with Joy Harjo

Krista Tippett: Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States.

She grew up in the state I grew up in, Oklahoma, but we might as well have grown up in parallel universes. Part of the rupture of our time, for many of us, is revisiting history we thought we knew, seeing in a whole new light places we thought we inhabited. That is very much true of growing up in Oklahoma. It’s very much true of me, that I have work to do — for the rest of my life — to reconcile terrible stories I did not learn or did not hear, to take in unimaginable cruelty and atrocity for which I must take some responsibility; also, to take in beauty I didn’t see.

I grew up in a town called Shawnee, not knowing who Shawnee was. Joy Harjo’s ancestors landed in Tulsa, which was at the end of the Trail of Tears. They were sent there after being forcibly removed from their homelands in the Deep South. She has composed a glorious life out of very hard beginnings. But from the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time,” w-h-o-l-e.

When she does that, she reminds me of Einstein; the way Einstein reimagined the reality of time, which is quite different from how we perceive it with our senses. Time, he reminded science, is not an arrow moving forward. It is relative, not fixed. Seen at a deep level, it’s not a compartmentalized past, present, and future. Past, present, and future are all happening, interacting with each other, all the time. And we actually know this. We experience it constantly in our thoughts and in our hearts, in our lives. But the way we structured the modern world and our daily lives hasn’t caught up with this fundamental reality. We are living in a Newtonian world of calendars and clocks and deadlines and hard stops.

Years ago, when I did a show about Einstein and spoke with another physicist about Einstein’s sense of time, he said that what Einstein really did with high physics is restore time to the heart of nature, where it had always been, in traditional cultures, in human cultures, and that is time as seasonal, cyclical, generational. This is also the sense of time in our religious traditions. It is the understanding of time in Martin Luther King Jr.’s evocation of the “long arc of the moral universe” that bends towards justice. It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn.

In this part of my interview with her that you’re going to hear, she’d been speaking of the pain and betrayal that has marked centuries of her people’s history. We were also speaking about an incredible Supreme Court decision that came down in the middle of the momentous summer of 2020. So much was going on that few of us, I think, noticed that our conservative Supreme Court of the present named and upheld the promise that was made to her tribe and others. This was a source of incredible joy, and possibility, and celebration for her and her community. And she was telling me, though, that immediately, forces began to rally to undo this undoing of a wrong.

So I asked her about something she wrote in The New York Times after that Supreme Court decision in the middle of 2020. She said that her elders always believed that there would be justice — “Though justice is sometimes seven generations away or even more, it is inevitable.” And I asked her if that is real to her still, even in the face of this most recent despair that she had been describing. How can she continue to hold those things together?

Joy Harjo: I have grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and children, and in the original teachings, we’re told that they’re all our children. I have to think of them, and they’re the rudder of hope. That’s where we’re going: with them. I have to know that there is a larger, beautiful sense. I think even — all the teachings, ultimately, wind up — the stories, everything — wind up at a point of harmony. And when you wind up at that point, everything will be reckoned with.

Tippett: I feel like you have this sense of different kinds of time. So there’s history, there’s the time of European settlement, there’s a lifetime, and there’s also — somewhere — I don’t know where this is — you write about “the whole of time,” w-h-o-l-e, which makes that perspective possible.

Harjo: I think so. A human mind tends to be pretty literal, even as it can jump around, but it’s not — it doesn’t necessarily have the access to other kinds of time. You can think about it and analyze it and make structures and architecture to hold the ideas of other kinds of time, but you have to — just like you wouldn’t use a certain kind of meter to measure electricity that doesn’t measure electricity, there’s another kind of perspective that you bring to understand or even move within time, that would give you that perspective.

That’s why the image, that NASA image, of the Earth, when it was released — because it was top secret for a while — that showed the Earth as a beautiful, beautiful being was so powerful because it shifted — certainly, it shifted awareness. And it gave us a perspective, which going into a larger kind of time or place can — like my grandson and I standing here watching this field that we were inside of, even as we were watching it — it gave us that glimpse into even another kind of time. Even the internet and the idea of networks can be linked to that image.

Tippett: Yeah. And the story matrix and the story field, as you describe, also, is more generous and expansive than that linear cultural imagination. It’s in sync with that idea, with that vision.

I watched this beautiful ceremony that was kind of your — or not your inauguration — but your inaugural appearance as poet laureate. Was it the National Book Festival? And I’m assuming that you were the first poet laureate to walk out onstage with her saxophone around her neck.

[laughs]

Harjo: [laughs] Yeah, I think so; I don’t think — there are actually a few poets who play saxophone, but no, I think that I’m the first one to do that. [laughs]

Tippett: There’s a — let’s see. It’s page 77 when you tell this story. This is in An American Sunrise, when Adolphe Sax patented the first saxophone on June 23. Would you read that?

Harjo: [laughs] Yes. I like that piece. And I always say thank you to Adolphe Sax that I use my poetic license and write a poem where a rabbit invents the saxophone.

Tippett: Yes. [laughs] That comes before it, but it was too long for radio.

Harjo: OK.

“When Adolfe Sax patented the first saxophone on June 23, 1846, the Creek Nation was in turmoil. The people had been moved west of the Mississippi River after the Creek Wars which culminated in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. We were putting our lives back together in new lands where we were promised we would be left alone. The saxophone made it across the big waters and was introduced in brass bands in the South. The music followed rivers into new towns, cities, all the way to our new lands. Not long after, in the early 1900s, my grandmother Naomi Harjo learned to play saxophone. I can feel her now when I play the instrument we both loved and love. The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the Earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little.”

Tippett: Our children as the “rudder of hope,” and that insistence, almost as an aside, that all children are our children. There are so many invitations here, but one of them is to get less literal, less Newtonian, in how we work with time — which is to say, to more completely enter the reality of time and space. To claim a hope that is big enough to meet them as they are. And, as Joy said, "to “fly a little” in our perspective — to believe and to insist and to live as if time and space are on the side of deep justice and human flourishing, in which we all become more whole.

Joy brings us full circle with adrienne maree brown in this notion of the imaginative power that we must summon towards the world we want to create and be part of and pass on to all of our children. It fascinates me how, just as emergence is actually a more reality-based grasp of how change happens than our faith in best-laid plans, this wilder, mysterious time is more reality-based, in fact, than a linear way with time — of clocks and schedules and deadlines. Just think about that word deadlines — it’s another use of language that Ocean would have us pay attention to. It’s an image of time doing violence with us, or us doing violence with time.

So, with Joy as our teacher, I think we’re called to practice living in the whole of time; to practice knowing in our bodies and our minds time as a more generative canvas and companion on which we carry, and confront, and inhabit, and work with the hardness — and the sacredness — of what we have before us; to reconcile on this kind of canvas who we want to be with the histories we've lived and told, and the future we desire.

I want to acknowledge here, also, personally, that when Joy Harjo speaks of “seven generations” and “the whole of time,” I know, I feel, that she feels that in her bones. It is not an abstraction. It’s not even a mystery to her in the way it lands in me as mystery. It is an existential reality, and it is part and parcel of her hope. It is part and parcel of her power. I did not interhit that feeling in my bones, from my family, from the way history was imparted to me. I think many of us in the West don’t — we became separated from that sensibility.

So in the journaling this time, I’m going to give you an image to carry around, a thought exercise that was passed on to me from my teacher, John Paul Lederach, passed on to him from his teacher, the sociologist Elise Boulding. It is called “the 200-year present.” It’s a way to cultivate a reality-based, longer sense of time and ancestry, and the possibility that comes with that.

Again, this will be in the journal, but I wanted to share quickly here how it works. First, take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember, and the oldest person you can remember holding you. Calculate back to their date of birth, their year of birth, roughly. Second, bring to mind the youngest person you have held in your arms, and the year to which they might live, which is a fascinating exercise in a century in which it is projected that the people born in the early part of this century might well, in great numbers, live for an entire century.

The span of time that you will be able to calculate from these two — from this date of birth and this projected date of death — is going to be, roughly, a 200-year present that is very tangible, a 200-year present that your life on this Earth spans, that you have literally touched and been touched by. See how this stretches your imagination, which we have explored as so powerful. See how it stretches your sense of the possibilities of the imprint and agency of your span on Earth.

It doesn't make what we stand before easier, but it absolutely makes it more spacious — and that is a great gift.