![]() ![]() When I started learning poetry, I was learning Navajo language. There is everyday language and there is sacred language. What compelled me to write was the need to move into the mystery that is just beyond the ordinary sensory. ![]() With the intuitive, you have access to everything, whereas with just the intellect you have access to restricted knowledge which is often repackaged thought constructions. We need to wean ourselves from our devices so we get back in touch with this many-layered universe, and how it accesses us through the earth. Joy Harjo: We are experiencing the rise of poetry readings, of people getting together socially, for connection and for social change. Shenandoah: How do we then keep that community alive? How do we work against these sort of barriers to connection? That shifts the story we tell ourselves or even what we know of story. What happens to community and making a community and even family then? When all the children are on their devices and people will even sit at a table and look at their devices and not talk with each other, that shifts our relationship to everything, even literature. We’re like Pinocchio let loose in the land of amusements. We can hear any kind of music we want anytime-night or day. ![]() Now, we are so disconnected even while connected. We listened to music on the radio, record player, or stereo, or from living players. Our interactions were usually out of doors and we spoke with one another. ![]() When I was younger, our minds were mostly earth. Poets have a very particular kind of work, which has to do with taking what is beyond language and making word art-the materials are reality, history, dreams, that which we know but cannot yet perceive. And it is the heart that has the function and ability to make those kinds of connection. The connection between the two poles is the heart. The stories, the people-what happens to memory and your relationship to memory, or rather the path of your own existence on a planet that is essentially you? What happens when our stories and our presence becomes reduced to sound bites and selfies?Įverything has two sides in this reality of duality. What do we give up? Is there a middle road? You won’t be able to hear your soul, or find the impetus to grow it. You have access to libraries and to different collections, and you don’t have to remember anything. You push a button, you click on a keyboard, touch a screen, it appears that all sorts of memory is available. In this digital and cellular age, we don’t have to remember anything, not even our telephone numbers. Poetry is one way to access memory, to hold memory. But here in the “over-culture,” which is a culture of commercialization, we are taught to live in the now only, so we become perpetual adolescents. With memory, rather, the memory-field, nothing is ever lost. There are more laws dealing with Native nations than there are any other kind of laws. Much of American history has been disappeared or suppressed, especially when it concerns indigenous peoples. And most likely in dimensions we do not have access to with our contemporary miles. It moves forward, sideways, and in a spiral. Joy Harjo: Memory is a living being that moves in many-layered streams. What effect has your storytelling had on your connection to that ancestry and to your family? Thinking about some other works by Native authors-Natalie Diaz comes to mind-this idea of remembering and the responsibility of remembering your family history really stands out. Shenandoah: In reading Crazy Brave and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, I noticed some points of similarity. The conversation was later edited and expanded into the version you see here. Three Shenandoah interns-James Ricks, Mara Efimov, and Arthur Rodrigues-sat down to talk with her. On February 11, 2019, Joy Harjo visited Washington and Lee University as part of the Mudd Center’s exploration of The Ethics of Identity. ![]()
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