Remember

Harjo presents a series of beliefs about nature and human beings’ relationship to the natural world. Many of these spring from the Muscogee (Creek) people and other Indigenous nations. The significance of repeating “remember” has two meanings—that people have forgotten the teachings of Indigenous religions, and that people forget the way they may have understood nature from their youth.

The repetition of “remember” also mimics the way that memory works. A person actively reconstructs memories from electrical impulses. The word literally means “to member something again.” To remember means to create, actively, the beliefs and the world around them. To keep a memory alive, people must go on remembering it, regenerating it every time it is recalled.

This act of remembering imitates the practice of oral tradition in pre-literate communities. Beliefs and stories were passed down from one generation to the next. A person would remember what they heard and teach it to someone else, and that person would need to remember it for those after them. The speaker does not advise the reader to write down their memories, but to remember them. Remembering is a more intimate act, taking place in both body and mind. It becomes part of who people are, part of their story, and presumably a guiding force that determines how they act in the world.