Feminist screenwriter and poet Joy Harjo relishes the role of “historicist,” a form of storytelling that recaptures lost elements of history. Typically listed alongside native writers Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Crow Dog, Wendy Rose, and Linda Hogan, she strives for imagery that exists outside the bounds of white stereotypes. As a force of the Native American renaissance, she speaks the pain and rage of the Indian who lacks full integration into society. Harjo’s antidote to despair is a vigorous reclamation of living. Her poems resonate with Indian journeys and migrations; her characters combat the cultural displacement that fragments lives and promotes killing silences.
Of Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, French, and Irish ancestry, she was born Joy Harjo Foster on May 9, 1951, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is a lifelong music lover who plays jazz saxophone and enjoys community stomp dances. After switching majors from art to poetry, she earned a B.A. in creative writing at the University of New Mexico and completed an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, followed by cinema study at the College of Santa Fe in 1982. In addition to teaching at the universities of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana, she has served as Native American consultant for Native American Public Broadcasting and the National Indian Youth Council and director of the National Association of Third World Writers.
Influenced by the works of Flannery O’Connor, Simon Ortiz, Pablo Neruda, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Harjo began publishing in feminist journals, including Conditions, and in the anthologies The Third Woman (1980) and That’s What She Said (1984). Her early work in The Last Song (1975), What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), and She Had Some Horses (1983) ponders the place of women in a blended Anglo-native world. She rose above the “native poet” label with In Mad Love and War (1990), an examination of the vengeance unleashed by failed romance. Her feminism enhanced two cinema scripts, Origin of Apache Crown Dance (1985) and The Beginning. In 1994, she produced “The Flood,” a mythic prose poem that links her coming of age to the “watermonster, the snake who lived at the bottom of the lake.”
At the end of the twentieth century, while retaining her focus on gender and ethnic disparity, Harjo turned to universal themes. The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1996), a volume of prose poetry, pairs creation and destruction. She juxtaposed benevolent native female voices in an anthology, Reinventing Ourselves in the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America (1997). In addition, she edits High Plains Literary Review, Contact II, and Tyuonyi. Her honoraria include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arizona Commission on the Arts, a first place from the Santa Fe Festival for the Arts, American Indian Distinguished Achievement award, and a Josephine Miles award.
