Symbols Used For Healing In Joy Harjo's Crazy Brave

In Native American tradition, the peyote plant is used for healing. Native to Mexico and southwestern Texas, the small and spineless cactus has been used in spiritual ceremonies performed by Native Americans for thousands of years. In the 1930’s it was introduced to the Navajo Tribe, who are native people located in the southwestern United States. In Joy Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, the plant was used by a Navajo man as an act of prayer. On the receiving end was Joy who was struggling with the demons of fear and panic. The plant serves as a false healing and comfort for Joy’s actual fear and panic. Joy is chasing an identity within love and looking for a person to define her rather than defining herself. She doesn’t realize her fear and

West is “the doorway to ancestors, the direction of tests. It represents leaving and being left and learning to find the road in the darkness” (Harjo 109). In “West” Joy introduced us to her first husband. Joy and her first husband bonded under a night of falling stars, and Joy believed that these stars symbolized their individual stories. Joy was sixteen and along with panic and fear being present in her life, loneliness was as well. As “West” continues, Joy describes how she became immersed in the theatre and went on tour. This tour still remains the “highlight of her life” (Harjo 115). While we lacked the details of their relationship as she made her way through the Indian school, by the time her education was completed she had fallen pregnant by him. Despite her child’s father not sending for her, Joy craved his love and set out to chase him down. When Joy found him, she first lived with his friends and then moved in with his grandmother. Eventually however, her husbands overprotective mother moved Joy in with her to keep control of her life. The relationship with her husband's mother was troublesome and only helped to further the panic Joy felt in her life. Joy’s mother-in-law even went as far as witching Joy (Harjo 127). For a while Joy could not only seem to escape her circumstance but she could not escape her mother-in-law as well. Where Joy and her first husband went, Joy’s mother in law followed. Thus the fear and panic Joy

In the beginning of “South” Joy is met with her dreams calling out to her. Abandoned, her dreams questioned her “necessary detour” (Harjo 135). Soon after, she decided to stop raising her husband and released him instead. Joy then entered the University of New Mexico in hope of providing a better life for herself. Politically, there was much going on at the time of her education. The Civil Rights movement was occurring and the Universities Indian student organization was “on fire with the possibility of peace and justice for our peoples” (Harjo 138). Another political movement that was occuring at the time of her education was the women's rights movement. However, unlike the Civil Rights movement which inspired the Native community, the women’s rights movement was a subordinate movement despite the struggles Native women faced. Domestic violence was an issue many women in the Native American community and in Joy’s life faced. Joy was not exempt from this violence and faced it at the hands of her second husband who was a prominent Native American Rights activist on campus. Despite the premonitions she felt whenever she was with him, a knowing that could be traced back from her childhood when her father was drunk and beat her mother, Joy loved him and would not let him go. Fear and panic were a third and fourth will in her relationship, yet she still was chasing love. It was not until Joy faced the threat of death that she