Crazy Brave

Joy Harjo's story of her childhood and teenage years depict the harrowing experience of growing up indigenous on stolen land. Her early life is a microcosm of the devastation that white people have brought to Native Americans, filled with abuse, alcoholism, racism, and poverty. Yet through it all, she has art, poetry, and an innate spirituality and sense of truth in herself that carries her through the hardship.

Her poetry doesn't particularly resonate with me, but it is very evocative of her culture and her Native history. I very much so enjoyed her story and the power with which she told it, even if some of it felt a bit like word soup to me.