Poetic Justice: Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice with "For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash"

I grew up in a small town in Northern California and in that town, about as far away from Native American culture as could be. There is an embarrassing photo of me, about 8 or 9 years old, dressed up in a handmade Indian headdress carrying a spear and whooping. The only thing I knew about Indians was conveyed by television - either that they were the bad guys in all Westerns or that they saved the Brady Bunch kids in the Grand Canyon.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Megan and I began to branch out in our experiences. Being Catholic, and living in Milwaukee at the time, we heard about a Native American Catholic Church and went to attend one day. We liked it so much we adopted it as our unofficial parish. At the time they met in an old firehouse, with a Polish priest named Ed who served them as pastor and who had been adopted into the tribe. Megan and I ended up being married by this priest and incorporating a small element of the ceremony we watched performed each week, the prayer to the four directions, into our own ceremony.

Through this church, we were introduced to the vibrancy of Native culture and spirituality. Fr. Ed brought the readings alive to us, because he would explain the readings to the congregation in the context of the tribal life that the parishioners experienced, relating it to the tribal life of the early Jews. We only scratched the surface, but we became aware of both the wonderful things about Indian culture, and the challenges they faced on a daily basis brought about by their shared history with that of the United States. It was a wonderful experience.

This song, For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, is part of the hard history of Native Americans. Even as organizations rose in the 1970s to fight for Native rights, human failings so present in all of us also were also at work, and the murder of Anna Mae Aquash was not one of the shining moments of Native American activism. But who better to bring poetic justice to the death of Anna Mae Aquash than Joy Harjo, Native American poet and author? Harjo is a Muscogee Indian from Oklahoma. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and also played alto saxophone with her band Poetic Justice. She is credited with being a leader and force in what has been termed the Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. The song is an homage to a member of the American Indian Movement who died under mysterious circumstances on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1976. You can find For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash on the Joy Harjo and Poetic Justice album Letter from the End of the 20th Century, released in 1997.