What I’m Reading: ‘Crazy Brave’

I am teaching Joy Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, in which she shares her odyssey of casting off fear and embracing the stories, songs, and music of the present and of her Native American ancestral past. Early on, she reveals, “I had no way to translate the journey and what I would find there until I found poetry.”

Guiding her was a spirit helper she calls “the Knowing.” It began as a “powerful warning system that stepped forth when I was in danger,” she says, one that she sometimes tried to disregard but that eventually became for her “a strand of the divine, a pathway for the ancestors and teachers who love us.”

Not unlike “a knowing so deep it’s like a secret” that the writer Toni Morrison describes as part of black women’s experience, Ms. Harjo’s knowing comes from shaping and engaging memories through stories, music, ancient dreams, myth, and painting.

Human failures loom large in her memoir, with our national failures as backdrop.

Ms. Harjo tapped into her knowing through poetry. We could tap into our national knowing and the story matrix that “connects all of us” through our curricula, our civic engagement, and our everyday lives. Then we, along with our students, might learn to listen, to speak, to sing — to aspire together for a just democracy for all.