In the epigraph, Harjo describes the east as the direction of beginnings, where the sun rises and where living beings orient themselves for beginnings. Harjo notes that east is also the direction of Oklahoma, where lies the Creek Nation where she was born.

Harjo describes a pivotal moment as a toddler in the backseat of her father’s black Cadillac driving in Tulsa in blazing heat. Tulsa is a Creek Indian town established in the mid-1800s at the end of the Trail of Tears. She focuses on a line of music a jazz trumpeter plays on the radio and follows that sound “to the birth of sound” (17), leading her to grieve the failings of her parents and her own life. She considers this moment her “rite of passage into the world of humanity” (17), through jazz music. Harjo describes this place as the “ancestor realm,” and she refers to it as the spiritual realm in other parts of the book.

Her mother is half Cherokee, half Irish. Her father is from the Creek, or Mvskoke, Nation, the descendant of a tribal leader, but he has no living father or grandfather to guide him.