Joy Harjo

1. SET CONFLICT RESOLUTION GROUND RULES:

Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand.

Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane.

Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill.

The land is a being who remembers everything.

You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs—

The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding.

As I brushed my hair over the hotel sink to get ready I heard:

By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.

Do not parade, pleased with yourself.

You must speak in the language of justice.

I have lived 19,404 midnights, some of them in the quaver of

   fish dreams

And some without any memory at all, just the flash of the

 jump

From a night rainbow, to an island of fire and flowers – such

 a holy

Leap between forgetting and jazz. How long has it been

 since I called you back?

After Albuquerque with my baby in diapers on my hip; it

 was a difficult birth,

I was just past girlhood slammed into motherhood. What a

 bear.

Beyond the door of my tongue is a rail and I’m leaning over

 to watch bears

Catch salmon in their teeth. That realm isn’t anywhere near

 Los Angeles. If I dream

It all back then I reconstruct that song buried in the muscle

 of urgency. I’m bereft

In the lost nation of debtors. Wey yo hey, wey yo hey yah

 hey. Pepper jumped

And some of us went with him to the stomp. All night,

 beyond midnight, back

Up into the sky, holy.

Shining persons arrive here

Ha yut ke lani

Open your being

Ha yut ke jate

In every small thought of what to fix

In every immense thought of dancers winding through the

    Milky Way

Ha yut ke lvste

What obscures, falls away.

Ha yut ke hutke

I believe in the sun.

In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed, and

forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.

When explorers first encountered my people, they called us

heathens, sun worshippers.

They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative, and

illuminates our path on this earth.

After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are

a part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us

overhead.

When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are

renewed.

There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart

might be just down the road.

Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the

earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of

meaning.

Our earth is shifting. We can all see it.

I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that

everything has changed. It’s so hot; there is not enough

winter.

Animals are confused. Ice is melting.

The quantum physicists have it right; they are beginning to

think like Indians: everything is connected dynamically

at an intimate level.

When you remember this, then the current wobble of the

earth makes sense. How much more oil can be drained,

Without replacement; without reciprocity?

I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn

to find the sun.

It was the fourth morning since the birth of my fourth

granddaughter.

This was the morning I was to present her to the sun, as a

relative, as one of us. It was still dark, overcast as I walked

through Times Square.

I stood beneath a twenty-first century totem pole of symbols

of multinational corporations, made of flash and neon.

The sun rose up over the city but I couldn’t see it amidst the

rain.

Though I was not at home, bundling up the baby to carry

her outside,

I carried this newborn girl within the cradleboard of my

heart.

I held her up and presented her to the sun, so she would be

recognized as a relative,

So that she won’t forget this connection, this promise,

So that we all remember, the sacredness of life.