'An Analysis Of Harjo's Crazy Brave'

“Crazy Brave” is the story of how Harjo survived abandonment and abuse, the temptations of alcohol, and youthful struggles with failed marriages and single motherhood to become one of the most successful Native American poets. Crazy Brave highlights the earliest parts of her life through her early 20s as she grew up in Oklahoma. She had given birth to two children, but cared for three. The story explains the difficulty and struggle with periods of respite. The larger moral of the story is how she faced the survival of spirituality and creativity in the face of generations of dispossession, racism, and familial dysfunction.

In the beginning of the book, we find out how society was in the time period she was living. A quote from the book, “We enter into a family story, and then other stories based on tribal clans, on tribal towns and nations, lands, countries, planetary systems, and universes,” written by Harjo, “Yet we each have our own individual soul story to tend.” Harjo wrote this in a

certain way because her style brought in specific narratives, tales, myths, and images. In “Crazy Brave’’ it becomes her autobiographical strategy.
When Harjo was the age of 16, in 1967, she was able to finally escape her stepfather’s abusive home and went for the Institute of American Indian Arts.

At the institute she and her new friends, “sensed we were at the opening of an enormous indigenous cultural renaissance . . . The energy crackled. It was enough to propel the lost children within us to start all over again.” Starting off with the event that she decided to be on her own and move away from abuse shows the audience how strong and brave she was to leave the house so early to begin her own life. “Crazy Brave” also reveals the use of alcohol abuse and domestic violence in Harjo’s native communities. Harjo finds herself to be like her mother and grandmother. They had both were married to an abusive man who uses alcohol to cure there own pain. But this also reveals the persistence of art. This is exemplified as she looks back for inspiration to her musical mother, storytelling grandmother, and artist grandmother and

aunt.
Furthermore, as time went on and she became more independent, we start to learn how much she was able to preserve through all the adversities in her life. As mentioned before, she left a house hold where she was being abused to start her own life and move on. Her hard work and luck got her admitted to the University of New Mexico where she met a man. Harjo said, “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” Her writing has finally come to help her open up and write down how she has felt all her life. Her husband had turned to be an alcoholic which had destroyed their marriage and Harjo. Harjo was faced with options on how her life could change. She could have either gone to despair and become “crazy brave”. She found the courage to reclaim her lost spirituality and live her life different from her mother and grandmother.