Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

The beauty and the tragedy of reservation life are on offer here. This is strictly a memoir, not an indictment of the 400 years of maltreatment of Native Americans, but that is certainly the subtext. The author is the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. Her mother remarried, but to a similar man who revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her success drove her stepfather mad, and what he couldn't control he tried to destroy, and she became essentially homeless at a young age. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by colonialization. An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage. She in many ways recapitulated what her mother had done, but with a difference. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality of her ancestors.