In your new book, Girl Warrior, you talk about the importance of finding inspiration in family. Can you share an example?
My great-aunt [artist Lois Harjo] was one of my most important mentors. I used to love going to her apartment because it was filled with stories—stacks of books, family stories, pottery made by Native friends of hers who all had stories. With her, I found kinship. I no longer felt like I was dropped into alien territory.

Your mother was Cherokee, French and Irish. What was she like?
She and my father were both dancers. When I grew up with them, we’d often have country swing musicians in the house jamming. That music filled my ears and my imagination before I had words.

You say you needed to escape from a repressive stepfather. That led you to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, which was where you began to find your creativity.
When I was a student at the University of New Mexico, getting involved with the Native rights movement, I started writing poetry, and the music was there again. It came to me through poetry. Then, when I was almost 40, I picked up a saxophone and started fooling around. Now I’m 74 years old, and I’m playing a lot of music. Last November, I cocurated a show at the Bob Dylan Center and later wound up singing with Taj Mahal and Jackson Browne. And two weeks before that concert, I was singing with Diana Krall, Elvis Costello and Lucinda Williams. It’s been wild. My mother always said that I was a late bloomer, but that’s pretty late.

How did you find your writer’s voice?
It surprised me because I had no plans of becoming a writer. I just started writing, and at one point I realized that this was what I needed to do. It made no sense to me or anybody else who knew me. I was a young single mother with two kids. How in the world was I going to make a living writing poetry? But I had a deep trust in what I call my council, my spiritual circle.

Tell me more about that.
It’s there for everybody, but most people don’t call it that. Some people call it “instinct.” For me, I just know things or feel a presence. It’s like a gyroscope or a level.

You talk about poems as being “transformation stations.” How so?
Art needs to transform the viewer, the listener by the end of the experience. Whether it’s a poem or a song or a painting, something shifts. And sometimes it’s not easy because art often tests our ideas of what is proper. I think of artists as the point people of the culture because they don’t remain [stuck] in what’s been done. They move forward in ways we don’t always comprehend.

Girl Warrior is a coming-of-age guide for young women, but the life principles you write about are relevant to men and women of all ages.
Coming of age isn’t just about adolescence. We hit coming-of-age moments all through our lives, collectively as well as individually. At my age, what’s constant is that we’re all getting closer to the departure gate. That’s when the awareness opens up.

When you talk about collective transformation, what comes to mind?
We need to keep moving toward kindness, connection and working together. Consensus is the Native way. You sit in a circle. There is no hierarchy. Power has to do with acts of kindness. You’re seen as being mentally ill if you start accumulating anything more than you need.

One of your principles for writing is: Develop what your great-grandfather called “long-root mind."
”That’s about having perspective rather than going after what you want now. Adolescence is about being in a youthful present, in which there’s no past or future. It moves according to whims. Long-root mind has deep roots in connection and compassion. There’s stability in it, but there’s also a wildness and depth of perception. With long-root mind, you step into an awareness of the past and the future, not just the present.

Another principle is connecting to the Earth and all living things. Tell me the story of the old Pueblo woman who taught you how to listen to an aloe vera plant.
She told me to pay attention to the plant because it knows what’s going on and has a certain kind of knowledge that you can learn from. “Be yourself,” she said. “Don’t try to be a rose or something else.”

You’ve said that storytelling becomes more important as we age. How so?
The older my children got, the longer my poems became. When I had my first granddaughter, I started writing stories. My sense is that when a child is born, mother’s milk emerges to feed the baby, but grandparents feed the babies with stories.

What do you tell your granddaughter?
I wrote a book called A Map to the Next World, based on a poem about what she needed to know. That seems to be a theme with me: “Here are some stories I hope you’ll find helpful. We’re all part of each other, walking the story.”

What gives you hope today?
I often watch my great-grandchildren to see what’s coming up. There’s a small group of little girls—around 1½ and 2 years old—and they just blow my mind. Their strength, their perception, their creativity. These kids have come to change the world dramatically.