Crazy Brave: A Memoir

“Because music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands. Music can help raise a people up or call them to gather for war. The song my mother-to-be was singing will make my father love her, forever, but it will not keep him out of the arms of other women. I will find my way to earth by her voice.”

Harjo notes that music is a language from the spiritual realm. She also positions herself in the spiritual realm before her own birth and suggests that the music of her mother’s voice drew her to earth to be born. Harjo often evokes both the power of ancestral belief and personal emotion to draw the reader into her philosophical thoughts.

“Though I was reluctant to be born, I was attracted by the music. I had plans. I was entrusted with carrying voices, songs, and stories to grow and release into the world, to be of assistance and inspiration. These were my responsibility. I am not special. It is this way for everyone.”

Harjo establishes her purpose and life mission in this passage. She emphasizes its fundamentality and importance by claiming to have felt it even before birth. Knowing that such statements ring narcissistic, she notes that we all have our own purpose and story and that she is simply recounting hers.

“In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol.”

Harjo foreshadows her multiple experiences with damaged, alcoholic men. She focuses not on the tragedy of drug and alcohol addiction but rather on the underlying wounds and pain that cause such addictions. Harjo always empathetically evaluates and understands the pain, emotions, and past experiences that lead people to commit major errors.

“My mother-to-be was fire. Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires. They are looking for purpose, a place in which to create. They can be so entranced with the excitement of creation that their dreams burn up, turn to ashes.”

Harjo’s illustration of her mother is based on the metaphor of fire. Her mother is beautiful, vivacious, and purposeful. Harjo does not shy from noting her mother’s flaws, however. As fire burns everything around it, so her mother burned up her own dreams and aspirations, despite her potential. Harjo herself is part fire, and she repeats this same flaw of her mother’s for many years until the end of the story, when she realizes that she can break away from abusive men and follow her own dreams of being a poet.

“My father-to-be was of the water, and could not find a hold on the banks of earthiness. Water people can easily get lost. And they may not comprehend that they are lost. They succumb easily to the spirits of alcohol and drugs. They will always search for a vision that cannot be found on earth.”

Harjo’s father is portrayed through the metaphor of water, which is always moving and drifting and never stable. Her father’s alcoholism and womanizing make his relationship with his family unstable. Harjo describes her father as always searching for a vision that he never found, making him very much a tragic figure. As his daughter and part water, Harjo shares his tendency to drift through life searching for a clear vision of what her future should be. Only at the end of the narrative does Harjo finally find a clear vision of herself as a poet and a storyteller.

“I saw the Christian law of forthright tied-tight shoes ahead of me. I saw scratchy lace and flounce, my mother’s girding girdles, the shame of ‘down there,’ the bowed heads, and the closed doors of house or church.”

At five years old, Harjo is scolded by her mother for playing outside without a shirt. She realizes the patriarchal oppression of women through this experience, as her brother does not need a shirt. Such oppression, she realizes, is taught in church and in society. She realizes that the girdles her mother wears for parties are part of this same oppressive system, and this experience marks her first real feminist realization in the story.

“In that house I had nightmares and premonitions of evil. The first night there, with unpacked boxes surrounding me in the room I was to share with my sister, I woke up in the midst of a struggle with a dark being. I cried out for my mother. No one came.”

Harjo foreshadows the darkness and destruction that her new stepfather brings, though she is also keenly aware of the danger as a child. The dark being that she dreams of symbolizes her grief at losing her childhood home and family and the fear of her new ones. Moreover, after Harjo has presented her mother as a warm protector in Part 1, it comes as a surprise that her mother does not respond to her cries. Her stepfather has even taken her mother away from her.

“I imagine this place in the story as a long silence. It is an eternity of gray skies. It runs the length of late elementary school through adolescence.”

Harjo scarcely has anything to tell about the time when her family was beginning a new life as prisoners of her abusive stepfather. Her description here is jarring given that Harjo has written so extensively and with such fondness for her earlier childhood. This passage emphasizes how much time and joy her stepfather took from her life.

“In that small moment, I felt the presence of the sacred, a force as real and apparent as anything else in the world, present and alive, as if it were breathing. I wanted to catch hold, to remember utterly and never forget. But the current of hard reality reasserted itself. [...] So I continued on my path of forgetfulness.”

During the long, dark part of Harjo’s life living with her stepfather, the spiritual world she was once so connected to emerges only three times. This first time, she prays and revives her fish that she has stepped on. During such a dark time in her life, Harjo here describes a moment of such ecstasy as she remembers and rekindles her connection to the spiritual realm. These events show that despite her terrible circumstances, she never completely loses her connection to this realm. The reality of her stepfather drags her back into forgetfulness, however, and she loses it for another time.

“I too was looking for a vision that would lead me free of the domestic prison our home had become with my stepfather. Or rather, vision was looking for me, and I was still hiding and afraid. It carried responsibility.”

During the long part of her life living with her stepfather, Harjo is scared to reconnect with the spiritual realm. However, the spiritual world follows her, emerging at random moments. The fear that Harjo has at this time in her life dominates her to the point that she cannot even hear the stories and have the visions that were so prominent and affecting for her as a child. Here Harjo notes that the fear is also to take on the responsibility of being an artist and a storyteller, something that she recognizes is an enormous burden to bear.

“I was fire and I was confused about the fire in my body. I was told it was wrong by the church to feel desire, yet I pondered on how desire must have been created by the same god that I was told created everything in the world. Power and shame tumbled together.”

At this time in her life, when she is discovering her body and her sexual desire, Harjo continues to recognize and evaluate the oppressive society in which she lives. Her recognition of the oppression of her body and her agency to fulfill her sexual desires lead her further toward a feminist outlook. The struggle between the shame and the power of her burgeoning sexuality also creates a dynamic that leads her to have a child as a teenager, creating an even more difficult situation for her.

“The knowing was always right. It could never be disarmed. It stood watch over me. Still, I tried. I told the knowing to remember that my stepfather could be nice sometimes. [...] The knowing didn’t respond. Truth does not lower itself to small-time arguments or skirmishes.”

Harjo occasionally struggles with the knowing, instinctual side of herself and her conscious self, which tries to ignore the danger of her stepfather. The warning in her heart that she calls “the knowing” is another example of the spiritual side of herself that she has suppressed but which has not disappeared entirely. When this spiritual side of herself emerges in certain moments, it is a reminder to the reader that, despite how her stepfather has beaten down her self-esteem and confidence, there remains an inner strength that will eventually reassert itself.

“As we made art [...] we sensed that we were at the opening of an enormous indigenous cultural renaissance, poised at the edge of an explosion of ideas that would shape contemporary Indian art in the years to come. The energy crackled. It was enough to propel the lost children within us to start all over again.”

Harjo’s own internal renaissance is shared by many others at IAIA, and together their personal rebirths contribute to a broader cultural revolution. Harjo is, finally, not alone, and her personal development is shaped by collaboration with others who have a love for the arts. The shared Indigenous cultural background of the students fosters a rebirth of ancestral cultural traditions as well, which helps Harjo rediscover her own spiritual self and cultural background.

“I marked myself once with a knife. I was disappearing into the adolescent sea of rage and destruction. [...] I never made such a mark again. Instead I chose to slash art onto canvas, pencil marks onto paper, and when I could no longer carry the burden of history, I found other openings. I found stories.”

Like other students at IAIA, Harjo struggles to emotionally cope with the problems of her past. She finds art as an outlet to express her pain and transform it into something positive and constructive. More importantly, she rediscovers the importance of stories and the need to tell stories that she felt as a young girl. Now storytelling is not only an instinctual necessity and a spiritual responsibility, but also an act of self-healing.

“‘This is what I think about this letter,’ Mrs. Wilhelm told me. She tore it into pieces and threw them in the trash can. I was both relieved and surprised. I had never believed it possible to be trusted over the word of a white man who belonged to the Elks.”

After Harjo was caught out at night drinking, Mrs. Wilhelm still believes in her over the word of her white stepfather. This is a unique experience in Harjo’s life at this point, one that she never thought possible. Harjo finally sees that, despite the racism of society, there is hope in more enlightened individuals, and Harjo has hope to move forward in her life.

“Most of all I remember the troupe as a creative, coherent family. Each of us was young, with tremendous personal, familial, and historical dysfunctions and gifts. We pulled together to create groundbreaking art that inspired.”

Harjo continues to thrive and advance herself at IAIA and in her acting troupe, with like-minded, artistic individuals. By pulling together and sharing their painful experiences, they move past these experiences and create more affecting art. Again, by giving such damaged students a second chance and allowing them to blossom in the context of art school, these students progress in their lives to inspire others. Harjo thus acknowledges the role that many other damaged young artists played in her own life and how they helped her become a successful poet.

“During my last visit to the clinic at the Indian hospital I was given the option of being sterilized. [...] I was handed the form but chose not to sign. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Many Indian women who weren’t fluent in English signed, thinking it was a form giving consent for the doctor to deliver their baby. Others were sterilized without even the formality of signing. My fluent knowledge of English saved me.”

Harjo provides a stark example of the intersectionality of racism and sexism and how Indian women in the 1960s were oppressed within this context. Through the formality of the medical system and with the weapon of language, Indigenous women had their reproductive rights taken away without their knowledge. Harjo describes her personal experiences with these abuses in matter-of-fact terms, not realizing the gravity at the time of the event.

“I loved to hear the story of my warrior fight for my breath. The way my mother told the story, I was given only so much time on the ventilator and I had to decide to live. I had been strong. I had been brave.”

The story of Harjo’s birth is one of survival, as both her and her mother nearly died in the experience. More importantly, Harjo and her mother describe the story as one of bravery, in which Harjo was valiant enough to fight for her survival against the odds. Thus, Harjo implicitly acknowledges that she was born brave, and it is only through abusive patriarchal figures and an oppressive, male-dominated society that her bravery diminished throughout much of her young life.

“The doctor was a military man who had signed on the watch not for the love of healing or in awe of the miracle of birth but to fulfill a contract for medical school payments. I was a statistic to him. He touched me mechanically.”

The starkness and indifference of white American society and government toward American Indians is symbolized here by the doctor. Like all American Indians, Harjo is viewed merely as a statistic and treated merely in fulfillment of old government treaties with Indian nations. Even at the moment of her son’s birth, Harjo is denied a positive experience because of her race and her gender.

“As I walked I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. They urged me out the door or up in the night, so they could speak to me. They wanted form, line, story, and melody and did not understand why I had made this unnecessary detour. [...] ‘Your people didn’t walk all that way just so you could lay down their dreams.’”

Part 4 opens with Harjo’s reflections on her abandoned ambitions and her forgotten devotion to poetry and art. As often, Harjo considers her role as an artist and storyteller as a responsibility not just to herself but to her ancestors and to those whose stories she must tell. Her ancestors even scold her in her mind for giving up her ambitions when she has a responsibility to tell their stories.

“As I sketched, I considered the notion of warrior. [...] What of contemporary warriors? And what of the wives, mothers, and daughters whose small daily acts of sacrifice and bravery were usually unrecognized or unrewarded? These acts were just as crucial to the safety and well-being of the people.”

Harjo explores the intersectionality of racism and sexism in the notion of what a warrior is. She rejects the view of warriors as Plains Indian men with headdresses. Rather, Harjo argues that a warrior is someone who sacrifices their own well-being for others, just as she has sacrificed for her children and for lovers who have betrayed her. She has been a warrior all along, just as her grandmothers were.

“As I sat there alone in front of the story box, I became the healer, I became the patient, and I became the poem. I became aware of an opening within me. In a fast, narrow crack of perception, I knew this is what I was put here to do: I must become the poem, the music, and the dancer. I would not truly understand how for a long, long, time. This was when I began to write poetry.”

After months of having panic attacks and feeling an intense premonition of death, Harjo finds healing in a vision. She realizes that she must write poetry and tell stories, and this realization harkens back to her childhood need to tell stories. Harjo frequently writes of the need to tell stories as a responsibility beyond herself, and ignoring this need for so long was literally killing her.

“I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn’t your real husband. He was a bad dream, an alien of sorts who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.”

As Harjo finally breaks free of the cycle of abuse and acceptance, she evaluates what she has been doing wrong. After her ex-boyfriend breaks into her house violently drunk, she finally breaks away. Having endured and accepted alcoholism and abuse from the men in her life, she has let it go, realizing that she is a warrior capable of moving forward in her own life.