Some Thoughts For the New Year

Some thoughts for the New Year:

--Yesterday, the last day of 2009, went out early in the canoe into Maunalua Bay into waters agitated by the full blue moon. We paddled out toward Portlock, through tricky water swells, with the adroit skills of the steersman Monte Costa. This is what I miss when I'm back in New Mexico and Oklahoma; being water and canoe, moivng through the human field with my water mind.
--Geological time is much like Indian time. In such a wide-angle view of time, colonization has already happened. It was a failed experiment. It was a blip in real time, a tough lesson in the human storyline for everyone involved.
--We humans are small marks in time. It’s the ancestral field that makes a discernable design. Just ask the artists, the visionaries, and others who travel out into the memory field. Ask those who have maintained a tradition of taking care, and paying attention.
--It is difficult to proceed with dignity and grace when you have lost yourself and your children to a prevailing story that doesn’t include you. We are almost never visible in the story. We are almost never on television, in the movies, heard on the radio, seen on the Internet, or visible anywhere, except as powwow dancers, warriors on horseback, shy Indian princesses, or constructed of other images emerging from a past constructed by Hollywood or anthropologists.
--The worst part is that we often believe these images.
--The newest Hollywood attempt, Avatar, despite the 3-D effects and millions of dollars worth of techie shine is the same shameless “wannabe” story as the blockbuster, “Dances With Wolves”. The non-native protagonist literally inhabits an indigenous body as a spy on their naturalistic society, and becomes more native than the natives, winning the girl, all bravery contests, and then returns to lead them out of a holocaustic fire of colonial destruction.


Joy Harjo

Posted on her site Poetic Adventures In The Lost World Blog