Criminal Justice Scholar to Moderate Film Discussion

Dr. Christina Lane will lead audience discussion following this Friday's screening of Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action, as part of the Justice & Multiculturalism in the 21st Century Film Series, cosponsored by the NYS Writers Institute and the School of Criminal Justice.

A faculty member at the College of Saint Rose and alumna of the UAlbany School of Criminal Justice doctoral program, Professor Lane is a multiple year honoree in America’s Who’s Who Teachers of Excellence. She teaches courses in Criminal Justice, Behavior & Law, Forensic Psychology, and Forensic Science.

HOMELAND: FOUR PORTRAITS OF NATIVE ACTION
February 15 (Friday)Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Roberta Grossman
(United States, 2006, 88 minutes, color)

An artful and moving example of documentary filmmaking, HOMELAND follows the stories of Native American activists fighting to protect their lands against corporate exploitation and environmental destruction. Variety called the film, “Beautifully crafted...,” and said “Roberta Grossman skillfully intersperses vastly varied archival clips with quietly impassioned testimonials by tribal leaders and stunning lensing showcasing both the natural wonders and the man-made degradation of the landscape.”

More on the film series:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html

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Homeland Film Tomorrow: "Visually Stunning"

Tomorrow, Friday 2/15 at Page Hall, 7:30PM, we will screen Homeland, winner of numerous prizes at documentary festivals around the world. The film follows the battles of Native American activists to save the natural beauty and resources of their reservations from corporate exploitation.

"Beautifully crafted... Roberta Grossman skillfully intersperses vastly varied archival clips with quietly impassioned testimonials by tribal leaders and stunning lensing showcasing both the natural wonders and the manmade degradation of the landscape... Homeland merits a wider audience than provided by scattershot PBS airings... At a time when 30 years of environmental protection laws are being rapidly dismantled, Homeland militantly proposes America's First Peoples as the vangaurd of resistence." -- Variety

"Visually stunning... [Homeland] is a perfect blend of visuals, words, musical background, and thought-provoking issues related not only to Native Americans but to the environmental crisis facing America. " -- School Library Journal

"The story of a U.S. tragedy -- multinational companies doing their deadly work in Native peoples' backyards -- and of the brave few who stand up to combat it." -- The Utne Reader

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Crazy Brave Review

Elizabeth Wilkinson reviews Joy Harjo's new memoir, Crazy Brave, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Joy Harjo, Native American performance poet and musician visits Albany today.

"Readers familiar with Joy Harjo's poetry, or, better, who have experienced her live performances, will recognize a familiar cadence and overarching mythic quality in the voice she creates for her newest work, Crazy Brave. In a memoir steeped in her Mvskoke (also known as Muscogee) worldview, Harjo relates narratives of abuse, persistence and reclamation that tap into universal human emotions. Harjo's text resonates for and with readers, whether longtime fans or not; as she asserts, 'A story matrix connects all of us.'"

Read more: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/161501475.html?vi_adid=W

More about the Writers Institute events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

You are invited to attend a free catered reception with Harjo, sponsored by SUNY Press, after the evening event at approximately 9:30 p.m.

Joy Harjo, Native American poet and musician
November 1 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus

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NPR Interview with Joy Harjo

On how to get your artistic voice back, if you've lost it...

"I [had] felt like I had lost my voice, too. And sometimes, to find it ... what I've learned is it needs to be lost for a while. And when it wants to be found, you'll find it.

"But I would say is that you just put yourself in the place of poetry. You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

"And, you know, it's like looking for love. You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you."

Read more or listen to the interview: http://www.npr.org/2012/07/09/156501436/joy-harjos-crazy-brave-path-to-finding-her-voice

Harjo visits UAlbany tomorrow, 4:15 and 8pm, Campus Center 375, with a catered reception by SUNY Press to follow the evening event.

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Poet Joy Harjo talks about her tattoo...

Joy Harjo, who visits tomorrow, explains her remarkable hand tattoo on her website:

What do I have on my hand and what does it mean?

The tattoo on my hand is a tattoo. It’s not henna. The style is from the Marquesas Islands. The Marquesas are north of Tahiti.

Roonui, a Tahitian artist, did the tattoo freehand in Moorea, Tahiti. He is now living in Canada. http://www.roonui-tattoo.com/ It took two-and-a-half hours. (And yes, it hurt.)

I’d seen the tattoo there on my hand for sometime. The tattoo represents assistance for my work. I use my hands for music, writing, and everything else I do. The tattoo reminds me of the levels of assistance. I am also carrying a beautiful piece of art with me wherever I go.

Roonui says: "Polynesian tattooing is not a simple exercise in aesthetics. Polynesian carve into their body the symbols of their actions (past present or future), their promises, their games."

The part inside my wrist, close to my heart, resembles ancestral designs of my tribal people.

More about Harjo's events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

 

The 8PM reading will be followed by a free catered reception and book signing with Harjo sponsored by SUNY Press (at approximately 9:30 p.m.). The reception is in association with the annual John G. Neihardt lecture celebrating Native American literature.

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Joy Harjo coming Thursday

“Joy Harjo is a giant-hearted, gorgeous, and glorious gift to the world. Her belief in art, in spirit, is so powerful, it can’t help but spill over to us — lucky readers. Wildly passionate and honest as a hound, Crazy Brave invites us into a whole new way of seeing—deeper, less cluttered, and vastly more courageous than our own. It’s a book for people who want to re-fall in love with the world.”-- Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

Joy Harjo, Native American poet and musician
November 1 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus

Joy Harjo is an award-winning poet and musician of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. The author of seven collections of poetry, she was praised by the late Adrienne Rich for her “breathtaking complex witness and world-remaking language.” Her poetry collections include How We Became Human (2002), The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received the American Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her new book is the memoir, Crazy Brave (2012), about her journey from a troubled childhood and teenage motherhood to her accomplishments in the arts.

Cosponsored by SUNY Press in conjunction with the annual John G. Neihardt Lecture

Read more: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

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Poet Joy Harjo profile in High Country News

"The poet Joy Harjo claims to remember her struggle through the birth canal –– leaving a past world as a warrior with weapons in hand and entering this one "puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen. Most people don't wonder about the lives they might have lived before they were born into this one; most of us don't go beyond abstractions such as "heaven" or "spirit" when we wonder about what follows our departure from this earth. But Harjo has spent decades exploring the connections between worlds in story and song."

Native American poet and musician Joy Harjo, who visits Albany on Thursday, Nov. 1, is profiled in High Country News, a Colorado based magazine about public policy and culture in the American West:

http://www.hcn.org/hcn/issues/44.17/already-gone-a-profile-of-native-american-poet-joy-harjo

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The Most Un-Korean Person in the World

Adam Johnson, who visits Tuesday, February 14 to talk about his thriller-romance set in North Korea, talks to the L. A. Times about his background.

"A gregarious, linebacker-sized guy of mixed Northern European and Native American extraction, dressed in a white guayabera shirt, jeans and electric-green running shoes, he describes himself as 'probably the most un-Korean person in the world.' He was born in South Dakota but grew up in the Arizona suburbs of Tempe and Scottsdale, an only child and latchkey kid, raised mostly by his clinical psychologist mother after his parents divorced. 'As a kid I just wandered the neighborhoods and alleys of Arizona on my bicycle. And I think I had a pretty big interior life, I had a big imaginary life. One of the things I loved to do was open trash dumpsters. I would go through the alleys and open the trash dumpsters and just look at what people threw away and find treasures and try to figure out who lived in those houses.'"

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Iroquois on the New York Frontier, 11/17

Robert Moss, the Australia-born author of a cycle of nine novels about the Iroquois, will deliver the 2011 Neihardt Lecture of SUNY Press at the Albany Institute of History and Art, 4-6PM on November 17.

The presentation is entitled "Four Indian Kings, Dream Archaeology, and the Iroquois Struggle for Survival on the New York Frontier." More.

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