SOURCE: "The Story of All Our Survival: An Interview with Joy Harjo," in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press and Sun Tracks, 1987, pp. 87-103.

[In the following interview, Harjo discusses the role of memory and storytelling in her poetry as well as the major themes and images found in She Had Some Horses.]

This interview took place on December 2, 1982, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Joy Harjo was living while a student in a post-graduate film-making program at the College of Santa Fe. Although the interview was done before the publication of her new book of poems, She Had Some Horses (Thunder's Mouth Press), a proof copy of the book had just arrived in the mail and we made reference to it during the interview.

The living room of the rented house in which we talked was one of those open "modern" living rooms typical of contemporary southwestern architecture. It was dominated by a painting on the wall of a group of horses—the same painting which became the cover design for her book—and a large stereo with reggae tapes piled on top of it.

I began by asking Joy if there was a poem she would like to start off with. The one she chose came out of her recent experience of teaching a workshop in an Alaskan prison.

[BRUCHAC]: I'm glad you started with that poem, Joy. Those last few lines, the "story of all of our survival, / those who were never meant to survive," are pretty much the theme I see as central in contemporary American Indian poetry: the idea of survival. What are you saying in this poem about survival?

[HARJO]: I see it almost like a joke, the story about Henry in the poem 1 just read. You know, he was real dry when he was talking about standing out there and all those bullet holes and he's lying on the ground and he thought for sure he'd been killed but he was alive and telling the story and everybody laughed because they thought he was bullshitting. And it's like a big joke that any of us are here because they tried so hard to make sure we weren't, you know, either kill our spirits, move us from one place to another, try to take our minds and to take our hearts.

That poem has many stories tied into it, stories of people that you know, stories of women, stories of things that you remember. Storytelling seems to run through and even structure much of the work by American Indian poets. Is that true for you?

I rely mostly on contemporary stories. Even though the older ones are like shadows or are there dancing right behind them, I know that the contemporary stories, what goes on now, will be those incorporated into those older stories or become a part of that. It's all still happening. A lot of contemporary American native writers consciously go back into the very old traditions, and I think I do a lot unconsciously. I don't think I'm that good of a storyteller in that sense, but it's something that I'm learning. I love to hear them and use them in my own ways.

If there's an image of the American Indian writer that many people, who are not very knowledgeable about what an American Indian writer is, have, it is of what I call jokingly the Beads and Feathers School, nineteenth-century "noble savages." The poetry in this new book of yours is not Beads and Feathers, yet to me it's very recognizably from an American Indian consciousness. What is that consciousness?

I suppose it has to do with a way of believing or sensing things. The world is not disconnected or separate but whole. All persons are still their own entity but not separate from everything else—something that I don't think is necessarily just Native American, on this particular continent, or only on this planet. All people are originally tribal, but Europeans seem to feel separated from that, or they've forgotten it. If European people look into their own history, their own people were tribal societies to begin with and they got away from it. That's called "civilization."

Leslie Silko and Geary Hobson have both attacked the phenomenon of "The White Shaman," the Anglo poet who writes versions of American Indian poems. What are your thoughts on that?

I agree with them. It's a matter of respect to say, "I'm borrowing this from this place, " or "I'm stealing this from here, " or "I'm making my own poem out of this, " but the white shamans don't do that. They take something and say it's theirs or they take the consciousness and say it's theirs, or try to steal the spirit. On one hand, anybody can do what they want but they pay the consequences. You do have to have that certain respect, and you do have to regard where things come from and to whom they belong.

Origins are very important in your work. Where things came from, where you came from. The title of your first book is The Last Song, and you ended it with "oklahoma will be the last song / I'll ever sing." Is it not true that you have in your work a very strong sense of yourself as a person from a place which informs you as a writer?

I suppose. But the older I get the more I realize it's caused a great deal of polarity within myself. I recognized my roots, but at the same time there's a lot of pain involved with going back. I've thought about it many times, like why I travel, why I'm always the wanderer in my family. One of the most beloved members of my family died just recently, my aunt Lois Harjo. She always stayed in Oklahoma, and I've jokingly said the reason I'm always traveling is so that Andrew Jackson 's troops don't find me. You know, they moved my particular family from Alabama to Oklahoma, and so I always figure I stay one step ahead so they can't find me.

Some American Indian writers—you and Barney Bush, for example—are the epitome, for me, of the poets who are always on the move, going from one place to another. Yet I still find a very strong sense in your work and in Barney's that you are centered in place. You are not nomads. There's a difference between your moving around and the way people in Anglo society are continually moving, always leaving something behind.

Oh, it's because in their sense they're always moving to get away from their mothers. They don't want to be from here or there. It's a rootlessness. But there will always be place and family and roots.

Those are things which you come back to in your work: those connections to family, to memory. A poem of yours is called "Remember." I think that's very important. The idea of remembering is central, isn't it, in the work of many, many American Indian writers?

The way I see remembering, just the nature of the word, has to do with going back. But I see it in another way, too. I see it as occurring, not just going back, but occurring right now, and also future occurrence so that you can remember things in a way that makes what occurs now beautiful. I don't see it as going back and dredging up all kinds of crap or all kinds of past romance. People are people, whatever era, whoever they are, they're people.

In other words, memory is alive for you. You're not just engaged in a reverie—like the old man sitting by the fire and going back over those things in the past. Memory is a living and strong force which affects the future.

Sure. People often forget that everything they say, everything they do, think, feel, dream, has effect, which to me is being Indian, knowing that. That's part of what I call "being Indian" or "tribal consciousness."

You also talk in your poems about the importance of saying things, speaking. What is speaking for you? What I'm asking, really, is for you to define words I see being used by American Indian writers very differently than most people use them. Song is one of those words. Memory is one of those words. Speaking is one of those words.

It comes out of the sense of not being able to speak. I still have a sense of not being able to say things well. I think much of the problem is with the English language; it's a very materialistic and a very subject-oriented language. I don't know Creek, but I know a few words and I am familiar with other tribal languages more so than I am my own. What I've noticed is that the center of tribal languages often has nothing to do with things, objects, but contains a more spiritual sense of the world. Maybe that's why I write poetry, because it's one way I can speak. Writing poetry enables me to speak of things that are more difficult to speak of in "normal" conversations.

I have a feeling that what many American Indian writers are attempting is to bring a new dimension, a new depth to English by returning a spiritual sense to something which has become, as you said, very materialistic and very scientific. German used to be described as the language of science. Today, English is the language of science throughout the world.

I've often wondered why we were all born into this time and this place and why certain things happen the way they do, and sometimes I have to believe it's for those reasons, to learn new ways of looking at things … not necessarily new, none of this is really new.

Even without the old language to say some of the things that were there in that old language?

Which is always right there beneath the surface, especially right here in North America, which is an Indian continent.

That ties into something I wanted to ask you, related to the whole question of the half-breed, the person who is of mixed blood. So many contemporary American Indian writers are people who have come from a mixed parentage. Does that mean a separation or isolation or something else?

Well, it means trouble. I've gone through stages with it. I've gone through the stage where I hated everybody who wasn 't Indian, which meant part of myself. I went through a really violent kind of stage with that. And then I've gone through in-between stages and I've come to a point where I realize that we are who we are, and I realize in a way that you have to believe that you're special to be born like that because why would anybody give you such a hard burden like that unless they knew you could come through with it, unless with it came some special kind of vision to help you get through it all and to help others through it because in a way you do see two sides but you also see there are more than two sides. It's like this, living is like a diamond or how they cut really fine stones. There are not just two sides but there are so many and they all make up a whole. No, I've gone through a lot with it. I've talked to Linda Hogan, Lajuana, Leslie, a lot of other people about it, and everybody's probably been through similar stages with it.

Then there is that point where you come to realize that this is still Indian land, despite people who say, "Well, if you're only half-breed, why do you identify so strongly with Indian ancestry?"

Well, you can't not. I'm sure everybody's thought about it. I've thought about saying, "Hell, no, I don't have a drop of Indian blood in me. I 'm not Indian, don't talk to me." Yeah, I've thought of doing that. But then I would be harassed even more. Everybody would come up to me and ask me why am I ashamed. But you just can't do it. And it also means that you have a responsibility being born into that, and I think some of us realize it much more than others. It's given to you, this responsibility, and you can't shake it off, you can't deny it. Otherwise you live in misery.

Barney Bush has spoken about the idea of being tested.

Sure.

Being tested from all kinds of directions at the same time. I especially feel that testing in some of your poems. A tension exists there. It seems to reach a point where it ought to break into violence and yet it doesn't. Why don't they go into violence as some of the poems of the Black American writers do? For example, Amiri Baraka's?

I don't know. I see where they could. There're always effective ways to deal with violence. There are ways to temper it. I just read this really neat quote by Gandhi. He's talking about anger and he says, "I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger, controlled, can be transmitted into power which can move the world. " It seems that the Native American experience has often been bitter. Horrible things have happened over and over. I like to think that bitter experience can be used to move the world, and if we can see that and work toward that instead of killing each other and hurting each other through all the ways that we have done it …

The world, not just Indian people, but the world.

Sure, because we're not separate. We're all in this together. It's a realization I came to after dealing with the whole half-breed question. I realized that I'm not separate from myself either, and neither are Indian people separate from the rest of the world. I've talked with James Welch and other writers about being categorized as Indian writers. We're writers, artists. We're human beings and ultimately, when it's all together, there won't be these categories. There won't be these categories of male/female and ultimately we will be accepted for what we are and not divided.

To connect, to celebrate, and also to understand. I think that there's a process of understanding that's going on right now in the United States and throughout the world. In fact, sometimes I think people in Europe are further ahead of many of the people in the United States in terms of listening to what writers such as the American Indian writers are saying and understanding what their messages can mean.

I suppose. I was in Holland a few years ago reading. I remember riding on a train and talking with a woman from Indonesia, and she told about how Indonesians are treated in Holland. I knew they were welcoming the American Indians and tribal people from all over, but they didn't realize that these Indonesians are tribal, too, you know. It's like during the Longest Walk when everybody was in D.C. And Carter wouldn't see the people, he said, because he had been out on some human rights mission involving the rest of the world.

Joy, I'd like to ask some questions that deal very specifically with your newest book of poetry, the one that's just about to be published, She Had Some Horses. Horses occur again and again in your writing. Why?

I see them as very sensitive and finely tuned spirits of the psyche. There's this strength running through them.

The idea of strength also seems to fit your images of women. Women in your poems are not like the women I've seen in poems by quite a few Anglo writers. They seem to be different.

I think they're different. I think they reach an androgynous kind of spirit where they are very strong people. They're very strong people, and yet to be strong does not mean to be male, to be strong does not mean to lose femininity, which is what the dominant culture has taught. They're human beings.

I like that. A woman or a man simply being a human being in a poem has not been very possible in the United States in poetry. Instead, the sexes are divided into stereotypes.

It's time to break all the stereotypes. The major principle of this universe, this earth, is polarity. Sometimes I think that it doesn't have to be, but the level that earth is, it is. You have to deal with it. I'm not saying it has to be that way—but this x-rated video game where Custer rapes an Indian woman—and then you have all these wonderful things going on in terms of consciousness. Such a split.

Ironic. It's like the old maxim that there wouldn't be angels without devils.

Or, again, like Gandhi's saying that bitter experiences can turn into a power that can move the world.

You're saying that things which are not properly used have destructive potential but then when they're used in the right way they become creative. Even those things which seem to be curses we can turn into blessings.

You always have to believe you can do that.

Another question about your images or themes … Noni Daylight. I've gotten to know and like her in your poems. Who is Noni Daylight, and how did she come to your poems?

In the beginning she became another way for me to speak. She left me and went into one of Barney's poems. I haven't seen her since. (laughter) Which poem was it? It was in his latest book. I remember when Barney showed me that poem, he was staying with me one Christmas and I looked at it and said, "Oh, there she is." She left and I really haven't written any poems about her since. It's like she was a good friend who was there at a time in my life and she's gone on.

When did you start writing poetry?

When I was at the University of New Mexico. Probably right around the time Rainy was born.

So you started relatively late in life—compared to some people.

Yeah, I never had a burning desire to write until rather recently. I always wanted to be an artist. When I was a little kid I was always drawing, and many of my relatives were pretty good artists. My favorite aunt, the one I spoke of earlier, was a very good artist. That's what I always did and it wasn't until much later that I got started, even interested, in writing.

What do you think created that interest?

Reading poetry and hearing that there was such a thing as Indians writing and hearing people read and talk, then writing down my own things.

Who were the people who were your influences at that time?

Simon Ortiz, Leslie Silko, Flannery O'Connor. The Black writers have always influenced me, also African writers, 'cause here was another way of seeing language and another way of using it that wasn't white European male.

Seeing that freedom of expression?

Sure. And I always loved James Wright. He was always one of my favorite poets. He has a beautiful sense of America. Pablo Neruda is also someone whose work I appreciate, learned from….

Neruda speaks about writing a poetry of the impurity of the body, rather than a "pure" poetry. A poetry as broad as the earth is broad, bringing all things into it. I can see that feeling in your work.

Yeah, for sure.

What's the landscape of your poems?

The landscape of them? It's between a woman and all the places I've ever been. It's like the core of Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Traveling seems to be a really major force in your writing. Movement, continual movement. I think I see a sort of motion through your new book. Is there a structure you had in mind when you put it together?

I had a hard time with this book for a long time. I could not put it together right. So a friend of mine, Brenda Peterson, who is a fine novelist and a very good editor, volunteered. She did an excellent job, and what I like about it is that the first poem in the first section is called "Call it Fear." It was an older poem. And the last section which is only one poem is called "I Give You Back," which has to do with giving back that fear.

The way it's arranged makes the book almost like an exorcism, too.

It is …

So it's not just another one of these cases where "poetry makes nothing happen."

No, I don't believe that or I wouldn't do it. I know that it does have effect and it does make things happen.

What does poetry do?

I've had all kinds of experiences that verify how things happen and how certain words or certain things make particular events happen. There's a poem that's in the new manuscript about an eagle who circled over us four times at Salt River Reservation. I went home and wrote an eagle poem for that eagle and took it back and gave it to the people who were there and one of the women took it outside the next morning to read it, and the eagle came back. You know, that kind of thing that happens. So I realize writing can help change the world. I'm aware of the power of language which isn't meaningless words … Sound is an extension of all, and sound is spirit, motion.

Yes, sound is spirit.

And realizing that everything also does, not just me, but anything that anybody says, it does go out at a certain level that it's put out and does make change in the world.

What about political poetry? Or do you think of your poetry as nonpolitical?

No, I think it's very political. But, yeah, I look at a lot of other people's poems, like June Jordan, Carolyn Forché, Audre horde—I love their work. It's very political. Political means great movers. To me, you can define political in a number of ways. But I would hope it was in the sense that it does help move and change consciousness in terms of how different peoples and cultures are seen, evolve.

That's great. Who do you like right now among contemporary writers? I'm not just thinking in terms of the American Indian writers, although maybe we could start with them. Who do you feel are the important people among Native American writers?

Well, I think everybody is. I don't want to mention certain people so that other people aren't mentioned.

That makes me think of what someone said to me at the American Writer's Congress. You remember that panel discussion?

Yeah, I remember that panel.

There were more of us than there were in the audience.

We had a good time.

It was great. But one person came up to me afterwards and said they couldn't understand why we all seemed to know each other and like each other.

That's because everybody else is busy hating each other, I guess. Trying to do each other in …That doesn 't mean, however, that there's none of that going on in our community!

Why is there such a sense of community? Even when people get angry at each other or gossip about each other, there's a lot of that.

Oh, I know, I was gonna ask you what you heard.

Yet there does seem to be a sense of community among the people who are Indian writers today.

I suppose because the struggles are very familiar, places we've all been. It's very familiar and we feel closer. But at the same time I really can't help but think that at some point it will all be this way, the community will be a world community, and not just here.

Do you notice that tendency in contemporary American writing?

Yes, I do. I do more listening than I do reading about what's going on … I call it feeling from the air, like air waves. I see other people opening and turning to more communal things, especially among women.

That's a good point. Could you say a few words about that?

The strongest writing that's going on in the United States today is women's writing. It's like they're tunneling into themselves, into histories and roots. And again, I think maybe that has to do with the polarity of earth. In order to get to those roots, in order to have that vision, you keep going outward to see you have to have that, to be able to go back the other way. You have to have those roots. And it seems like they're recognizing that, whereas other writing doesn't often feel it has a center to work from.

I like the fact that you dedicated your book, partially, to Meridel Le Sueur.

She does recognize who she is, what she is from, and there is no separation. You know, she's been going at it a long time, has faced much opposition, and has kept on talking and speaking in such a beautiful and lyrical voice.

Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. But Le Sueur's life and writing seem to prove Fitzgerald wrong.

She's really had a lot of influence on me in terms of being a woman who speaks as a woman and has been often criticized for it, and in the past she could not get her books published because she kept to her particular viewpoint and was sympathetic to certain unpopular viewpoints.

And has influenced a lot of other women, too.

Definitely.

To begin writing at a point when most people would say your career is all set. You're a housewife, you're this, you're that, you're something else, you're not a writer. To begin to write at an age when most men have already been writing for ten or fifteen years …

Well, I always knew I wanted to do something. When I was a kid I always used to draw, paint. I even had pieces at Philbrook Art Center, in a children's art show. I always knew I wanted to be some kind of artist … and here I am, writing.

One last question. Your Native American ancestry is Creek. How do you deal with that particular ancestry in your poetry? Does that affect you as it has some other Indian writers?

From the time I was a kid I knew I was Creek. But I was raised in an urban setting and in a broken family … It all influenced me. I was born into it and since then I've gone back and I'm very connected to the place, to relatives, and to those stories. They always recognize me. My father who was not always there but his presence always was—certainly the stories about him were!

But you're not artificially going back and, say, pulling Creek words out of a dictionary?

No, I mean that's who I've always been.

Yeah, you don't have to do that. There's no need to prove that ancestry.

No, they know who I am. They know my aunt Lois. You could sit down and talk with her, she knew who everybody was and who's related to who, you know, all of them, and they all know who everybody is. They'll say, "Oh, so you're so 'n' so's daughter." And they watch you real close, especially if you have white blood in you. Bad. (laughter) So in a way, I suppose, the whole half-breed thing gives you this incredible responsibility but it also gives you a little bit more freedom than anyone because you have an excuse for your craziness.

That's nice.

Of course, you realize it is because, oh, you're an Indian like Linda says, but it's the white blood that makes you that way. (laughter)

I like that.

And you also always have to have a sense of humor about it all.

Yes, a sense of humor is right. We didn't talk about that, did we?

I mean it's like that poem, "Anchorage," I remember that one jail. I went in there three times and the place would get more and more packed each time I came in because we would sit around and tell stories and—it was all men—and talk and laugh and they didn't want me to go because nobody allowed them to speak. We would all be crying at the end, and I remember when Henry told the story, yeah, you know, we were just laughing at him and saying, you know, you 're full of crap, yet the story was really true. We all knew it was absolutely true and it was so sad that it had to be so funny.