Good Life Project - Introducing: No Small Endeavor: Joy Harjo on Poetry and Pursuit of the Common Good

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Sharing an episode of the No Small Endeavor podcast.These days, our culture is marked by political unrest, polarization and anxiety. Beauty and art feel like a luxury, or even a distraction.In a special series, No Small Endeavor is asking: What if art, beauty, and poetry are exactly what we need to face the crisis at hand? Can poetry help us protest, pray, lament, and even hope? Host Lee C. Camp talks to poets like Haleh Liza Gafori, a poet, musician, and acclaimed translator of the Persian poet Rumi; and Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and host of Poetry Unbound. Their conversations evoke thoughtfulness about how to fight for beauty in the current culture, and how to make it through the fires of our time together.In this episode, Lee talks to Joy Harjo, a musician, author, and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate. Camp and Harjo explore how poetry can act as a form of justice, a practice of self-development, and a tiny experiment in healing.You can listen to No Small Endeavor at https://link.mgln.ai/goodlifeprojectWatch Jonathan's new TEDxBoulder Talk on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zUAM-euiVI Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, before we dive in, a quick note, the video from my new TEDx Boulder Talk just went live on YouTube. It's this love letter to making things with your hands in a world that's being eaten by screens, machines, and AI. And I share this story that I've never told publicly before. It'd mean the world to me if you'd go and check it out. You can watch it now on YouTube, just open up YouTube and search for Jonathan Fields and TEDx Boulder. Or just click the link in the show notes. Hey there, I am sharing something special with you this week. It's an episode of No Small Endeavor, a podcast that explores hope in challenging times. So these days, our culture is marked by political unrest, polarization, and anxiety. Beauty and art feel like a

luxury or even a distraction. In a special series, No Small Endeavor is asking, what if art, beauty, and poetry are exactly what we need to face the crisis at hand? Can poetry help us, protest, pray, lament, and even hope? Host Lisi Camp talks to poets like Hale Liza Gafori, a poet musician and acclaimed translator of the Persian poet Rumi, and Padra Gautuma, poet theologian, and host of poetry onbound. Their conversations evoke thoughtfulness about how to fight for beauty in the current climate and how to make it through the fires of our times together. In this episode, Lee talks to Joy Harjo, a musician, author, and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate.

Camp and Harjo really explore how poetry can act as a form of justice, a practice of self-development, and a tiny experiment in healing. The episode asks what it means to live a good life in an age of crisis, climate change, technological upheaval, and cultural fracture. Poetry Harjo reminds us is a way of being human, an act of authentic human flourishing, even in the hardest times. Okay, here comes the episode. You can listen to this series and more on No Small Endeavor wherever you get podcasts.

I'm Lee Seacamp, and this is No Small Endeavour, exploring what it means to live a good life. Poetry, it's ceremonial language that taps on your heart and says, okay, let's pay attention here. That's three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo on this, the first in our three-part poetry series. So my work came about out of a need for healing. I mean, justice is part of that. We discussed the native poets who inspired her the importance of history and place in her writing and her new book, Girl Warrior. That's some of the most subtle kindness, perhaps, is to look at somebody and see them, say, okay, you have a story, and here we are in this moment, so I honor you. All coming right up.

I'm Lee C. Camp. This is no small endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life. Years ago, I found myself particularly grieved by yet another new war and what I understood to be the fear and falsehoods that were fueling that so-called preemptive war. One day, especially heavy, I was biking in South Nashville and came upon a weeping willow, its own saddened branches, down to the earth, heavy with the griefs of the creation. And thus I was reminded, yes, we must contend with our crises and challenges, with the devastation of war, political unrest and oppressions by the mighty. Yet none of these, alas, are new.

However, the specifics of the challenges of our own day pose hitherto unknown challenges, such as the continued rapid unfolding of climate change and its attendant devastation, or the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, its proponents professing utopian-like goods, while we also wonder regarding the potential devastation it might leave in its wake, what can it mean to live a good life in the midst of such seasons? Grapling with that question I remembered a line from my friend and NSE friend, poet Chris Wyman,

in his beautiful memoir, My Bright Abyss, he asks the question, What is poetry's role when the world is burning? poetry at such a time as this some might be tempted to answer simply nothing but maybe not only not nothing maybe something necessary something deeply human maybe something indispensable in part one of this series we were pleased to welcome joy harjo distinguished poet musician and three-term u.s poet laureate the second poet in history to hold this prestigious role for a third term Joy is a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation, and much of her work draws on First Nation storytelling and histories.

Her extensive literary achievements include 10 celebrated poetry collections, notably conflict resolution for holy beings, shortlisted by the Griffin Prize, and In Mad, Love and War, winner of an American Book Award. Joy has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and awarded a National Humanities Medal. Joy, we're very honored to have you with us today. Well, it's good to be here. Thank you so much for your time. How much you began to formulate an answer, perhaps, to that role of how you think of your work as a poet, giving us a response to the challenging times in which we find ourselves? That's my whole next book of poetry. Well, it's good timing then.

Well, maybe the world is always burning. Certainly right now, we're at quite a crisis of a magnitude. I don't know. I mean, I think of Crockatoa and that eruption and plague and all those things and dictators that rise up and fall down. But we're in quite a mess right now. And when I'm with native people, we say, well, we've been through this before and we'll still be hereafter.

But I think the work of poets, I mean, you think about how is the world constructed and what kind of world are we in of, I mean, we seem to be okay, and then here comes hatred. and here comes dictators, and here comes this onrush of struggle and suffering. Poets, philosophers, people fixing cars, whatever, we all think about, why are we here? What does it mean? And when we construct this world essentially with our dreams, and our dreams get formulated into our thoughts and our thoughts into words and then into action, And poetry demands another kind of language.

It's not everyday language. It's ceremonial language, language of ritual language that not just taps you on the shoulder, but maybe taps on your heart or at the edge of your soul and says, okay, let's pay attention here. It shifts us into deeper perceptions of connection. So the role of poets is to, you know, we're witness, all of us are witness to history. But poets bring that refined and tough language to the attention, to the oral A-U-R-A-L, to the oral attention of the people, because, you know, language is sound, it's resonance.

You've spoken about how this is very personal for you. At one point, you said, in a strange kind of sense, writing frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to, it is my survival. What's that looked like for you for your writing, your poetry to be your survival? I don't know when I said that. That was probably a little ways back. I think when I first began writing, I began writing as part of Native Rights movements. I had no plan to become a poet or a writer. When I started writing poetry, I was a studio art major and involved in Native Rights movements. And I didn't do it consciously and say, well, I'm going to be a poet now.

I started writing out of, you know, after hearing these eloquent speeches and responses to community people being questioned by Kinnikot Copper, co-companies, companies of extraction, who were going on to native lands in the same. southwest, not far from Albuquerque and New Mexico, and the native communities would call in native students because we were getting educated just to witness or to listen or to help. And to hear those people speak and how they made connections between the land, between history, and what being a human being meant to them and how it was connected inspired me or just took hold in me, and I started writing poetry out of that impetus. So my work came about out of a need for healing. I mean, justice is part of that. You know, justice for anyone. It becomes a kind of healing. Elsewhere I read that you said the importance of you becoming a student at the

University of New Mexico had been very significant, that you began to understand how much language putting together words can make a difference in terms of transformation of nations, transformation of lives and so on. What do you remember about that moment in which you began to see the power of words in that way? It was hearing native poets for the first time. I mean, I grew up in Tulsa and we could see the work of native artists everywhere, including like my aunt whose painting is behind me, Aunt Lois Harjo and others in the community. I mean, we were aware and we knew the artists knew their names, but poetry was something else. Teachers were terrified of it. They approached it, you know, as something they had to do. And if I put myself back

again as a student, you know, in eighth grade or sixth grade, and the teacher said, okay, here are songs on paper. Let's listen to them. And then if they read them, that would have been so much more magical than saying, we have to do this. We're mandated by the state to do this section on poetry. So I'm going to labor through it and get. through it as quick as I can, you know. But we didn't read native poets. In state history, we all had a required Oklahoma state history. Native history was only like the first few paragraphs, and yet it's everything here in this state. So I began hearing native poets. I think the first native poet I met was Simon Ortiz from Acoma Pueblo. And what struck me was that he wrote poems that

that were about our lives and in the cadence of the English that we spoke in our contemporary young, you know, native communities, although he was older, you know, he was kind of a different generation than me. But that opened the door. Leslie Silco, who she was writing her novel, Ceremony. When I first met her, she was living in Alaska and came to visit. And we became close and had quite a correspondence for a while. but her poetry she's a wonderful poet as well as short story writer and novelist but that poetry was in her novels just like you know tony morrison one of the finalist novelists of our time her novels are poetry i mean there's an attention to language and jim welch blackfoot writer who is known for his novels but he wrote one of the best american books of poetry called writing the earth boy 40 and when I heard them and then I was going through these experiences as a young native woman

and as being part of different gatherings of people telling stories and organizing that I started writing poetry. You mentioned that in your state-mandated Oklahoma history, there was very little attention given to Native poets or Native history. were you aware as a child of much of that history or much of that overlooked history or that literary tradition or was this something that you only came to learn as you began hearing these poets in this time in college? When I was growing up, well, my father was Muskogee Creek and my mother was Cherokee. I don't know how much. Her mother grew up in a Cherokee family, but they were not enrolled. But what I grew up hearing, I think from both of them was Native history. and my father especially was very pronounced in his pride and in his family.

He comes from quite historically important family. And so I would hear some of that. Later I found out that we're related to Alexander Posey, a major American poet who is also Muskogee Creek, distantly related. You know, I didn't know as much as I know. You know, I went digging around. I think it was a different age then.

You know, my father was born in 1930. And that was, I think of it as an age of chaos, especially for native communities coming out of removal, you know, in the 1800s and trying to reconstruct and everything that went on. And it was our generation that brought everything up again and began organizing. But it was very clear to my father about the injustice is going on.

on. And it was heartbreaking. I think that's what he died of more than anything was a broken heart. But he was still rowdy. You've written in your book Crazy, Brave, about some of the struggles of your father and about his alcoholism. And how do you see his alcoholism related to that kind of broken heart that you just discussed? Well, what I like, and I can't remember who said it, but years ago, some of us were sitting around younger native people with an older person, and we were talking about addiction and alcohol, which is, you know, it infects everybody, not just natives. But he was saying, well, people are just looking for a vision. And that's, that's always stayed with me. There is that nice little buzz at first that everybody kind of wants

to ride and then it feels good and then the thought of going back into the real world gets a little bit difficult. I can read a new poem actually. Yeah, please. It'll be in the new book and I had it pulled right up here. It's called Overwhelm. There was a door between the men arguing in me in the small town hotel where I returned late to my room. Then they went quiet which can be more dangerous. I became stealthy in my mind. Bad spirits find doorways and stupor. I used to seek, lift from the overwhelm and drink.

I'd ride over the meadow of doubt flowers to the field of miracles where anything was possible in the blur. I never drank alone. It was the circle that drew me from the haunting to the waters. We remembered songs that we thought we had forgotten And we were beautiful beyond belief The profane danced wildly with a sublime

How ridiculous now to think we were happy In the quick shelter we sought from truth I now understand how a whole country can drink From the waters of illusion and go down And how easy fury can turn to gunshots Then give way to torpor I needed a respite from the story then as it now

I counted the steps from midnight to home to your arms the dark skies of eternity were lit with small fires they showed me the way as you think about that vision of escape from the torpor that you described there and earlier you used the language of the tragedies of history and that they were heartbreaking

what are specific ways that that historical drama trauma impacted your own childhood i think as a kid you're just a kid and your world you assume that you know that just how people live like any kid i think the perspective starts widening or it can it depends on your mindset you know from child i mean it's natural there's a perspective of infancy which could be of eternity more than we think because we're fresh from that doorway to the perspective when you're around seven and you move out into the larger world and you start to see other circles of community and you make your own community with friends i think that's when you start realizing oh i'm native okay this is this

and this is that. Sometimes you torque yourself into ways to fit or you get edgy in your ways of not fitting. And then when you reach adolescence, it's at a fever, you know, this fever of perception. And I have a new book out in October called Girl Warrior, their coming-of-age stories. And in one of the stories, I talk about adolescence.

I talk about how there's a chrysalis period in adolescence is cases. point you go from being a boy to a man or a young person to an adult and that's quite a process and I liken it to being in a chrysalis and going from being a caterpillar to a butterfly and yet how we are in that now perhaps as a country we're in the gooey moment of chaotic where you're no longer a caterpillar but you're not a butterfly yet and you don't know how it might happen or what's going to happen

and so I think too as a kid you move through time differently when you get to my age there's a huge shift I love the perspective from here so as a child growing up I mean certainly the history was there I mean there was the race riots

that had happened in Tulsa there was a lot of segregation the world was black and white and native my community was mostly native and white. There was a little bit of overlap, but I didn't really know about the race riot. I didn't really understand how we wound up there from Georgia or Alabama. There were realities that we crossed into. And then the word was, in our schools, it was all America and white America. We didn't read black writers either. We read mostly writers from England.

or from the northeast. My idea of a poet was an old white guy declaiming in a raincoat. You know, even though there was Emily Dickinson, but even she was in a raincoat, you know, in a country far away. Or there were daffodils in a field. It had nothing to do with me or my history or how poetry comes from history in place. And then I came to love Yates, but not through what anybody was teaching in my education. My mother loved poetry, but, you know, I came to poetry really through music, through song lyrics. But then I think now of, I would like to think that what was happening is the students were beginning to see that all of America, you know, there's poets, all of us, all the cultures and their various streams of identity. We had become present in the classroom in a way that was not when I was a student in the 50s and then the early 60s. And then now it's within a few flicks of the wrist of a crazy man.

It's undone. By one person. By one person. I mean, he has support, obviously. But, you know, no one is minding the store, so to speak. You're listening to No Small Endeavor and a conversation with Joy Harshow. I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to,

or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at Lee at No Small Endeavor.com. We would be most appreciative if you would go to your favorite podcast tab where you're listening right now and write up a glowing five-star review of no small endeavor. Those reviews help extend the reach of the beauty, truth, and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world, and we'd be grateful for you taking two minutes to go out and do that for us. Coming up, Joy and I discuss the complexity of Muskogee history,

democracy's roots in native culture, and the importance of all in a life well-lived. I understand that you discovered there's a complexity about your own story in that your father was raised with a lot of wealth. And maybe it was what it was your grandfather, great-great-grandfather, who owned the Harjo Oil Company and that your father had actually been raised in a 21-room house. Yeah. But you'd only learn this later. So what was that discovery like? And how did you make sense of that? Well, being native, I mean, we've been so equated with the trauma story or the,

that all natives are poor or all natives are this. Our stories are complex. Someone reminded of a story they used to call her Creek Mary, who in the 1700s a Muskogee woman who garnered a lot of power by marrying a trader and also garnering a lot of trade and being an asset to her community by, in a way, being kind of a diplomat, you know, a major force in the trade economy, which was what was primary.

in the southeast at that time. So it didn't surprise me. I mean, I knew that there had been oil money. There's a story, and I've been collecting research. We've heard, of course, in a very big way, culturally, about the Osage and their story. But, you know, the Muskogee people have a story, too. Same thing with the oil companies.

They would come in and kill off parents to gain guardianship. There's all those kinds of stories. so that my grandparents survived that. I mean, my grandfather, my great-grandfather, became quite an interim principal chief, but he was very respected for his humbleness and his take and his steadiness on what was going on in our community, say in the 20s in the early 1900s,

and was quite a respected person. He had the first car, and I just found out recently, he had our Harjo Oil Company, and I wonder what happened to that. And other family members were sharecroppers, you know, on my mother's side. My grandmother, who was a painter, also played saxophone in Indian Territory. Obviously, I put that in your images of native people. You know, we run the gamut. Our story as Muskogee people as a whole is very different than, say, the Lakota and Pine Ridge,

which gets presented as the primary story of native people. But we're not all plains people. Our music, our culture is different. Like Pacific Northwest people, very different. You're dealing with water. Other ways of getting food, a lot of salmon, et cetera. I mean, that all makes a difference for any community, not just anthropological studies of natives,

but it works the same for Jewish. New York City, how you bring food to the table. That's culture. A moment ago you spoke of companies of extraction, which of course is kind of classic colonialism. And I'd love to hear you share a little bit with us about how you began, I think in your book in Mad Love and War, you began to think about those sorts of themes. How have you begun to process this sort of systemic reality of colonialism and the sorts of ways that such power can wield such devastation in its wake how does anybody process it really i mean it's it's really come to bear with this current administration allowing extraction and public lands and protected lands

I can remember hearing old people who were probably my age then saying they're not going to stop until they take everything but we'll still be here and yet I just don't want to believe I can't I have children grandchildren they're all our children in the work I do and traveling I meet a lot of young people and I see them in their hearts and what they're doing and the story they're bringing forth together

so I know it will go on but at what cost to all of us and it reminds me how much power one person can have and that ultimately each of us is a power source every one of us and so we have to figure out what it is that we were put here to do

what we need to take care of and develop that and go to work, doing that. When you think of exemplars who have withstood the overreach of power, who are some particular images or stories that you carry with you to fuel your own courage? Stories of courage, I think it's everyday people. I still remember her, and I don't remember her name, but this young Navajo woman when I was a student. And I'd be working so hard, and I went to work, and I had a full load,

and I had two kids, and pretty much on my own. And then I'd feel a little ragged. And then she would come into a meeting, and she was just well put together with, I think she had about four or five little children with her, all very well behaved. And she was like me taking a full load. And I was just thinking, This is, you know, what it takes.

I honored what it would take for her to get up and cook and fix everything and get the kids ready and all the things that you have to do to make a family. So much so that before I stopped painting and switched my major to creative writing, I was going to start working on a series of women warriors, or warriors, period, because the people that you see in history books are usually those picked out, not by the community. I think about who would the community pick? Who do we see that no one else sees? And those are people, sometimes they go through incredible hardship.

Maybe the family knows and no one else knows, but then they manage to get their high school diploma. You know, or they manage to make it through college. they manage despite having to take care of family members and you know there's all kinds of stories of people who have survived incredible things and nobody knows their story in your memoir crazy brave you say i am seven generations from monawee with the rest of the red stick contingent fought Andrew Jackson at the battle of horseshoe bend in what is now known as Alabama. our tribe was removed unlawfully from our homelands seven generations can live under one roof that sense of time brings history close within breeding distance i call it ancestor time

everything is a living being even time even words that passage struck me with a particular poignance because I had read this right before going home to Alabama a month ago. And my grandparents lived in Dadeville, which is just very close by where the Battle of Horseshoe Bend happened. And I was raised in Talladega, which there was another battle with Andrew Jackson that is memorialized in a little historical marker there in downtown Talladega. And those two battles in Talladega and at Horseshoe Bend, where all my people are from and where I was from, led, of course, to the displacement of your people on the Trail of Tears. And so having read that and then being home and making a special stop by the historical marker,

I didn't know what to do with that other than to be aware of the, sad and poignant way in which all of a sudden I found this connection with you. My heritage that profited off of the injustice to your heritage. Maybe my question is, I know you use this notion of story field. But maybe that seems like this sort of awareness that we're all a part of this shared story. We find ourselves at different places in the story. But it certainly draws us in a profound way, I think, to see one another. humanity, at least, at a minimum, in a way that we might not otherwise.

Yeah, that's the complexity, and actually I need to correct that in the book. I'm actually six generations. I really wanted it to be seven because of the seven generations, but it's not. It's six generations. And an American Sunrise, that book, deals directly with that history and how Manahui and his family, he had different wives and one family. One family, was totally killed, that horse you bend, the women, the children. And I'm descended from Betsy Cozer. And he went on the trail. I have the Emancipation Records in that book, Bending Our Way. And it has a lot of those emancipation officer records about him and the Fishpond people, the Fishpond Miko and his family traveling together from Talladega, Alabama to on the

trail of tears and how Manawi like to party. I mean, I like those human things, those human moments, but yeah, I mean, what do you do with that? I downloaded a biography of Andrew Jackson because I'm trying to figure something out, trying to understand people making people inhuman is a problem so that you can't sit and talk and reason with each other. And do so without an assumption that because of your culture or something like skin color or any of those things gives your opinion more value or makes you more of an authority or allows you to dominate. And that was the whole point of democracy in a way and the way it was set up based on native cultures. The Iroquois and the Muskogee is about consensus and talking respectfully

and listening. Listening is a big part of it, one-on-one with groups. And then there's a breakdown. I think guns enter into it in a big way, gun power, authority, assumption of authority

based on religion, which has been a major destructor in the world, you know, in terms of forcing your way onto other people and so on. So that, yeah, I think about it. I think about the contradictions, the contradictions even of how we wind up here,

you and me, or how I had a position at a University of Tennessee, Knoxville. And my husband and I went all over that part of the world. We found houses that some of our family members had lived in. And I remember going to what they said was Sequoia's cabin, the birthplace, not far from Knoxville, and going in there and discovered that Sequoia fought with Andrew Jackson, And at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, he fought against Muskogee Creek people. I think about what was going on then, people trying to survive, seeing the onslaught, not knowing, you know, and other people, settlers coming in, many of them just trying to have a little piece of land or a home from a place where they had nothing or they were starving or no chance to have anything. And it's complex. But then I think the simplicity is that it would be like somebody in a spaceship

coming in and saying, okay, you guys, we're going to tear down your churches or your places and you've got to live like us and marching your kids into their schools and trying to make them like them. And yet here we are as two people, and that's important. And I think that's going back to the original question is where poetry comes in to be able to sing together or to come to an understanding in a way that's beyond the small human mind. Coming up is a short break

followed by our conversation on the long shadow of colonialism, the power of story, and the so-called ordinary people who have inspired joy. You mentioned religion and the role of religion and certainly the destruction of the imposition of religion. What was your conception experience of religion or religion or God or faith as a child, and how has that developed or changed?

Oh, man, I don't want to get in trouble talking about religion. Because I already have made enemies because of a few things I've said, like saying it's been a major cause of conflict and wars all over the world. If I go back to my earliest consciousness, and I can remember even being a, an infant, and even before, but to the earliest consciousness, for me, creation was being an incredible awe, and I found that outside, and I found it with the trees, and I found it usually not where human beings were, you know, but I would see it in acts of kindness. I was, I think, deeply, spiritually aware as a child, and I think maybe most children are.

And then they get these ideas or they learn things. And by the time you go to school, you're being perhaps mind in a way. Going back to extraction, economy or extraction, you're being mind or your energy or we start to lose track. I mean, little children are very creative. They don't judge, but they repeat what they see. And yet, I think people still come in as who, who they are, even as they come up through families. And my mom was, she called herself a Methodist.

And my, you know, my grandfather, Henry Marcy Harjo, the one who had the oil company, was, you know, he and my grandmother, Katie Manaw, we met at a boarding school. I think they had been orphaned after the trail in church. I mean, that's as all church. But, you know, my Skogi people are very spiritually minded people. and I think they use, then religion, they would make it fit the culture in a way. And you see that with the churches and the pueblos, you know, where there's a native Catholicism and so on.

And that's sort of what Muskogee people did in the way that some of the Muskogee churches where they arranged them somewhat like the ceremonial ground. So it's difficult to talk about. I mean, I started going to, I got involved in an evangelical church because they were coming to the school and putting up notices about vacation Bible school and they had candy attached to it. So, of course, I was hooked.

And I love the stories, you know, and I love the innate spirituality of it. But what I had a very hard time with and what eventually made me leave was that this is the only way. And I thought that doesn't make sense. And there was a lot of racism. I mean, there were people who wouldn't talk to me. I mean, I'm light skin,

but there were people, because I was a native, would not sit with me, would not talk to me, but there were other people who were wonderful and treated me like a relative. And I just went there because it became a kind of refuge, the spirituality beneath all of the judgment and the racism that was there. So I left that, but really I'd like to think of, well, it's about for me, my understanding it's it's about this incredible love beyond belief you know and then we humans we're who we are we get in here and make stories and get ourselves into a lot of trouble cases you experience this all at the creation or in nature or moved by kindness.

And I'm just wondering what particular pictures come to mind of nature or acts of kindness that especially move you in that way. I've had incredible mentors in poetry and healing and healing arts and just family. and I think for somebody to give of themselves I see that a lot in teachers and I experienced it when teachers like in sixth grade where she didn't have to say anything

and I would come in and I was going through some rough stuff and she could see that but there was something in her manner she didn't have to I didn't want her pity I didn't need pity but I just felt that she saw me

and to me that's some of the most subtle kindness, perhaps, is to look at somebody and see them. Even in a moment, even somebody on the street is just to see them. Say, okay, you have a story and your story is

just as important as mine, and here we are in this moment. So, I honor you. And I honor that you're part of me this story. I remember the writer, Meredith Lassour. I had two kids and the men are not long before and I was just starting to write poetry and one day I get a cash in the mail that I absolutely needed for food and there it was and that's part of it. You know, I was just reaching out and to people, not necessarily people that you know. You don't have to know people. You don't have to know people. And I like watching it in children, in alien children. I've seen it in animals, too.

So going back to what you said there about being seen and being seen as someone who has a story, I would love it as we close if you would do an experiment with us. And if you were to perhaps tell Joy Harge's story in brief fashion, what would be the key moves or highlights of who you are? Oh man, I actually wrote something. I said that my mother was the sun and I was the moon. You know, and I was observant and fierce and dark, dark in my countenance. And then it took a lot of trials and dealing with dragons and struggles.

and then at some point there's blooming with words, words and music, and they start to bloom, and that plant makes friends with plants all over the world. Something like that, that's not very good. Well, I think that it's quite lovely, and I would say we're grateful for the way in which you have blossomed and bloomed with words and the way in which you have sought to bear witness to history and bear witness to peace and bear witness to reconciliation.

I have one story actually about a plant. We think of animals, but I wrote, it's a story in my book, Girl Warrior. And somebody gave me an African violet plant. I never had one. But it bloomed and bloomed and bloomed, and you have to water it a certain way. and I had to leave, and I left instructions for watering, but I didn't for that plant. And by the time I got back, the roots had started rotting.

And I tried to make the plaque come back, and it tried. But it wasn't, it always gave me flowers. It bloomed constantly. And so I told it, I said, I really miss your flowers. And right before it died, it gave me one flower. And I think, okay. I know I'd heard me. You know, I had that relationship, and life is in all things.

You know, there's communication with all things, even planets and our organs in our bodies. You know, of course, with each other, sometimes there's communication, sometimes not, you know, there's resonances, but that's a story. I think a plant hardly had anything left, but it used some of its last energy to give me a flower. Well, thank you for the flowers that you've given us in talking to Joy Harjo, three-term U.S. poet laureate. Thank you, Joy, so much for your work, and thank you so much for your time with us today. Thank you.

Here's one closing take on today's interview. As you heard Joy Harjo's people six generations ago were forcibly removed from their land by the United States federal government from the region in which my own people, four or five generations ago, took up residence. Her people's Muskogee language still lingers there. There's Chihaw, the highest point in Alabama, a Muskogee word for High Place. There's Talladega, my hometown, another Muskogee word meaning boundary. And still today, the most prominent historical marker in my hometown celebrates the defeat of Joy's people. Regarding the so-called Battle of Talladega, the marker reads,

quote, this short battle was a decisive victory for the young United States. Indians lost about 50. Jackson lost 20. In succeeding battles, Old Hickory broke, in quote, here I'll replace the racial slur with the phrase Native American. Quote, in succeeding battles, old Hickory broke the Native Americans' power in the Southeast forever, permanently claiming this land for a greater nation, end quote. Describing all this to joy, I used the word poignancy,

this sadness infused with a bittersweet regret, something heartbreaking, with no simple solution. Yes, said Joy, it's complex, and yet here we are, two people, seeking to come to some understanding that transcends just one small human mind. These days, many prefer to ignore the heartbreaking poignancy, the complexity, yet it's not clear to me how willful blindness will ever serve us well. Amidst such complexity, Joy pointed us to two things we can do. First, bear witness. Put yourself in another shoes, even if you have to imagine alien ships tearing down your home,

abducting your children, and then bear witness. Second, practice all, all at the beauty of sky and river and land and plants that give us one last bloom and blossom and awe in simply seeing another human being, each carrying their own story. All this seems to be no small endeavor, and it's one closing take on our rich conversation with Joy Harjo. You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Joy Harjo. Her new book Girl Warrior comes out October 7. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development,

education, and religion. All right, thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Carriott Harmon, Jason Cheesley, Sophie Byard, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, and Audrey Griffith. Our theme song was composed by Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together. No Small Endeavor. Tokens Media LLC and Great Feeling Studios.