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Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019).

What is energy? Depending on one’s cultural background, it can mean a lot of different things. Mvskoke scholar and associate professor in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Laura Harjo shares what it means in the Mvskoke belief system. Read an excerpt from Harjo’s monograph, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity, below.

The late Mvskoke author Joan Chaudhuri, née Hill, claims that a Mvskoke way of being in the world is animated by energy in all things. [Donald] Fixico too argues that there is spiritual energy in all elements. Within a Mvskoke belief system, Chaudhuri argues, our time existing in material form is animated by a transfer of energy among beings, an important grounding concept for understanding the realm of community and all beings that inhabit a community. Energy is exchanged and sensed through interaction, conversations, and contemplation. We create a collective that is built from energy produced together. In community, the process of social relations -- such as a community gathering to socialize or make decisions -- snowballs the kinship energy of the collective into something greater than it was at the outset of the process. This energy moves in a continuum, and although leadership may change, we still dance and practice Mvskoke ways of being in the world. This energy extends across time and space and possesses the power to change our communities in ways that we desire. (Harjo, 55)