A lot of images [of Native Americans] are based on fairy tales or Wild West shows. We are human beings, not just people who have been created for peo… - Joy Harjo
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A lot of images [of Native Americans] are based on fairy tales or Wild West shows. We are human beings, not just people who have been created for people’s fantasy worlds. There’s not just one Native American. We’re diverse by community, by land, by language, by culture. In fact, we go by our tribal names, and there are 573 tribal nations.
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About
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo (May 9, 1951) is a poet, musician, author and the first Native American United States Poet Laureate.
I’m a great-grandmother now. I was a grandmother in my 30s and a teenage mother. And what that’s given me is a kind of a broader sense of the story field.
I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day.
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I pick up the bar of soap from her sink, the same soap she used yesterday morning to wash her face. When she looked in the mirror, did she know it would be her last sunrise? I move over pill bottles, a clock radio on the table by the bed, a pen, and set down the pan. I straighten the blankets over her, to keep her warm, for dignity. I start with her face. Her face is unlined even two months before her eightieth birthday. She was known for her beauty, and when younger passed for the Cherokee that she was through her mother and her mother’s mother all the way back to time’s beginning. My mother had the iron pot given to her by her Cherokee mother, whose mother gave it to her, given to her by the U.S. government on the Trail of Tears.
