It was expected that a chat with Joy Harjo, whose creativity knows no borders, could swerve into any number of lanes. But physics?

In addition to being a three-time U.S. poet laureate, Harjo is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and author. On the day she was interviewed for this story, she answered questions while creating something other than art or poetry or music. That something was guacamole.

“I have all these avocados that have ripened,” Harjo said.

So, guacamole and physics were not on the preinterview bingo card as things that might come up in conversation. But Harjo “went there” because the overriding topic — the whole reason for the interview, really — was education. She’s going back to school.

Harjo will be the artist in residence when ARTworks returns to Holland Hall in October. ARTworks, Holland Hall’s annual celebration of creativity, has a decades-rich history of introducing students to prominent guest artists and vice versa.

For Harjo, the appeal of being an ARTworks participant is this simple: She likes being around young people.

Elaborating, Harjo said young people are at a powerful and transformative moment in their lives.

“It’s that age of adolescence where you are finding yourself,” she said. “It’s a great time of creativity too.”

Continuing on the subject of why the Holland Hall engagement is special, the Tulsa-based artist said she is looking forward to meeting students from her own community. She said most of her work is national and international, so she appreciates an opportunity to be invested in a local endeavor.

“I did an event at Holland Hall about two or three years ago and enjoyed being over there,” she said. “I like the idea of working with local students — and students that maybe I’ll run into and get to see out and about, so that was compelling to me.”

Harjo is accustomed to being in classrooms. She has taught at major universities and at the school (Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M.) where she completed her precollege education.

Asked what she loves about being a teacher, Harjo said, “It’s about learning. I love that. And often I’ll teach things I don’t know (about) just to learn. But what I like about it is working with young people, and they don’t come in ‘empty.’ … We all come from a story. It doesn’t just begin when we take our first breath here. We come in — and we come into this story.”

Speaking of stories, it was at this point in the interview that Harjo shared a personal one. She said she wanted to back up a little and talk about the thing that turned her on to teaching.

Harjo, when she was a junior high student in Tulsa, applied to get into an advanced art class. She was accepted. But, on the first day of school, art was nowhere to be found on her class schedule. She pointed this out to a school official, who — inundated with first-day chaos — had this advice: Go to the physics class, and we’ll fix the schedule tomorrow.

Harjo soldiered on to the physics class and got a pleasant surprise.

“It was so good. The teacher was so good,” she said. “And what I mean by good is he was engaging.”

Some teachers may be content to go into “here’s what’s expected” mode on opening day. Not this physics teacher.

“He was already teaching because he was so excited about the world and excited about what was possible,” Harjo said, indicating the physics teacher demonstrated things rather than just talking.

How do you get a rocket to the moon? Let’s collectively figure this out.

What Harjo figured out was she did not want to drop the class. She stayed in physics.

“And then, later on — probably in the ’80s or something — I got to studying,” she said. “I went and did a big study on my own of quantum physics. I still remain very interested.”

The physics teacher influenced what kind of teacher Harjo wanted to be when she began standing in front of students.

Harjo talked about other memorable educational experiences in a lengthy interview with former KRMG radio personality John Erling for the Voices of Oklahoma oral history project. In the interview, which can be accessed at
voicesofoklahoma.com, she suggested that leaving Tulsa at age 16 to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts saved her life.

“Yeah, it did — I guess because of things going on at home,” she said in the interview for this story.

Harjo said her mother was wonderful and worked two or three jobs to help out. But, again, there were things going on at home that she needed to escape, and she never really fit at Will Rogers, the school she attended before moving to New Mexico.

“I don’t blame it on the school. It was just me,” she said. “But when I went (to Santa Fe), it was all Natives. It was the first time I had Native teachers, ever, and then there were a lot of Muscogee students and Cherokee students and so on. … Being around students that were all Native, it’s the first time I would talk in class, which I never did. I was even in a speech class in elementary school, and I don’t know why I had that class because, you know, I made a ‘D’ because I wouldn’t get up and talk. After that, I got up and talked because I always liked to get good grades, but that was not my thing. And when I went to the school where they are all Native students, it was different, and I felt freer there.”

Harjo found the school’s arts curriculum (comparable with a college curriculum) to be “inspirational.” She found her path. She said it was always there — she knew when she was tiny that she was going to be an artist — “but I found my community when I went to the Institute of American Indian Arts.”

As someone who benefited from classroom experiences, Harjo believes it’s important to “pay it forward” as an educator.

“You know, we come into this world and everybody is here because they’re meant to be here,” she said. “They take a breath. When you take that breath, it’s ‘OK, I’m here,’ and everybody is bearing gifts and challenges. Everybody has their own set of challenges and their own set of gifts, and we’re here to develop those.”

When students are in elementary school and middle school and high school, it’s prime time to figure out what those gifts are so they can be developed and mastered so each person can “do what you came here to do,” according to Harjo.

“And then there’s a point where you give back, and it’s important that you share what you’ve learned and you help those coming up,” Harjo said, mentioning there are people who mentor you and assist you in life.

For instance, Harjo said the physics teacher she mentioned probably doesn’t remember her “but I would consider him a mentor because he taught me about teaching, and he was passing along his love and joy of how the world works. Sometimes the mentors are parents or other relatives or neighbors or musicians. I consider (late jazz saxophonist) John Coltrane a mentor even though I’ve never met him in person. But (I learned from) his music, from listening to his music and hearing things he said about music, and so on.”

Among questions pitched to Harjo during the interview: What’s the best-case scenario for what happens with you and the Holland Hall students?

“Well, I think that students will come to see that the arts are a tool,” she said. “They’re a tool for you. We feed our bodies, and we know a lot about food, what’s good. But we also need to feed our minds. … Some of us keep studying. I’m learning drumming. I bought a drum kit. …

“What do we feed our minds with? Well, social media is like eating Barbie cereal. It doesn’t nourish. You have to think about when you feed your mind. Are you feeding what nourishes you?

“And then you get into feeding your spirit, and that’s where the arts come in. People don’t speak about it too much. Maybe they do in terms of religion. But you know what? What feeds your spirit would be the natural world, the arts. The arts are how we know ourselves, because the arts can question. They can reveal history.”

Harjo talked about some examples before wrapping up with this: “I just want them to understand they’re part of a continuum and they have a voice and to take care of their space. You think, ‘oh, it is your space’ and, yes, it’s your physical space, but also you’ve got to take care of your mental space, and you also have to take care of your spiritual space. And, ultimately, we’re all here to help each other. And just because somebody makes more money or is a certain race or lives at a certain address, that doesn’t make them better.”

Contact Jimmie Tramel: jimmie.tramel@tulsaworld.com