Joy Harjo "Deer Dancer"

            Joy Harjo crafts a unique poem pertaining to a cultural shift in morals and life-style to a strict heritage of people in "Deer Dancer."  She also encompasses the inner feelings and desires of women of the night by relating their life-style of frivolous dancing for income to a deer.   The symbol of a deer represents how the wild and untamed beast they become when they dance is natural to them and has become natural to the society due all the changes in morality.  The bar where all the strippers, lowlifes, thugs, and as the poem describes, "broken survivors, the club of shotgun, knife wound, of poison by culture," is not only where these individuals gather but their hardships of life.  The bar contains principals of culture that have spiraled downward into pool of pain that only the dancers can cure with their dance that is sacred to them.  Her mystical movements clean the broken-hearted men or women that fill that place but in turn create more troubles thoughts of her own.