC and featured artist, and five other native comedians Larry Omaha, Howie Miller, J. R. Redwater, Marc Yaffee, Jim Ruel and Vaughn Eaglebear. As Hill pointed out in the introduction, laughter is truly a medicine and part of healing. They did an incredible job. Which leads me to my final thought:
--I look forward to the time when we each take our rightful place in the story. We must each assume our place, and believe in ourselves. Every sunrise marks a new year. Every breath is a decision to go forward. Might as well go forward with bravery, laughter, joy, grief, whatever it is, let it be exactly what it is, and most of all, be yourself.

MNN Column for December 2009 THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

What it my imagination or did the Christmas season start earlier this year? I saw Christmas lights going up two weeks before Thanksgiving in Miami, Florida, and in the local Albuquerque stores Christmas came right after Halloween. I read this as fearful economics.
Basically economics is an exchange system. It describes the ebb and flow of what is materially valuable within individuals, families, clans and nations. Before the world cash markets we bartered. The money system grew from silver and gold mines, the lands and the labor of indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is a system that has sustained few yet required the labor of many. In our indigenous cultures it is morally unlawful to acquire wealth beyond need, and reprehensible to ignore the care of the needy.
A system created from trickery, sustained from the need of a few to control and own world markets is motivated by fear of not having or being enough. There will never be enough for the greedy. That kind of hunger is never satisfied. That hunger destroyed and dispossessed us from our original lands.
There is no separation between economics, social, political, or spiritual systems. Each is interconnected. The high rate of diabetes we are experiencing is directly related to crash and rally of the economic system. Each system within the whole either supports life, or it degenerates. For life to be sustained, whether it is a bio system like Earth, or a cultural system (each culture is an energetic system), there must be balanced flow in and out. To heal means addressing the source of the problem, to bring what is broken back into balance. It means changing the story.
We must return to the original teachings, which stress respect, dignity, creativity and forgiveness. In these teachings the power of the individual is a crucial denominator to the power of the whole. We must start at the root of meaning. What makes meaning that will sustain us? Does the acquisition and control of material goods by a few individuals serve all of us? How do we take care of what we have? And most of all, at the heart of the question is how we value who we are and who we are becoming.
We have to go back to the beginning of the story and remember why we are here and what we are truly about, as spirit beings that inhabit the earthly body. What do we need for true growth and fulfillment? How do we meet challenges? Do we take care of our resources? Are we generous? Do we take care of those who cannot care for themselves? Are we thinking and acting, with our descendents in mind?
We have to want the shift. We must acknowledge water and all of our resources as sentient beings and treat them as such. We must consider that our reason to be here is to serve each other, to be there in joy and sorrow. There is no room for laws that compel us to throw away our grandchildren, so there is more money for others. And perhaps most of all, we must take care of our collective imagination, to re-vision a system that will sustain and take care of all of us. We must create fresh stories and images that promote regenerative metaphor and meaning and give value to what matters. Artists, visionaries and those coming up feed the people with fresh images.
When you see the earth from the perspective of the guiding stars you know without question that we are one being, that what anyone thinks, speaks or acts grows the potential of the next generations. We then understand that no one can own the earth or what grows upon or within the earth, that there is enough for everyone. This is the true Christmas spirit. Imagine.

Happy New Year--

Roly Poly Bug People

...I’m convinced each of us here on Earth has made that leap in consciousness.. Even the roly poly bug I watched skitter quietly across the floor of the bathroom of my Kolkata hotel room, a few years ago had made that crossing. In India it was morning. In my body, it was the middle of the night. When I got up I looked through the window. I could see women across the way squatting and doing the laundry in the river, as their families swirled around them. I was delighted to see this little fellow join me in that corner of the world as I sat on the toilet. I spoke to him with my mind. I’ve always felt close to these roly poly people with their segmented, armored bodies and the ability to roll into a perfect ball when threatened. I first met them when I was a child in Oklahoma and dug in the dirt for the sheer joy of the smell of earth. They were often with me when I watched sunrise outside alone in the early warm mornings of summer. And now here in a place far away from Oklahoma, I felt properly greeted by them. As he walked away to have his breakfast, he gifted me with the vision of the light of his spirit: an exquisite glow surrounding his dignified body...

Excerpt from my memoir in progress c Joy Harjo 2009

Wordplay: from the Washington Post. Thanks to my friend, the poet William Pitt Root, for passing this on. Enjoy!!

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternative meanings for common words.
The winners are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), a condition in which you absentmindedly answer
the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n), olive-flavoured mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are
run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (n), Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (n.), person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent (n.), opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.


The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are this year's winners:


1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. ( that one got extra credit)

9. Karmageddon (n): Its like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

10. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The colour you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.