Introduction for Joy Harjo (Mvskoke Nation)

When Joy and I spoke by phone a few days ago, what most moved me was that in acknowledging the poet laureate honor, the first words out of her mouth were: “It’s ours. Everywhere I go,” she said, “Native people see the Award as theirs, too.”

This is Joy Harjo – the profound intimacy of a single voice that extends across the four directions and seven generations - the above and below of it – to make six directions, a thousand pueblos, to make the recognized and forgotten, the beauteous and the battered, the recovered and reclaimed, the lonely and open hearts, to find home in a woman stirring up the song and story of poetry.

The first time I saw Joy Harjo was at a poetry reading at the American Indian Community House in New York City, sometime in the early 1980s, around the time of the publication of the incomparable She Had Some Horses.

I don’t believe we actually met at that time. Knowing me, my own shyness, I probably left without approaching her. But, the pure integrity of her intention in the writing – the courage evident within a certain measure of embodied fragility –- drew me to the work that I already knew by heart, somehow and would seal my now near 40-year relationship to it.

We would become friends – not daily hang-out friends – but sisters of common cause and common generation.

Hers, is the taboo language of truth: She writes:

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

She invokes familial and tribal memories reenacted in the delicate and dangerous dance of desire. Every line inscribed by an unyielding history through the hand of the daughter given birth to the heart-song of change.

Always the elemental in the telling. The fire & water of it, the alchemy of dreams made manifest in the visionary realm of a native cosmology. Joy, the walking receptor of this gift -- to receive and regenerate what she calls, the “metaphorical language of the ancestors.”

How blessed we are, she born flesh and bone and storyteller in our lifetimes.

How blessed that she followed poetry and from it uncovered a fundamental hopefulness.

In An American Sunrise, she writes: “The smallest one remembered, the most humble one, the one whose voice you’d have to lean in a thousand years to hear, we will begin there.”

Do not forget this night. Keep it in your repertoire of moments that matter.

Joy Harjo, the poet laureate of Native América.