Reflections on Joy Harjo, Indigenous Feminism, and Experiments in Creative Expression
I want to tell you when I think of culture, I think of rupture, something split open trying to put itself back together again.
I know something was taken away from me. I know that what I have, I had to beg, borrow, and steal it away in small snatches for it to be mine.
As a child, I sat in the corner of the kitchen hoping that none of the aunties would think I was in the way. Or worse, that their topic of conversation wasn’t meant for my ears and I would be banished, sent to play with my dolls or find something to watch on TV.
I want to tell you that a very different kind of pain settles in around so much silence and solitude.
I remember my mother, sitting, drinking wine, and laughing. One of the cousins asks, “But what are we?”
She’d shrug her shoulders and laugh. Her reply, as she shook her head decidedly from left to right: “We’re Mexican (head to the left). We’re Indian (head to the right).”
She’d laugh some more. “We’re Mexican. We’re Indian.”
And then we’d sit there even more confused than before we had piped up with the question.
“What are we?”
My mother’s mother was Lila, and she was Wiyot. She was born and raised on a reservation until she met and married my grandfather, Raymond. Lila’s tribe is from the far northern coastal section of California. Raymond’s family was from the geographic area now known as Arizona in the Southwest region of the United States. Once upon a time it was Mexico.
I can still hear her laughter, “We’re Mexican. We’re Indian.”
We’re Mexican but we don’t speak Spanish. We’re Indian but we don’t know what that means. And our last name is Page.
My mother refused to speak Spanish in our bicultural home. Spanish from her mouth as a child meant that she would be beaten by her teachers in the Oakland Public Schools. Back in the day, the teachers walked around with rulers and hit your hands if you spoke Spanish in their classrooms. She, like so many mothers, wanted to protect her children. She wanted to spare us the suffering that she knew all too well.
My mother despised the kitchen in our home and everything about cooking. As a young wife and stay-at-home mom, she learned to prepare dinners the way my Anglo father preferred them. We ate family meals together while she complained about how much she hated to cook. As I got older, I became her quiet confidante. I don’t remember when I was invited for the first time to join her in the kitchen, but I know another world opened up to me. I was invited to the table that my mother and her sisters shared. I learned that there were things that she loved to cook and, more important, that she loved to eat. She and my aunts came together around food, and the meals they shared were very different from the steak, potatoes, and canned vegetables that constituted most of our family dinners. Refried beans had to soak overnight before you could start cooking them. Handmade tortillas that Rose and Delores took so much care and time to make were perfectly round and flat. We ate them hot off the grill, slathered with melting butter. Linda used ancho chilis and other savory spices to make enchiladas. She warned us not to touch our eyes or nose after handling these peppers. One of my mother’s favorites was spicy chorizo with eggs that were fried to perfection together in one pan and eaten with tortillas. Another favorite of hers were tacos. We used the freshest ingredients: tomatoes, green onions, cheese, lettuce, avocado, grilled meat, beans with Spanish rice on the side. We fried corn tortillas into crisp shells that each woman filled to her own liking.
As a young adult, I would visit my mother and she would ask, “Why don’t you make some chorizo and eggs?” or “What do you think of making tacos for us for dinner?” A special invitation for her daughter. And with the meals came the stories and the gossip and the fights. The laughter and the tears.
It wasn’t until her passing in 2005 that I realized my special status with her, with my aunts, and our relationship to food. My brother had no idea that my mother would eat chorizo and eggs with tortillas for breakfast. It wasn’t until he and I had a disagreement about what she ate that I realized he was never at our special meals. Neither he nor my father sat at our table. This food, this key element to my identity, was passed from mother to daughter. Food does more than satisfy hunger. It deepens our understanding of who we are, and it brings us closer to one another when we share it. Our family, our lives, our culture is produced at our kitchen tables. It took me a long time to learn this lesson, and it all hit home the first time I read Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here” in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994).
I was a young mother and college student in Hayward, California. I had little in common with my peers. And then, in a women’s studies course, I encountered Joy’s work and I felt a seismic shift. I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t as crazy as I had started to feel at that large state institution in my hometown.
The bittersweet poem captures all of the elements of life, and links our livelihood to the kitchen table where we take in food in order to live. I learned my most valuable lessons at my mother’s table. If the world might end there, that’s because it definitely began there: “We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here”; the kitchen table is the place where “we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks” (Harjo 1994, 6). These things and more came to pass at my mother’s table.
I had no idea, when I first read this poem in the late 1990s, that I would meet Joy Harjo a decade later in Westfield, Massachusetts. At that time, I was living and working in the nearby town of Amherst after completing my MFA in theater at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Magdalena Gomez, an extraordinary poet and dear friend, told me about Joy’s reading and I decided to go. I had recently lost an aunt, my mother’s youngest sister Linda, and did not have enough money to travel home for her funeral. On a cold, wintry night, I sat alone in the crowded auditorium and wept while Joy read her poems and played her saxophone.
I had been reading and studying her poetry for a long time and felt a gravitational pull toward her that I couldn’t quite name. I wasn’t simply a fan of her work; rather, I felt that she was writing about my life and the women in my family. Her poetry is powerful, yes. But that night, I wept because I saw Aunt Linda in her. The two women look strikingly similar. So much so that they could have been sisters. I wept for the many losses that Linda endured in her life. I kept thinking that if my mother and her sisters and their mother had found their voices and been listened to, like Joy, then maybe their lives would have turned out differently. I wept because I didn’t know how to help them.
When the reading ended and the room cleared out, I moved closer to the stage. Joy was graciously speaking to a few women who had made their way to her. I didn’t plan to speak to her, and I didn’t know exactly why I had moved so close to her, but within a few minutes, she was sitting in front of me. I thanked her for her powerful poetry and then told her how much she favored my aunt Linda. The tears started up again. She took my hand and said, “Tell me about your aunt.”
I don’t recall my exact words, but I do know that I told her about my aunt’s difficult life wrought with physical abuse, drug addiction, poverty, and loss. Then I told Joy how connected I felt to her poem “Remember” (Harjo 1983). In its opening line, she offers this directive: “Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the stars’ stories.” My sense of spiritualty aligns with Joy’s command to honor the higher powers of the natural world and to acknowledge my place in the universe. In the second line, her tone shifts as she continues: “Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her in a bar once in Iowa City” (35). Grounded in an urban reality, I often find it difficult to recognize spirit in places like bars. But Joy’s poem reminds me that the moon, with her grace and compassion, is just as likely to show up in a bar as anyplace else. (In subsequent publications, Harjo has edited this line out of the poem.) Then, I told her about the alcoholism in my family and its toll on all of us. She asked me about my people, and I explained to her that my ancestors were Wiyot but that none of the elders in my family would talk to the younger generations about this.
Joy responded by telling me that she had visited the story of the Wiyot people many times and actually went to the reservation once. She told me that my people endured horrific violence and attempts at genocide. When white settlers arrived in the geographic region now known as California, they tried to wipe out the entire population of Wiyots. Those who survived went into hiding to preserve their lives. She explained that this tragedy, like so many for Native Americans, has gone unspoken for a very long time. I was stunned by this information, and we sat and held hands for a few minutes more.
This seemingly small gesture—Joy sitting, listening, and holding my hand—meant a great deal to me. Over the next decade, we stayed in touch and developed a friendship. Her poetry and my conversations with her inspired me to tell my story and to honor my ancestors through my writing. I have done more research on my people and the legacy of trauma they experienced. I now know more about the pain, the silence, and the power of speaking out and speaking truth to power even if our numbers are small, even in the face of genocide. Joy helped me tremendously in my journey with her generosity that evening. She is a prolific writer and a tireless performer who won the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award recognizing her outstanding mastery of poetry (Alicia Ostriker, Academy of American Poets). Her writing continues to inspire me and, I am sure, many others.
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, her most recent performative endeavor, blends poetry, music, and theater. Harjo presented a workshop production of this play at the Native Theater Festival at the Public Theater in New York in 2007. In 2009, Randy Reinholz, theater director and University of California San Diego professor, directed the play at Native Voices at the Autry, where he is one of the founding co-producers. In the promotional materials, Reinholz describes the play as “a heightened ceremony, a broad intersection of art forms, an intimate act that celebrates the beauty and the inherent paradoxes of the human condition” (Native Voices press release, March 2009).
I attended the workshop production of an early version of the piece at the Public Theater and the panel discussion that immediately followed it in December 2007. There was a mixed reaction from the audience members during the talk, and I remember thinking that Harjo was very brave to show new work and then endure immediate responses from panelists and audience members. As a dramaturg who has organized post-show discussions for new plays, I can relate to the challenges of balancing respect for the artist and her process with creating a space for audiences to respond to the work they have just seen. I think a facilitator’s primary role in this type of conversation is to provide context for the audience members while striving to elicit useful and meaningful feedback for the artists. Sadly, the facilitator for this particular conversation fell short. To be fair, post-show discussions are difficult to manage, and there is usually a very limited amount of time during which one can both frame a conversation and move it in a productive way for the artist, in this case Harjo. With a dramaturgical framework that connects Harjo’s poetry, music, and performance text, in this essay I will highlight major themes in the work that connect to larger ideas about indigenous feminism and experimental performance practice. This kind of care and attention must be paid to Native American theater, its history, its cultural specificity, its forms, and its purpose, if theater practitioners and producers truly want to support ongoing work by Native American playwrights.
Harjo’s blend of poetry and music to tell the story of Redbird, the central character in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, signals Harjo’s departure from conventional notions of storytelling. In order to create this performance text, she incorporated concepts and imagery from her 1994 poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” and music from her two latest CDs: Winding through the Milky Way (2008) and Red Dreams: A Trail Beyond Tears (2010). Taken together, these three works demonstrate Harjo’s long-standing focus on articulating her place in the cosmos, a location that is rooted in contemporary urban reality as much as the realm of the ancestors and spirit guides.
In Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, Harjo sets the scene with a description of the kitchen table, placed just left of center stage. The kitchen table is “[t]he gut around which all action flows. It is a heart, a bed, a bier, a car, a counter at the bar, an altar, and a hiding place” (2007, 19). This stage direction signals from the very beginning that this play is not grounded in realism: instead, metaphor and magic abound. The table is all things and figures prominently in all of the action of the performance. This is a literal translation of the significance of the kitchen table in “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” where Harjo writes the opening line “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what we must eat to live.” By the end of the poem, she ponders, “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet, bite” (1994, 68) In this poem, Harjo takes the reader on a journey through life. Fifteen years later, she mirrors the structure of this poem in Redbird’s cosmic journey in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. In both the 1994 poem and the 2007 performance text, the reader is keenly aware of the cyclical movement through life. Redbird’s journey begins in crisis as we are asked by Redbird’s relative to “[p]lease keep in mind that the patient Redbird Monahwee is in a delicate and vulnerable state. There is imbalance between dark and light. We need your good thoughts to help see us through.” The unnamed relative then introduces the audience to Redbird’s protector guardian, who “open[s] with a traditional family story and song, so that our minds come together as one” (2007, 3). The blurring of the roles of Relative, Spirit Helper, and Redbird, all played by Harjo (in the full production at Native Voices at the Autry) facilitates the audience’s understanding of the close relationship between each of the characters. As Harjo embodies each of the characters, she moves seamlessly from one to the other onstage.
Redbird’s life unfolds before us, and we witness the roots of her distress that date back before her birth. In Scene 2, Harjo writes:
When my spirit crossed worlds to join my father and mother, there were no songs to assist the birth.
There was no cedar or tobacco … but—my mother had drugs!
My body was a wet, ripe, bloody seed
And it was about to be spit onto concrete in Oklahoma.
That’s when I changed my mind. (2007, 8)
In this short description, we learn that Redbird’s parents no longer had access to the traditional songs or medicinal herbs to assist in her birth, and that they lived in a city. Just before her birth, Redbird understands that she will be “spit onto the red earth of Oklahoma” (8). This harsh image signals the enduring strife of urban reality that many indigenous people face in the United States. Her guardian convinces her to proceed with her birth, and the play is set in motion.
Harjo also works with the journey motif in her 2008 CD Winding through the Milky Way. “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks” is the first song for both Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light and Winding through the Milky Way. With this song, listeners embark on a journey that begins “a long time ago.” Harjo sings, “In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone until somebody got out of line.” Through the CD, we experience a journey of the soul. In “This Is My Heart,” the second track, Harjo declares, “This is my soul. It is a good soul. It tells me, ‘Come here forgetful one.’ We sit together. We cook a little something to eat. Then a sip of something sweet. For memory.” Near the end of the CD, in “Witchi Tai To,” Harjo tells us, “I went back home to claim my soul/took it back/from the sugarman/took it back from the money man/took it back from the devil man.” We have moved with her from a time of forgetfulness and confusion to a time of self-determination. Embedded in this personal journey is a critique of colonialism. Harjo claims power and sovereignty over herself in the way that indigenous people (and people of color in the United States) struggle to be free from oppression in its many forms. Freedom, in the context of Winding through the Milky Way, is found at the end of the metaphoric night in the song “Goin’ Home.” She sings, “We’re all goin’ home some way, some how,” and finally she instructs, “Be kind to all you meet along the way. We’re all related in this place” (Harjo 2008).
Redbird, the protagonist in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, takes this same journey across time and place in order to become fully actualized. Harjo describes Redbird as “a native woman, Mvskoke, somewhere in her later twenties, thirties, forties, or fifties” (2007, 2), making Redbird an everywoman of sorts and drawing on an allegorical approach to storytelling. This reinforces the idea of our connectedness to each other across time and space that Harjo establishes at the beginning of the play with her decision to portray all of the characters.
Harjo places the song “Rabbit Is Up to Tricks” at the beginning of her play, and this cautionary tale forewarns of unchecked selfishness and greed: “In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone until somebody got out of line” (2007, 4). That someone is Rabbit, who was bored; clay man is Rabbit’s creation. Rabbit entertains himself by teaching clay man to steal things, cultivating greed and selfishness in this newly formed companion. Harjo describes clay man as insatiable, a man who wanted “all the wives,” “all the gold.” She leaps from one greedy man and implicates us all when she writes, “Soon it was countries, and then it was trade. The wanting infected the earth.” Clay man’s greed is our greed, the very greed that drives our capitalist society. Linking back to a sense of community, Harjo writes that we have been conditioned to “forget our songs, our stories.” She concludes, “We could no longer see or hear our ancestors, or talk with each other across the kitchen table” (2007, 5).
Joy Harjo and Larry Mitchell. Production still from Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, March 2009. Photo by Silvia Mautner.
Joy Harjo, “It was at this kitchen table I was forbidden to sing when I was fourteen.” Production still from Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, March 2009. Photo by Silvia Mautner.
Joy Harjo, “I hid under the table.” Production still from Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, March 2009. Photo by Silvia Mautner.
Joy Harjo, “We saw Monahwee far away on a horse.” Production still from Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, March 2009. Photo by Silvia Mautner.
Joy Harjo (with Larry Mitchell): “I present Redbird Monahwee.” Production still from Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, March 2009. Photo by Silvia Mautner.
Joy Harjo and Larry Mitchell at the end of the play. Production still from Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, March 2009. Photo by Silvia Mautner.
Institute of American Indian Arts Art Department Faculty, circa 1966: Ralph Pardington (back row); Leo Bushman, James McGrath, Louis Ballard (second row from top, left to right); Seymour Tubis, Neil Parsons, Rolland Meinholtz, Lloyd New, Kay Weist, Terry Allen, Allan Houser, Fritz Scholder, Michael McCormick (middle row, left to right); Otellie Loloma, Terence Shubert, Josephine Wapp (front row, left to right). Photo courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM.
Rolland Meinholtz, Joy Harjo, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (left to right). Photo taken at the Public Theater, 2007.
From Deep Roots, Tall Cedar, Institute of American Indian Arts, theater performance 1, 1968: Joy Harjo and Jane Lind (left, behind screen); Keith Conway (kneeling in front); Phillip Wilmon (right, behind screen). Photo Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board.
From Deep Roots, Tall Cedar, Institute of American Indian Arts, theater performance 2, 1968. Far left, seated: Phillip Wilmon; center, back, seated: Tom Adams; right, standing: Keith Conway; far right, seated: Cordell Morsette. Photo Courtesy of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board.
We quickly move to the present time and learn that Redbird feels lost and angry. We learn that her stepfather, whom she calls “the keeper,” has forbidden her to sing in her home. She sits with Spirit Helper at the kitchen table, where she is instructed to go back to the beginning of her story: the time of her birth and the struggles she and her mother had in that process. Redbird didn’t want to be “spit onto the red earth of Oklahoma” where “there were no songs to assist the birth” (2007, 8). Her people were already lost before her birth, so it stands to reason that she would be lost, too. Redbird was born to two broken parents. Her trauma begins before her birth. It follows her through her young adult life; it moves with her from the domestic sphere into the colonial space of the Indian boarding school, and then into the bar where she meets her future husband Sonny. In fact, the legacy of the trauma of imperialism reaches across multiple generations and carries violent events through time. In Scene 14, Redbird finds her voice and sets out on her own path, free from home and school. She says, “This is my time. And, Time lifted up its glorious beaded head and I latched on, and I began to fly” (23).
The plot takes another turn as Redbird creates her own domestic space. Scene 16 begins in a “light bright day” with Redbird’s declaration, “I was happy as I made a home around the kitchen table in Sonny’s world, up here in the stars” (2007, 24). She describes the world as Sonny’s, so the reader/audience is not totally surprised when things take a turn for the worse for Redbird in his domain. In highly metaphoric language, Harjo depicts a bond between the women who free themselves from Sonny. She writes this woman, who is Sonny’s lover, as a tree who is saddened to be bound by her roots. Redbird, at first jealous of the tree and resentful of Sonny’s affections toward the tree, becomes attracted to her songs. Redbird says, “I was lonely. Her voice was sweet” (25). The two women are able to leave when Redbird pulls the tree out by her roots. It is the women’s bond to each other that allows them to literally seize their freedom together.
This action sends Redbird singing into a free fall where she meets the soul of her living mother in the spirit realm, and where she makes peace with the death of her father. While Redbird’s relationship with her mother remains unreconciled, Spirit Helper guides her to her grandmother. The Creek prayer/song that was a part of the invocation at the beginning of the play returns as a reprise and serves to bind Redbird to her grandmother: “Do not get tired. Don’t be discouraged. Be determined, to all come in. We will go to the highest place. We will go together” (2007, 30).
And then, we move full circle. The play opened with a call for prayers for Redbird, who was in “a delicate and vulnerable state” (2007, 3). It closes with Spirit Helper telling Redbird that she has all she needs for healing. It is all at her kitchen table, and the table is within her. Like the CD Winding through the Milky Way, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light ends with the song “Goin’ Home.” Redbird’s journey toward healing leads her home with a sense of responsibility to share with others in a traditional giveaway. Redbird’s individual wellness is directly connected to the wellness and well-being of her family and her community. The principle of social responsibility is embedded in the cultural practice of the giveaway, where one acknowledges the blessing of his or her bounty by sharing it with others. In the play, Redbird’s gift is her voice, and once she secures it, she is able to give back to her loved ones. This play also functions as a giveaway, as Harjo’s bountiful gift is her storytelling, and she shares her bounty willingly and generously with the reader/audience. Shelley Scott writes that through “witnessing their performances, embodied healing can be shared by the audience and wider community” (Wilmer, 135). Redbird’s strength and stability become models for the readers or audience members who face similar struggles.
Shari Huhndorf, professor of ethnic studies and Native American studies at the University of California–Berkeley, published Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture in 2009. This book offers a pointed critique of cultural nationalism, asserts a lens of indigenous feminism through which we can study culture and politics, and demonstrates the transnational nature of indigenous peoples. In her coda titled “Border Crossings,” Huhndorf examines Shelley Niro’s artwork, specifically the 1997 mixed-media installation The Border, to drive home her central argument that “the tribal and the transnational are inseparable” and that this concept “foregrounds new critical questions” regarding “Native cultural practices” (177).
Huhndorf expertly describes contemporary Native theater and performance as the site where artists depict the urban locale as “a key center of indigenous experience.” She notes that the “return to tribal communities is a major theme in the Native literary renaissance period” (114) and that “movements from tribal home to urban center find a place, however neglected, in Native literary production, including theater” (115). She also notes that this is “not yet a sustained area of literary scholarship” (115). While there is a rich and growing body of literary work worthy of study, few scholars have taken up the task of thinking and writing about it. Native Traces: Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History, edited by Birgit Däwes, and Native American Performance and Representation, edited by S. E. Wilmer, are two recent books that focus on contemporary Native American performance and provide important historical context and analysis, while Christy Stanlake’s 2009 book Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective provides dramaturgical insights, paying special attention to nine contemporary Native American plays. Lastly, editors Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, Kelli Lyon Johnson, and William A. Wortman published Performing Worlds into Being, using performances and papers presented at “Honoring Spiderwoman Theater/Celebrating Native American Theater,” convened by the Native American Women Playwrights Archive and Miami University (Ohio) in February 2007. This book rightfully places Spiderwoman Theater as a beacon of innovation in Native American theater. Scholars Ann Haugo, associate professor of theater at Illinois State University, and Jaye T. Darby, co-founder and co-director with Hanay Geiogamah of Project HOOP (Honoring Our Origins and People through Native Theater) at UCLA, have each written important essays that outline the details of the Native American cultural renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. There is an ongoing need for the documentation and analysis of contemporary Native American theater.
Haugo, in her chapter titled “Native American Drama: A Historical Survey” in Native Traces, provides a comprehensive survey of Native theater and marks the beginning of the contemporary Native theater movement with the founding of three important companies: Native American Theater Ensemble by Hanay Geiogamah in 1972 at La MaMa Experimental Theater in New York; Red Earth Performing Arts in Seattle in 1974; and Spiderwoman Theater, composed of Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel, and Lisa Mayo in 1975, also in New York. In Haugo’s chronicle, the arc of contemporary Native cultural production has its roots in the literary boom of the late 1960s. She notes that this can be marked by the publication of the novel The House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday in 1968, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Additional significant works of that time include Custer Died for Your Sins by Vine Deloria Jr. in 1969, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood in 1974, the poetry collections Going for the Rain in 1976 and A Good Journey in 1977 by Simon Ortiz, and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko in 1979. It was at this time that Harjo began writing poetry in response to the Native Rights organizing and the creative expression that was blossoming. This decade, according to Haugo, “marks a moment when Native theater artists began to have a greater degree of control over their own work by running companies, writing plays and directing productions” (43).
Of equal importance, this time period also saw the rise of the American Indian Movement across the United States. Jaye T. Darby begins her chapter “People with Strong Hearts: Staging Communitism in Hanay Geiogamah’s Plays Body Indian and 49” in Native American Performance and Representation with a succinct description of the inciting incidents of the Red Power movement. The artists, activists, and intellectuals of this movement did not separate their livelihood, their art, their culture, or their politics into distinct categories, much like the well-documented sisterhood of the Black Power and Black Arts movements; the relationships between organizers of the Brown Power movement, the United Farm Workers and Teatro Campesino; and the Young Lords political organizing efforts and the Nuyorican Arts movement. Darby writes that the goals of the Red Power movement were “sovereignty and cultural autonomy” (164). In her analysis of Body Indian and 49, Darby illustrates the presence of these goals in each of the protagonists’ journeys. The same can be said of Harjo’s Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light and her character Redbird’s path to healing and wholeness. Redbird’s recovery exemplifies what bell hooks calls the “love ethic” that is necessary in the struggle for liberation. In her essay “Love as a Practice of Freedom,” hooks writes that it is by “beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good” (247).
Harjo’s performance text Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is also an assertion of indigenous feminism that specifically explores issues of gender and sexuality. With this text, Harjo joins the theatrical continuum that Shari Huhndorf establishes in her chapter titled “Indigenous Feminism, Performance and Memory” (2009, 105–39). Huhndorf’s book includes the early and ongoing work of Spiderwoman Theater alongside plays by Monica Mojica and Marie Clements. Again, Ann Haugo has completed in-depth work with her chapter “‘Circles upon Circles upon Circles’: Native Women in Theater and Performance,” published in Geiogamah and Darby’s American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader. Taken together, the performance texts of these women articulate concepts of indigenous women that address questions of sovereignty as intertwined with gender equity. In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, and Culture, Huhndorf and Cheryl Suzack describe expressions of indigenous feminism and cite human rights activist Elsie B. Redbird, who says, “If the erosion of sovereignty comes from disempowering women, its renewed strength will come from re-empowering them” (6).
Harjo depicts a chaotic world for Redbird to navigate. On her journey, her early encounters with her father are bittersweet, and then he leaves the family. Redbird recounts stories of her “great-great-grandfather,” who was the best horse trader and who knew how to bend time (2007, 9). These stories move quickly from nostalgia to trauma as her father states, “The only race I have is outrunning the Whiteman” (9). He asks for another beer, and later in the scene, things take a violent turn. Harjo writes, “He kept swinging. I got away. I hid under the table” (11). The men in her life, namely the keeper (the man who replaces her father in her mother’s home) and Redbird’s first husband, continue to perpetuate violence throughout the play. Using Huhndorf’s analysis, these men colonize the domestic space of the home. This oppression on an intimate level mirrors the larger systemic violence enacted on Native American people. In fact, throughout the play, Redbird moves from one colonial space to another as she moves from her childhood home to the Indian boarding school and then to her home “in the stars” with Sonny, where they start a family (24). None of these colonized domestic spaces suffice, and Redbird remains unsettled until she recognizes that her sense of freedom must come from within. Redbird’s journey is one toward self-determination on an individual level, a spiritual level, and a communal level.
Harjo connects Redbird’s journey toward freedom to her sexuality. In Scene 10, Redbird experiences sexual trauma at the hands of the keeper. At the beginning of Scene 11, Redbird states, “I don’t remember anything after that … I lost the ability to fly. I disappeared” (2007, 16). The scene then abruptly jumps to Redbird’s departure to boarding school. While violence and sexual aggression are enacted by some of the men in this play, it is a misreading to blame all of the men for Redbird’s struggles. On a visit home from boarding school, Redbird attempts to see her mother, and the keeper prevents her from doing so. With a mixture of anger and agonizing compassion, Redbird states plainly, “We were all trapped, even the keeper” (20). Again, the larger context of imperial violence permeates the home and poisons intimate relationships. The public and the private realm are more connected than not.
While Harjo is linked to the tradition of indigenous feminist women artists such as Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel, and Lisa Mayo of Spiderwoman Theater, as well as Monica Mojica, Victoria Nalani Knuebuhl, and Cherríe Moraga, she is also linked aesthetically to a community of artists who work with jazz aesthetics and performance. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones has documented this type of work as it was practiced in the Austin Project at the University of Texas–Austin from 2002 to 2007. The resulting book, Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project, is a useful pedagogical tool and an archive of creative writing and reflection by workshop leaders and participants. Osun describes the jazz aesthetic as being forged from “fierce individuality, communal responsiveness, and play, play, play” (360). Through a series of workshops, the participants learned how “to be in the present, truly feel what [they] are feeling, to be honest about what [they] know of [themselves] and the world” (357). According to Osun, the key elements of this aesthetic are “choral work, repetition, layered music, and polyphony.” Lastly, these elements come about through the choral work because of “studious listening” (362). Through Osun’s description, it is clear that the values of jazz the musical form are embedded in the theatrical form. Namely, the jazz aesthetic in theater means connection to a higher power and freedom. This notion comes directly from the basic tenets of musical jazz. In his essay “Black Music and Social Change,” in Such Sweet Thunder: Views on Black American Music, Playthell Benjamin asserts, “African American instrumental music became a living example of the American ideal of freedom and equality. The jazz band might well be the only society in the world where these ideals are fully realized” (12). Harjo’s mode of expression in Wings Of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light aligns with these descriptors of individuality, community, and creativity. Redbird’s journey is directly linked to finding her voice. Redbird’s story begins when there are no songs to help her transition through her birth. Her parents have lost their traditional knowledge, which is emblematic of the losses that have plagued many indigenous people since colonialism and continues to do so as colonialist practices persist in the United States. Even though her mother didn’t have “cedar or tobacco” (Harjo 2007, 7) at that time, later she passes a pouch of tobacco to Redbird as the young woman leaves for Indian boarding school. Her mother gives her “tobacco and a song,” and tells her, “There is power in this song. You have to sing to wake the power up” (16).
Eventually, Redbird finds her voice. She steps up and makes a striking entrance on the night of the “first official Howling Contest,” dreamed up by her friend Wind, “who always joked that she was raised by wolves” (2007, 20). Wind commands Redbird, “Let’s hear the poetry of howl” (21), but before Redbird can let out her holler, the evening is interrupted by a fistfight. After a long night that includes meeting Sonny, who will become her husband later in the play, Redbird lets out her howl at a diner in the early morning. The scene ends when Redbird asserts, “This is my time.” She recalls, “Time lifted up its glorious beaded head and I latched on, and I began to fly” (23). Over the course of this scene, she and her friends each howl, speaking themselves powerfully into existence. Indeed, Redbird’s howling/singing wakes up the power within. Through the example of their journeys in this play, other women may find their voices, too. The characters in this play exemplify freedom and expression, and their actions are emblems of personal and social transformation.
Connecting to the jazz aesthetic in a more direct way, we can turn our attention to Harjo’s seamless integration of music into her text. In fact, during a radio interview that I conducted at the WMUA-FM studio (University of Massachusetts–Amherst) with Professor Ron Welburn, Department of English, Harjo described Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light as “a healing ceremony of stories and music.” Throughout the twenty scenes of the play, she includes story songs that serve as cautionary tales; traditional songs sung in Creek; and songs that underscore the emotional tones in various scenes. There are lullabies and jazz riffs in some scenes; rock and funk grooves in others. This pastiche makes complete sense because Harjo innately understands the connections to poetry and music. In the same interview, she stated, “The poetry of our people has always included music. Sometimes I think poetry feels really lonely without the music.”
Harjo is a musician and a poet who says, “I have always heard music with my poetry” (Harjo and Welburn, interview). An award-winning saxophonist, she recorded her rendition of Jim Pepper’s “Wichi Tai To” on her NAMMY award winning CD Winding through the Milky Way as her tribute to him. She also includes this song in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. According to The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, Pepper’s song is a “jauntily haunting theme reflecting his Native American roots” (Cook and Morten, 1183). Pepper, a jazz saxophonist of Kaw and Creek heritage (1941–1992), “based some of his pieces on traditional stomp dances, as well as on Native versions of Baptist hymns, in addition to the ritual chants of his grandfather” (Siegel). He recorded “Wichi Tai To” on the album Everything Is Everything in 1969 and on Pepper’s Pow Wow. Harjo’s inclusion of Jim Pepper’s music is an important declaration of a much deeper and long-standing connection between jazz and traditional Native music. Professor Ron Welburn states,
There is a whole galaxy of Native people who have been performing in this music. It’s taken for granted that Indian people are not involved in jazz, rock and roll, or various other forms of popular music. (Harjo and Welburn, interview)
At that time, Harjo described her dismay at the striking erasure of Native people’s contributions to jazz. She recalled a (then) recent talk by Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center in New York, stating, “He completely left out Indian people when he discussed jazz history.” She and Welburn then (re)constructed some of this history as they discussed musicians such as Big Chief Russell Moore (1912–1983), who was Pima from Arizona; Oscar Pettiford (1922–1960), born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, whose mother was Choctaw and father was Cherokee and African American; and Cecil McBee (1935–), Cherokee from Tulsa, Oklahoma. As they reflected on these huge gaps in jazz history that erase the contributions of Native people, Harjo asserted,
There is a lot of opposition on both sides to consider Indians’ contributions to jazz. This notion would require an entire revision of jazz history. Congo Square was an old ceremonial ground and a southeastern tribal meeting space. American music has become so sanitized; the wealth of stories has been left out. (Harjo and Welburn, interview)
Harjo is as much connected to a jazz lineage as she is connected to poetry. In our conversation, she shared that Ernie Fields (1905–1997; trombonist, pianist, and bandleader) took one of her mother’s songs and recorded it as an instrumental piece. Harjo described the lasting impression that the image of her mother holding onto the pressing of that recording had on her younger self. In Crazy Brave, Harjo’s memoir, she describes a scene where she stands perched in the back seat of the family car, her father at the helm and Miles Davis playing on the radio. She writes,
My rite of passage into the world of humanity occurred then through jazz. The music was a startling bridge between familiar and strange lands. I heard stomp dance shells singing. I saw suits, satin fine hats. I heard workers singing in the fields. It was a way to speak beyond the confines of ordinary language. I can still hear it. (18)
In our conversation, Harjo shared that the first time she combined music and poetry for the 1985 Watershed Records recording Furious Light. Shortly after that, she began playing the saxophone. “Someone showed me the G Blues and I started going from there” (Harjo and Welburn, interview). Four CDs later, she is still playing and making visible the connections she felt as a young girl listening to Miles Davis in Indian country.
It is no accident, then, that Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light blends storytelling and music as they have always been intertwined for Harjo. Through her character Redbird, we see a young Muscogee woman reclaim her voice, her sense of self, and her sense of purpose as she reconnects to her family through her grandmother’s spirit. Redbird understands her value and her responsibility to her wider community. This play is a reminder to all of us to choose kindness and compassion over fear, greed, and jealousy. When we do so, we find abundance in all that comes our way.
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