Writing
Joy Harjo
Born 1951-05-09 · Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the U.S., is a member of the Mvskoke Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv (Hickory Ground). She is only the second poet to be appointed a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she left home to attend high school at the innovative Institute of American Indian Arts, which was then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. Harjo began writing poetry as a member of the University of New Mexico’s Native student organization, the Kiva Club, in response to Native empowerment movements. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teach English, Creative Writing, and American Indian Studies at University of California-Los Angeles, University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, Arizona State, University of Illinois, University of Colorado, University of Hawai’i, Institute of American Indian Arts, and University of Tennessee, while performing music and poetry nationally and internationally.
Acting credits
5.4What would it sound like if the national anthem was written today? Anthem follows composer Kris Bowers and producer Dahi on a musical road trip across the country to reflect on “The Star-Spangled Banner” to find out.
Anthem
2023
8.0Examining the movement that is ending the use of Native American names, logos, and mascots in the world of sports and beyond.
Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting
2021
NRA visual journey into the mind and soul of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Navarro Scott Momaday, relating each written line to his unique Native American experience representing ancestry, place, and oral history.
Words from a Bear
2019
8.0Filmmaker Sterlin Harjo follows Native artists for a year as they navigate their careers in the US and abroad. The film explores the immense complexities each artist faces concerning their own identity as Native artists, as well as pushing further Native art into a post-colonial world.
Love and Fury
2020
NRFor thousands of years, traditional Inuit sports have been vital for survival within the unforgiving Arctic. Acrobatic and explosive, these ancestral games evolved to strengthen mind, body and spirit within the community. Following four modern Inuit athletes reveals their unique relationship to the games as they compete across the North. As unprecedented change sweeps across their traditional lands, their stories illuminate the importance of the games today.
Games of the North
2011
NRHIGHWAY 99: A DOUBLE ALBUM is a musical travelogue that chronicles the epic, American story of one of our greatest musical voices, Merle Haggard.
Highway 99: A Double Album
2025
NRA tribute and call to action for linguistic diversity. A 15-minute motion poem (poem on film), each line comes from a different treasure or minority language. 48 speakers each speak in their mother tongues, as line by line, language by language, the poem is created.
Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues
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NRAmerica's first Native doctor, Susan La Flesche Picotte (1865-1915) studied medicine at a time when few women dared. She graduated first in her class and returned home to serve as doctor to her Omaha tribe. During this heartbreaking and violent time she never gave up hope. The reverberations from her shattered world continue today as Native Americans suffer from alarming rates of disease, suicide and mental illness. Like Susan, these modern day medicine women from the Omaha, Lakota and Navajo tribes are fighting a war and sharing a confident, even joyful, approach to the work of healing.
Medicine Woman
2016
A meeting of the Far West Council elders inspires a discussion of Northwest Native American history and traditions, and the struggle to remember and honor their ancestry
The Native Americans: The Tribal People of the Northwest
1994
6.0Cara Romero's contemporary fine art photography captures Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from an Indigenous female perspective.
Cara Romero: Following the Light
2022
8.0A look at the life of Native American jazz saxophone pioneer Jim Pepper, the first widely recognized musician to fuse Native American music with jazz.
Pepper's Pow Wow
1996
NRJaune Quick-To-See-Smith, Shoshone French Cree painter, discusses her abstract paintings, which depict her Indian heritage with scenes of early plains lifestyles.
Jaune Quick-To-See Smith
1982
