Native American writer retells her stories

The first Native American writer to serve as U.S. poet laureate, Joy Harjo is revered for speaking truth to power with lyricism and compassion in her nine books of poetry and a memoir, “Crazy Brave.” Her new book, “Poet Warrior,” is a hybrid memoir, combining poetry and prose as it returns to the life passages revealed in “Crazy Brave.”

Harjo was in second grade when she was given Louis Untermeyer’s “Golden Treasury of Poetry” and discovered “a refuge from the instability and barrage of human disappointment.” She thrilled to Emily Dickinson, but “Girl-Warrior was lonely/ for the poetry-talk of the Old Ones” — the voices of Native American culture she found scant evidence of until a bit later in her life.

“When I hit puberty,” she tells us, “I was locked to the destiny of physical body. There was no more flying and dreaming in eternal time, there was only here and survival. There was a fire burning in my body, the same dangerous desire that had led my mother to disaster.”

Her stepfather, “the monster,” raged against her enjoyment of rock music, forbade her to sing, broke into her diary and mocked her, beat her with his belt. When her mother failed to stand up for her, she drowned her anger and misery in cheap vodka and beer.

Harjo became a mother at 17 and soon after moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her son to train as a pediatric nursing assistant. “The hospital work engaged me in a way nothing else had to that point. My innate impulse is healing, which is also standing up for justice, which can heal hearts and nations.”

The connection made here between physical and spiritual healing, between the healing of the individual and the healing of the collective, is central to Harjo’s identity. But at the University of New Mexico, her focus became painting, poetry and the Kiva Club, the Native American student organization. Blissfully, Harjo blossomed in a “brave, brilliant, hilarious” circle of friends.

Continually eliding the material and the ethereal, the political and the mystical, the poetry of words and the poetry of action, Harjo ends this iteration of her life story with a journey down the Amazon, a sighting of pink dolphins, and her mother’s death.

If her many fans could have their way, this will not be the last we hear of these things.