Nature, Women and Culture in Joy Harjo’s Selected Works Extending from 1982 to 2022

Abstract

Nature, women and racial minorities were oppressed in the western societies for a very long period of time by those who were powerful. Ecofeminists as Karen Warren (1997, pp. 3-5) say, there is a connection between all the oppressed ones. Native Americans are among the minorities faced a destructive persecution. One of their famous writers is Joy Harjo (1951-   ), who explains that the arrival of the white colonizers to their land led to the expulsion of her people, putting an end to the harmony they had built with the natural elements and suffering of their women. This study looks at Harjo’s columns, interviews and analyzes some poems from her award – winning works such as She Had Some Horses (1983), How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2002 (2004), Poet Warrior: A Memoir (2021), Catching the Light (2022), and An American Sunrise (2019) to show how colonization led to the struggle of the Native American women, the destruction of nature and changing the culture that has been in the land for centuries.