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Joy Harjo

Birth : 1951-05-09, Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States

History

Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the U.S., is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). She is only the second poet to be appointed a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she left home to attend high school at the innovative Institute of American Indian Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. Harjo began writing poetry as a member of the University of New Mexico’s Native student organization, the Kiva Club, in response to Native empowerment movements. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teach English, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at University of California-Los Angeles, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, Arizona State, University of Illinois, University of Colorado, University of Hawai’i, Institute of American Indian Arts, and University of Tennessee, while performing music and poetry nationally and internationally.

Movies

Herself

Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo follows Native artists for a year as they navigate their careers in the US and abroad. The film explores the immense complexities each artist faces concerning their own identity as Native artists, as well as pushing further Native art into a post-colonial world.

Games of the North

Games of the North

Narrator

For thousands of years, traditional Inuit sports have been vital for survival within the unforgiving Arctic. Acrobatic and explosive, these ancestral games evolved to strengthen mind, body and spirit within the community. Following four modern Inuit athletes reveals their unique relationship to the games as they compete across the North. As unprecedented change sweeps across their traditional lands, their stories illuminate the importance of the games today.

A Thousand Roads

A Thousand Roads

Screenplay

The film threads together four stories, taking us into the life of a stressed-out Mohawk stockbroker in Manhattan; a young Inupiat girl sent to live with her grandmother in Barrow, Alaska; a Navajo gang member who must find his core values in his reservation on the mesas of New Mexico; and a Quechua healer in Peru, attempting to save a sick child. Each story explores what it means to belong to a specific community. A Thousand Roads is a fictional work, produced by National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) to explore the human context of the NMAI’s collections. The film is striking visually, and presents through its beauty and its stories an imaginative entry into knowing about Native people living in the vast indigenous geography that comprises the Americas. Rather than presenting a conventional historical perspective, the film is composed of short contemporary fictions about individuals, grounding them in emotional truths to which an audience can easily relate.

Pepper's Pow Wow

Pepper's Pow Wow

Self

A look at the life of Native American jazz saxophone pioneer Jim Pepper, the first widely recognized musician to fuse Native American music with jazz.