Joy Harjo's Blog

I was torn about taking the trip to NY for the Kaleidoscope event! It sounded great. But I ended up getting in a good trail run and a little kayaking instead--and watching the stormy weather from my porch. I'm sure you got a great turnout.

Anyway...I received this announcement this morning and thought your readers might be interested in this book, which just won a prestigious award from the Society of Dance History Scholars:

The de la Torre Bueno Prize® went to Jacqueline Shea Murphy for The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance History (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Jacqueline Shea Murphy is an associate professor in the Dance Department at the University of California, Riverside.

The judges’ complete citations for the de la Torre Bueno and Lippincott prizes follow:

de la Torre Bueno Prize®: Jacqueline Shea Murphy, The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories.
Jacqueline Shea Murphy demonstrates a rich depth of archival research and detailed ethnographic observation in her pioneering study of Native American dances ranging from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The author explores identity politics attached to Native American dance practice as a response to forms of corporeal control enacted by anti-dance edicts from the 1880s through the 1930s and continues to discuss the influences of Native American dance on early modern dancers. The comprehensive historical examination develops into a fascinating analytical discussion of contemporary Native American Stage dance. The many facets of discovery revealed in this study articulately bridge the politics of Native American dance with the dynamics of American history, notions of race, gender, identity and social memory. Written with a command of the historical and theoretical literature of Native Studies, this revelatory text allows readers to appreciate the extensive range and prominence of dance in Native American cultures as an aspect of larger constellations of social, spiritual, and artistic practices.


Hope your travels are going smoothly!
-Stephanie
 

Poem-Conundrum

Oh
if someone had thought...and tried
to cut Richard Nixon's penis off...the symbolism alone would destroy america...and bring us one step closer to ending patriarchy...yet here we are...nearly forty years later...still suffering under the same bullshit.
 

I have renamed the poem....To Myra Breckenridge, With Love