Essay: She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo / Linda Hogan’s Map (animal symbolism)

9-22-17
Although almost all cultures of the world use animal symbolism in real life as well as in legends and myths, Native American culture regards animals with worship and adoration to such an extent that their whole basis for existence can be found on a turtle’s shell. Native American people have traditionally viewed animals as fellow living creatures that they share a common destiny with. The relationship between Native Americans and horses, for example, is one of the more widely known instances of human contact with the animal world. In many Native American traditions, the wolf is also a powerful figure and is often considered to be a powerful spiritual teacher, as well. Animals represent the first beings on earth and are considered deities responsible for creation and a source of guidance and strength in times of trouble or need. Two Native American poets who truly capture the importance of animals through their work is Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan.
Joy Harjo wrote a poem called She Had Some Horses (page 474) that beautifully explores a woman’s struggle to shape her identity as a modern Native American living in the alien environment of Eurocentric-American culture. The powerful image of the horse repeated constantly throughout the poem, goes hand and hand with events and images from the speaker’s life. These brief descriptions of the images and events in the poem sharply define the psychological, spiritual, and cultural conflicts at war in the woman’s conscious and subconscious minds but also build toward the speaker’s self-recognition. The animal symbolism is a very useful tool in this poem not only because the horse is a powerful creature in Native culture but because it is an image that represents the speaker’s journey to shape who she is. This is because the horse in native culture is a beautiful, free creature that finds all that it needs through the earth and this can be representative of the speaker’s native American heritage, where the people in the tribe survived off the earth and lived freely without fear.
However, the horse can also be captured and broke at the hands of people who intend to change and mold it into something they can use for self-gain; a tool to make their lives easier and more pleasant. That breaking of a wild spirit can represent the speaker’s trouble adapting to white culture- a place where for many years people with her heritage were truly treated as horses to be broke-in and used. One part in particular that can be seen as representative of the speaker’s troubles is stanza seven, where she states, ‘she had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak. She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts. She had horses who waited for destruction. She had horses who waited for resurrection. She had some horses,’ (Page 475).
While She Had Some Horses was a deep and heart-wrenching expression of one woman’s journey, another emotionally evocative work can be found in Linda Hogan’s Map (Page 498). In this poem, the author uses the wolf as a symbol for how the world around the speaker has changed. The wolf is one of the most recurring animals in Native American poetry. The meaning of the wolf image is to symbolize direction and leadership, and it also signifies strength and endurance. Native Americans incorporate wolves into their myths, legends, ceremonies, and rituals, portraying them as ferocious warriors in some instances while associating them with creativity, fertility, and protection in another. Wolves are traditionally pack animals and rely very heavily on every single member of their pack for survival. The hierarchical nature of wolves can be found to be important, also, especially when one considers that in Native American tribes, there was usually a hierarchy of sorts present to keep things more organized.
In Map, the author conveys despair at how the world has turned out under the hands of outsiders and wielded her words in such a way as to inspire a sense of foreboding in the reader. ‘This is the map of a forsaken world. This is the world without end. Where forests have been cut away from their trees. These are the lines wolf could not pass over. This Is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own.’