Joy Harjo

native survivance” and that “survivance is an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry” (11). An example of a piece of writing that fits into a long legacy of a literacy of struggle is from Joy Harjo: “This poetry made roots from the…

The articles that I will be comparing and contrasting will be Young Women’s Eggs: Elite and Ordinary written by Elizabeth Reis in the 2011 and Three Generations of Native American Women’s Birth Experience written by Joy Harjo in 1991. The articles each have their different ways of approaching their topic but both speak of women and reproduction. The article Young Women’s Eggs: Elite and Ordinary speaks about how the author investigates the egg "donation" industry. She explains how there is ads…

On Wednesday, October 5, 2016 at 8:00 pm, I have attended a performance by Joy Harjo and her friends Mitch Taylor who played the guitar, Dave Copenhaver who played the bass guitar, and Smiling’ Vic Gutierrez who played the drums and vocals. I had specifically chose this performance to do my report on because I wanted to feel what actual Native American music would be like in concert as opposed to what we naturally think of when it comes to Native American music. For me, that would include heavy…

no health care, no food nor education.” The banality of Settler violence inflicted upon Indigenous bodies leaves them bloodied and broken, lost in the whirlwind of violence that arises from ontological genocide. Although, we remain and, we, as Joy Harjo…

Louis opens Ceremonies of the Damned’s first section “Petroglyphs of Serena” with a quote from Nietzsche stating, “Poets behave impudently towards their experiences: they exploit them” (3). The decision to open the first section of the collection with this quote indicates to the reader that Louis possesses a level of self-awareness about the content of the novel. Invoking the role of the poet directly links Louis to the experiences within the text. The idea of exploitation signals to the reader…

Scholarship on Joy Harjo’s poetry, for example, indicates that emotions can be transformed and that they can serve as transforming agents. Harjo explicitly seeks the transformation of emotion, commenting, "I hope that on some level [my poems] can transform hatred into love. Maybe that’s being too idealistic; but I know that language…