Joy Harjo: An Old, Old Story

Photo by Molly

Our words matter. True leadership knows this and uses words to empower and bring people together.

I will be seventy-five next month and never thought I would hear the unhinged and dangerous rhetoric spewing from so-called leadership. In Mvskoke culture (considered one of the world's oldest democracies) anyone endangering the community by their words and actions was banished.

When I am in the middle of a challenge, like walking the New Jersey Turnpike at two in the morning to find a hotel, I tell myself, this will one day make a good story. What a story we're in. I keep thinking that one day we will tell what a terrible story we lived through, but we made it out of the destruction together. And how we set up safeguards so no dictator could rise up from greed and hatefulness. And how everyone in the community came together and reinstated educational, economic, and cultural institutions that reinvigorated the people (and by people, all living ones). ...sounds like an old, old story...

— Joy Harjo

https://www.joyharjo.com/