Episode 11: Joe Harjo and Native Visibility: Not Monolithic, but Extraordinarily Diverse
Indian Ordering a Pizza 2017
Growing up in Oklahoma as a member of the Muscogee (Creek) nation, Joe Harjo says he didn’t have “access to seeing ‘artist as profession,’… there was no concept of that.” He remembers that his uncle, who spoke to him only in Muscogee, carved Native images in sandstone, and Harjo, along with his mother, accompanied him around the state looking for buyers.
When he got to high school, Harjo said he was told by the guidance counselor that he needed to find a good job. Harjo told him he wanted to be a teacher, but the counselor said, “You don’t want to do that.” So Harjo said he wanted to be an artist, to which the counselor told him, “You can’t make money as an artist.”
Now Harjo is both an artist and a teacher.
After he earned a BFA at Central Oklahoma University, Harjo went to the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he earned the MFA. He spent five years with an artists’ collective, the Lullwood Group, and navigated the “spaces in which artists exist” honing his voice. He landed a full time teaching gig at a new BFA program started at the Southwest School of Art, where he met our co-host Eddie Dupuy.
Keeping up with the Joneses From This is Not an Indian
Now he focuses his teaching and work on countering misrepresentations of Native people and their beliefs. He especially stands against the representations of Native people proffered by Edward Curtis, whose work has seared itself in popular imagination as “the marker and standard” of what a Native person should be. Instead, Harjo is careful not to allow his experience as a Native person to eclipse the great diversity of the Native experience in the United States.
From Stoic to Heroic
2020 marked a particularly difficult year for Harjo and his partner. It was a year, he said, “I was not in a mental space to create anything… I was taking it in and just experiencing it on the surface, in the moment.” Covid, the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the upheavals following them, the slow re-emergence from isolation, an injury to his knee, and, when he least expected it, coming down with Covid himself all led him into further isolation.
Performance Print COVID - Despair
Performance Print COVID-19 Vaccine
The culmination of these events inspired him to look inward and to the experience of his ancestors in surviving smallpox and the Spanish flu. During the depths of his Covid isolation, he connected with his ancestors, and he “felt carried through” by their “energy.”
He emerged renewed and realized another set of performance prints, pieces he says that are both deeply personal but also markers of our shared histories, his own and those of his ancestors.
James the Gentle Gentrifier From This is Not an Indian
Harjo’s voice as an artist and teacher finds expression not in an ability to say “what a Native person is,” but in what “Natives are not.” His is a sober voice, reminding us that Native people are not a monolithic body, but extraordinarily diverse, despite their many misrepresentations in the dominant culture.
Let Us Pray 2019 Photograph 27 x 40 inches
Mark of the Beast 2019 Photograph 27 x 40 inches
Click on image to visit Joe’s Website
