“Making Songs of the Marrow”: Joy Harjo’s Music and Traditional Knowledge (original) (raw)
Related papers
Tears of the Collective: Healing Historical Trauma through Community Arts
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 2019
In this paper, I advocate that culture matters in music education and should be a measure we consider when we assess the quality of music-making in the community. Community arts education can address a multitude of social issues that impact marginalized communities if viewed through an appropriate lens. I propose historical trauma as an appropriate lens for a (post)colonial context. It provides a framework for disrupting music education practices in university music programs and reconsidering the competencies that need to be emphasized when training conservatory educated performers to be community music facilitators. This text is a story, written in the style of a genealogical narrative (whakapapa kōrero). It moves through a specific body of experiences, interconnected stories, contexts and emotions, a process identified by indigenous social work researchers as a culturally appropriate healing intervention for indigenous communities. If you are looking for a bullet-pointed exposition of suitable procedures to employ in your work, you are missing the point. In the past we indigenous academics have made it very easy for other academics and researchers to access our knowledge, but to appreciate the new knowing offered in this text you will have to work a little harder. You will need to shift your cultural paradigm and any academic bias to a world where you are not given direct answers, but rather you are encouraged to listen (and with the audio examples provided I mean that literally), reflect, become aware of your physical reactions, open yourself to the spiritual dimension and consider how these words and sounds may impact your future thinking. Most importantly, I hope this chapter will allow you to understand and share the un-mourned grief of the indigenous people in your (s)p(l)ace.
Sounds from the heart : Native American language and song
2011
Our world is witnessing the rapid extinction of indigenous cultures through colonization. This thesis is presented not to amplify decolonization but to honor the value and meaning of the oral society and its indigenous peoples through their culture's traditional and necessary components of language and song. The basis of this thesis pertains to the author's tribal relatives, the Coast Miwok original people of California known as Tamal Michchawmu which literally translates as the People of the West Coast. The author chooses to use this work as an advocacy for the worldview of indigenous peoples, particularly to matriarchal societies in which the Tamal Michchawmu are included. In this thesis, stories and interviews with scholars and with Native Americans studying their language and singing their songs as well as the author's personal experiences are included as support to the theory that language and song are formed from the foundation of a philosophy that is grounded within a peoples relationship with the land. My thesis question is: If this worldview is resurrected, how can it contribute to its indigenous people in a modern society?
Reconstructing Harjo's Native Womanhood through Indigenous Confessions
2024
This research paper presents an in-depth analysis of Joy Harjo's poetry through the lens of political confessionalism, exploring the intersection of personal identity and tribal sovereignty. Harjo, a Muskogee poet, utilizes her work to bridge the gap between Native American and mainstream cultures, particularly focusing on the Creek nation's challenges and triumphs. The research paper delves into Harjo's role as a literary artist who employs her writing to address 2 affirms her role in shaping the narrative of Native American women and the broader discourse on sovereignty, civil rights, and cultural identity.
Over the last ten years or so a group of mixed-race Cape Town jazz musicians, through the music they compose and perform, started making claims to an identity more frequently associated with the indigenous peoples of South Africa. The identity in question, a Khoisan identity, refers to the two original peoples of the Western Cape [the Khoi and the San] and often concerns discussions that include terms such as “primitive”, “first people”, “iron age”, and the recovery of land, language and culture. Thus their [the musician’s] Khoisan claim is intriguing. In this paper I will discuss Khoisan identity and outline a short history of the initial people of the Cape. I will illustrate various colonial views of the Khoisan, including notions of “primitiv-ism” and “the wild men of Africa”; constructed according to ideas that originated during the Enlightenment (Hudson, 1999). The aggregate result of Dutch and British colonialism, creolisa-tion, apartheid, the cosmopolitan mix of peoples found in a harbour city such as the Cape of Good Hope and various nineteenth century sciences, including social Darwinism and physical anthropology, led to major difficulties in identity construction for many people. My aim is to draw attention to the newly emergent Khoisan identity, and demonstrate how, in the after-math of apartheid, one of Cape Town’s jazz musicians are reclaiming himself and his human dignity through the use and placement of real and imagined Khoisan compositional materials in his newly composed pieces.
Poems as Stories and Memories: Joy Harjo’s Narrative Poetry
The Rainbow of American Poetry: Proceedings of the 18th International Colloquium of American Studies , 2014
Joy Harjo (b. 1951) is a Native American poet and musician. She identifies herself as belonging to the Muscogee/Creek nation and stresses that her family members are also related to the Cherokee nation. In 2002, she received a PEN/Open Book (known as the Beyond Margins Award through 2009) for her book A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales. From the first poem in this collection, she makes clear that the word “story” is central to her view of poetry. More specifically, many of her narrative poems read like stories about various moments of her life or reflect on the tradition of storytelling and ritual in Native American communities. Consequently, a related feature of Harjo’s poetry is an interest in the past. While she occasionally reminds her audience of the violence committed against Native Americans throughout history, she sees remembering the past primarily as a source of one’s identity and power, for example by emphasizing that the members of her nation would start to introduce themselves by explaining who their ancestors were. Thus, in my paper, I examine the ways in which Harjo’s poetry illustrates the author’s concepts of story and memory.
Earth song as storywork : reclaiming Indigenous knowledges
2015
Is it possible for Indigenous ways of knowing, which draw on earth song and storywork, to find a place within the academy? Indigenous peoples recognise that the earth has a song, which we can listen to as story. In return, we can sing our story to the world and of the world. In this paper, the authors explore their own stories and songs. They explain the ways that listening to the earth’s song and working with stories can inform their work in the academy – as teachers who support younglings to hear their voices and develop their own songs, and as the writers and tellers of curriculum. The authors ask whether it is possible for Indigenous academics to combine their academic work with Indigenous ways of knowing. They argue that, not only is the combination possible, it can be used to create a harmonious voice that will help them to reclaim their power as Indigenous academic women.
2019
This research illuminates adaptive and innovative interpretations of traditional music developed to maintain a voice in an ever-shifting and increasingly globalized society. Consideration has been given for methods which individuals utilize in navigating their sense of self through continuous negotiation with the larger community. There is an analysis and comparison of traditional and contemporary expressions of gender as it intersects with other identities such as Indigeneity and sexuality with consideration for cultural and historical contexts. In the endeavor to increase awareness regarding the dynamics of privilege and oppression challenges may arise in the process of orienting oneself in such a complex social matrix. Examining ways of personalizing these processes and experiences then expanding outward to the macro scale has great potential.
Wounded Spirit's Chant: PTSD and Native American Experience
As an autonomous clinical entity approved in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder has been a determining factor in considering the relevance of certain psychiatric symptoms in Native American women who have been sexually assaulted or kidnapped on reservations and nearby the frontiers between indigenous lands and federal territory (Uniting 2024). Native American culture, heir to an intergenerational trauma dating back to the colonial settlement, not least the tragedy of the Trial of Tears between 1830 and 1850, is witness to the fact that, in Begay and Zandamela’s words, “one in three Native American women report being raped during their lifetime at a rate 2.5 higher than other groups” (2018). In this light, this paper’s main aim is to track possible symptoms of PTSD as stipulated by Loerzel (2020) and Kwok et al. (2022) in the testimonies of women who meet this description. Moreover, we will analyse the possible implications of this psychic shock in Native American poetry, taking the example of Louise Erdrich’s Jacklight (1984). In this book of poems, as throughout Erdrich’s narrative work, the female characters, of Chippewa ancestry, are traversed by the collective trauma of their community and the personal trauma of being victims of sexual abuse, thus responding to the typical symptomatology of PTSD. Furthermore, we will draw on online resources sponsored by indigenous rights platforms such as Native Alliance Against Violence (2024), which promotes activities where poetry acts as a vehicle for women who have experienced these types of violence to offer their testimony and help build community for healing.