Readers and writers blog

I’ve been traveling through territory that is — and I’m ashamed to have to say it — strange to most of us. And that is American Indian territory.

The reason it remains so strange to most of us is that the real Indian territory is still obscured by stereotypes that refuse to go away. They always surface at Thanksgiving, despite efforts by native Americans to disabuse us of them, and they still haunt movies and other products of mainstream American culture.

So a visit is in order to Joy Harjo’s Web Log, the latest addition to our blogroll.

Harjo’s blog, which dates back to July 2003, is a voluminous collection of writings about native Americans, much of it by her — all of it well written — and some from other sources that she has found or who contributed it themselves. Some of it is familiar to most of us, much of it is not. And some of it is, well, just strange.

Harjo is a poet, visual and performance artist, musician, professor, Oklahoma native and member of the Muscogee, also known as Creek, tribe. Primarily, she is a poet, and she writes like one. For example, her Sept. 28, 2005, entry:

. . . I knew the owls to the right of the car Saturday night, as we drove down after the film showing from Tucson to Patagonia, were a message, a warning. I felt death. Then, almost immediately after, a bright light fell straight to the earth in front of us. It was not the elegant arc of a star or heavenly body following a circular trajectory. It was sure fall.

. . . Yesterday the fulfillment of the prophecy came in the sudden death of a relatively young Creek cousin who grew up in Okemah but lived in the Sacramento area most of her life. Her life made a rough path. Her last stint in prison, for something stupid and not worthy of a prison term: drugs and the need for vision in her painful world — she’d emerged with a resolve to be transformed . . . Strange how life is, or should I say strange how death is — it was her mother who was in the hospital struggling for healing. It was her daughter who left first.

The sky also is prominent in one of Harjo’s more strange entries — strange not because of the Hopi belief that we’re now in the fourth world and that a comet may presage the fifth, but because it links to a weblog called Predicto, a potpourri of strangeness itself. (By the way, the original link to the comet is now missing from Predicto.)

But Harjo is open to the world’s strange elements, and her weblog encourages the rest of us to open ourselves as well. A caveat: If you’re as uninformed as I am about native American culture — the real culture(s) — you’ll be spending a lot of time in dictionaries, encyclopedias and other resources.

Just sorting out the American Indian tribes and nations is daunting. And reading census material on the nearly 2 million native Americans can be depressing. For example, while poverty among some Indian groups is close to the national average of 12 percent, a more realistic figure among larger tribal populations ranges from 15 to more than 50 percent.

Like all groups, American Indians are a diverse lot. And like Harjo, many are of mixed heritage (she is half Muscogee but a full member of the tribe). Searching the blogosphere, I came up with some other interesting sites:

• A Girl Named Turquoise, a charming weblog written by Tiffany Midge, a Hunkpapa Sioux poet who also claims German heritage.

• chimEra/saaniidotcom, written by Zoey, a Navajo poet in New Mexico.

• RezBlog, written by a young woman who lives on a Coeur D’Alene reservation in the Northwest, or, as she puts it, “somewhere on the rez.”

For a more complete list of native American writers, visit Native Wiki.

Funny, all the sites I listed are written by women. Well, maybe it’s got something to do with Mother Earth. Maybe that sounds stupid, but I don’t know.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE: In case you didn’t click on the comet link, it’s to an entry about and a picture (shown above) of Comet Holmes, which appears blue and could be interpreted as the blue star that the Hopis believe will be the kachina or life-bringer leading to a fifth and better world.