This month in “Dare to Believe,” we are featuring two Indigenous Americans, Tommy Orange, and Joy Harjo.
They were chosen because they use their talents as writers to help debunk the stereotypes about Indigenous Americans created and perpetuated in books, movies, and on television.
Their writings recognize the unique civilizations and communities of Indigenous Americans throughout the United States.
Tommy Orange was born on January 19, 1982, in the Dimond District of Oakland, California. The Dimond District is a multicultural neighborhood with a diverse sampling of cultures and social classes. He is a citizen of the Arapaho and Cheyenne Tribes of Oklahoma. His father was a Native American ceremony leader and his mother converted to Christianity for part of her life. From the ages of 14 -24, Orange played on a nationally-ranked roller hockey team. At 18 he developed an interest in music and enrolled at a local community college where he earned a Bachelor of Science in sound arts (audio engineering).
After graduation, he worked at Gray Wolf Books where he developed a love of reading that led him to begin writing. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts where he now teaches.
Orange’s first novel, There, There was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2019.
It won an America Book Award and a PEN/Hemingway Award in 2019.
According to Orange, the inspiration for There, There came to him while he was working in a digital storytelling booth at a Native American Health Center and at Story Center, a non-profit founded by the University of California/Berkeley. His job was to record oral stories of urban natives.
The stories he heard made him acutely aware of the need for the stories of urban natives to be heard, by other urban natives and the rest of the world.
Many Indigenous Americans feel invisible because their stories and communities aren’t reflected in history books, novels, movies, or television. His goal is to expand the range of what it means to be Native by telling these stories, so others will feel a connection to their communities and their histories.
Orange also writes for various magazines about the experiences of Indigenous Americans in today’s world.
Photo of Tommy Orange:
By Larry D. Moore - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73982519
Book Jacket of There, There:
By https://ew.com/books/2018/06/07/tommy-orange-there-there-book-review/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62328911
Joy Harjo was born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father was Muscogee, and her mother was Cherokee and European-American from Arkansas. As a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, she adopted her paternal grandmother’s surname.
Harjo is an American poet, author, playwright, teacher, activist, and musician. In 2019, she served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Indigenous American to hold that honor. Her signature project as U.S. Poet Laureate was called Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First People’s Poetry. Her project focused on mapping the United States with Native Nations poets and poems.
Harjo’s father struggled with alcohol. Her abusive stepfather kicked her out of the house when she was 16, so she enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts which at the time was a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) high school boarding school. In high school, she used painting as a way to express her emotions and channel her energy. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of New Mexico. Harjo earned her MFA in the University of Iowa’s creative writing program. She also took filmmaking courses at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
At 22, she published her first book of poems, The Last Song, which started her career as a writer.
Harjo taught at The Institute of American Indian Arts from 1978-79 and 1983-84. She taught at Arizona State University from 1980-81, the University of Colorado from 1985-88, the University of Arizona from 1988-1990, and the University of New Mexico from 1991-95. Deb Haaland, the current Secretary of The Interior was one of her students at the University of New Mexico.
Harjo played saxophone for the band Poetic Justice and has released 7 musical CDs of her original compositions and the compositions of other Indigenous American musicians.
In 1995, Harjo received The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas.
Harjo writes poems, novels and plays with the recurring themes of self-discovery, the arts, and social justice. She embraces Native American oral history in her works to convey these themes.
Much of her work reflect Creek beliefs, values, and myths. She advocates equality and respect among all living creatures. Her work analyses the mistakes of the past with the injustices present in modern society not just for Native cultures, but for other oppressed peoples. She explores the rise of colonialism and imperialism with the rise in violence against Indigenous American women and all women.
Harjo has won numerous awards for writing, poetry, music, and art. She continues to be a voice for change in our society and is considered to be an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century.
Photo of Joy Harjo: Public Domain