Bioneers 2025—the March 27-29 eco-design conference founded in 1990 and held on and around the University of California Berkeley campus for the third year running—involved much talk about individual healing in support of collective action. It’s a message worth seeding in the East Bay and beyond.
There is a root to things. Muscogee Nation poet Joy Harjo was a young rebel, a caring kid who took care of others by making them laugh, playing jokes that sometimes might have gone too far but were always meant to heal.
Those traits put her on the path that eventually led to three years as the Poet Laureate of the United States. She gave a keynote at Bioneers this year and appeared on a panel called “Art and Healing,” along with fellow artist/painter Cara Romero. The panel was part of the popular and growing Indigenous Forum held every year as a part of the Bioneers conference. A recurring theme on the panel was the power that art gives to a community.
“[Art] is something that in our Indigenous communities we talk about all of us being born with,” said Romero, the director of the Indigenous Forum and a vice president with Bioneers. “Art can come in its many, many forms through us, and maybe even from something greater than us.”
Poets are known to break rules in the ways they take a deep look at things; a listen, a feel, a sensing of the thing—all tricks in the poet’s bag. For Harjo, the tools of the trade emerged through her childhood explorations of identity, painting and, eventually, the written word.
“As I child I can remember being in that realm,” Harjo said, reflecting on the focus, that zone, the flow state that for an artist comes with the act of creating. Harjo pointed out that others may enter that realm when fixing a car or pursuing scientific study. As Romero had suggested, it might just be universal. “I remember that I wanted to be in [the realm] or outside. I wanted to be by myself often. I [painted] in the closet a lot,” Harjo said, laughing.
The deep focus that artists seek is harder to access in the present polycrisis, so the desire to isolate in order to reach that “realm” may be strong. The two American, Indigenous, women artists hold that ultimately a gift is to be given. Doing so, giving from one’s creative force, does not deplete the artist, the speakers contend.
“Your creativity is never-ending, you know. It will always regenerate, and it comes from something more than human,” Romero said.
“When you are doing your art it is not just about you,” Harjo said. “Because you are giving birth to something that comes through you.” Along with self-care, Harjo conjures a powerful term: “culture care.” Heal the self to be resilient for the community.
“The artists always during these times rise up,” Romero said.
“That’s it. We found our way through it before,” Harjo added.
Being Bioneers, the threat of ecological collapse weighed on the minds of all those in the room, as did the threat of democratic collapse the country now faces. Many a Native speaker will remind climate activists that Native Americans have already survived ecological disaster.
In her plenary speech earlier in the morning, Harjo evoked the universal symbol of radical change—the caterpillar’s transformation into a butterfly. “In the chrysalis state,” she said, “[the being] is in deep listening, to imagine what’s possible, to imagine becoming.”
Harjo’s message bends toward the universal. A fragment of her poem, “Remember,” is inscribed on NASA’s “Lucy” spacecraft which, after its mission to Jupiter, will wait in a stationary orbit like a seed. There it just may be found by future generations of Earthings looking to understand their roots.
It is worth recalling Joy Harjo’s words from that plaque:
“Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth, brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their history, too.
Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember.”
