Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2004
Visions for A New World: A Journey
Through Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac
of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and
Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit and Solar Storms
Kendra Gayle Lee
Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]
THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES
VISIONS FOR A NEW WORLD: A JOURNEY THROUGH LESLIE MARMON SILKO’S
ALMANAC OF THE DEAD AND GARDENS IN THE DUNES AND LINDA HOGAN’S
MEAN SPIRIT AND SOLAR STORMS
By
KENDRA GAYLE LEE
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2004
The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Kendra Gayle Lee defended on
February 24, 2004.
______________________________
Dennis Moore
Professor Directing Thesis
______________________________
Leigh Edwards
Committee Member
______________________________
Maxine Montgomery
Committee Member
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to that Dr. Dennis Moore for his unending patience during the creation of this thesis.
I am incredibly grateful for his guidance and encouragement. Thank you to Dr. Leigh Edwards
and Dr. Maxine Montgomery for serving on my thesis committee. A special thanks to Betsy
Talton, Amanda Dorsett, Theresa Klebacha, Amy Kellogg, Wanda and Ken Lee and Angie Lee
for believing in my determination to see this project to fruition and for their constant support.
Thank you.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
v
INTRODUCTION
1
1. BORDERLANDS
4
2. WATER & LAND
23
3. ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM
40
4. SPIRITUALITY
53
5. THE VISION FOR THE BORDERLAND SOCIETY
69
REFERENCES
73
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
76
iv
ABSTRACT
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda
Hogan’s Mean Spirit and Solar Storms forge a new borderland in literature, a fluid world where
Native American traditions and Native American spirituality resonate, dynamically responding
to the world in which the characters live. The borderland of these novels calls into question
white culture’s perception of nature, society, economics and history. Silko’s and Hogan’s works
clearly express the necessity to blur boundaries, which are diametrically opposed to the
American Indian view of the Earth as a living entity with a spirit, and the necessity to create a
pull toward a new society. Yet this society is neither an assimilation to white culture nor a return
to traditional tribalism. It is a vision for a new world, undefinable by the structures that bind
Anglo-American ideas and philosophy.
This vision commands dissolution of the current
economic and class system, sensitivity to and responsibility for the environment, and a respect
for basic human rights. The vision encompasses an awareness of individual spirituality, a
connection to community and an acknowledgement of the divinity of all life. Ecofeminist
philosophy, the pull toward a union with the earth and equality for all living beings, unifies these
novels and forms a basis for analyzing them in a literary and social context.
v
INTRODUCTION
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda
Hogan’s Mean Spirit and Solar Storms forge a new borderland in literature, a fluid world where
Native American traditions and Native American spirituality resonate, dynamically responding
to the world in which the characters live. The borderland of these novels calls into question
white culture’s perception of nature, society, economics and history. Silko’s and Hogan’s works
clearly express the necessity to blur boundaries, which are diametrically opposed to the
American Indian view of the Earth as a living entity with a spirit, and the necessity to create a
pull toward a new society. Yet this society is neither an assimilation to white culture nor a return
to traditio nal tribalism. It is a vision for a new world, undefinable by the structures that bind
Anglo-American ideas and philosophy.
This vision commands dissolution of the current
economic and class system, sensitivity to and responsibility for the environment, and a respect
for basic human rights. The vision encompasses an awareness of individual spirituality, a
connection to community and an acknowledgement of the divinity of all life. Ecofeminist
philosophy, the pull toward a union with the earth and equality for all living beings, unifies these
novels and forms a basis for analyzing them in a literary and social context.
Ecofeminism figures largely into the pattern of these four novels. In fact, the philosophy
of ecofeminism underlies the structure of the novels so strongly that I could not contain my
commentary on ecofeminist principles and their relation to the novels to just one chapter.
Instead, I have woven the principles of ecofeminism throughout this thesis. In this discussion, I
have not in any way treated ecofeminism as an argument for essentialism. Rather, ecofeminism
finds its basis in principles of equality for all living things and preservation of humanity and the
Earth. The premise behind ecofeminism is not that women are inherently closer to Nature.
Instead, ecofeminists believe that no being is truly free while society continues to create
“Others” (women, different races, Nature, etc.) to dominate. Ecofeminist principles provide a
new way of looking at the world that could end a large portion of the destruction and
disenfranchisement that are prevalent in Anglo society.
1
Returning to the land and the revival of tribal culture drive these four novels by two
prominent Native American, women writers. Silko and Hogan chronicle the indigenous people’s
struggle against the suppression of their own communal, collective culture and spirituality in
favor of a capitalistic, Eurocentric culture. This thesis examines the quest to regain or return to
the land, the promise of wholeness and peace that stems from the American Indian view of the
intertwining of life, land and nature, and the manner in which each novel addresses a
Eurocentric, capitalistic structure that attempts, at every turn, to destroy land, Native American
life and a common spirituality. Each novel invokes memory, through dreams, visions, story,
song or a sense of knowing through the body, to reconcile the past with the present and create
hope for the future.
I chose Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda
Hogan’s Mean Spirit and Solar Storms without a predisposition regarding how the novels would
weave themselves together or how their themes would complement each other. Silko has been,
and remains, a viable force in the Native American writing genre. I felt that the exclusion of her
work would leave this thesis bereft of the foundation of Native American literature that she has
been so instrumental in creating.
However, I took a cursory glance at the volumes of
commentary addressing Silko’s Ceremony and decided that it would not be the best choice for
creating innovative and thought provoking commentary in the field of Native American
literature. I opted to use two of her lesser known works, Gardens in the Dunes and Almanac of
the Dead, to gain access to her wealth of experience and acclaim as a Native American author yet
explore essentially untapped literary ground.
Linda Hogan’s work, on the contrary, I stumbled upon quite by accident. I had chosen
and read books by various female Native American authors whom I knew were respected in the
field, yet I had not actually read any of their texts. Ultimately, Hogan’s vivid imagery and power
of her prose drew me to her work. Mean Spirit was the first novel I read in its entirety for this
thesis. I knew I also wanted to include another of Hogan’s later novels in this thesis. However,
at that point, I found it necessary to read Gardens in the Dunes to begin to explore similar themes
and threads running throughout Hogan’s and Silko’s works. After beginning to weave together
the chapters of this thesis, Solar Storms became a clear choice as the second text by Hogan that I
would incorporate.
2
Silko’s Almanac of the Dead became somewhat of an enigma to me, as I could find very
little commentary on it at all. What commentary I did find was on such disparate themes that it
seemed impossible that scholars were writing about the same novel. I opted to include Almanac
as a challenge to myself, after hearing that it was Silko’s most difficult and ambiguous text.
However, after reading all four novels, the parallels regarding borderlands, the existence of the
“Other” in Anglo society and the freedoms and new social and literary spaces that can be forged
out of that same “Othering;” the Anglo and Native American response to and regard for water
and land; Native American alternatives to capitalism; and Native American spirituality and its
relation to Anglo, institutionalized religion were simply undeniable. The chapters of this thesis
had created themselves.
Ultimately, works by Hogan and Silko proved to be solid choices for academic
commentary on Native American writing.
Both have been on the forefront of the Native
American literary movement since the 1970s. Their background as poets is evidenced by the
fluidity of their prose. Hogan has published four novels and multiple volumes of poetry. Mean
Spirit, published in 1990, was her first departure from poetry. Book of Medicines, Solar Storms
and Power then followed. Silko also began as a poet but published her first novel, Ceremony, in
1977. Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead, Yellow Woman and Gardens in the Dunes exist as
some of her most widely acclaimed works of fiction.
3
CHAPTER 1
BORDERLANDS
“Native American writing arises from the experience of dispossession” (Brice 127)
This chapter introduces the tradition of Native American literature, situating Hogan and
Silko in that tradition. Studies by Vine Deloria, Jr., Gloria Anzaldúa, and other contemporary
authors, critics and sociologists of contemporary Native American life form the basis for my
analysis of the cultural climates of the novels. This chapter examines the manner in which the
authors weave storytelling—through song, through myth, through oral tradition, through a
suspension of time and place, and through magical realism—throughout their novels. This
chapter juxtaposes these storytelling techniques against more traditional, linear forms of
expression.
Fully appreciating the Borderland in which these Native American authors tell their
stories requires an understanding of the concept of a national landscape. This thesis relies
heavily on David Noble’s recent Death of a Nation:
American Culture and the End of
Exceptionalism to define and delineate the theory of a national landscape.
While different
scholars have explored the notion of a national landscape and the “othering” of non-Anglos and
women to create the idea of a unified nation of Anglo males, Noble’s work proved instrumental
in writing this thesis because it did not specifically address individual works of literature to a
great extent. Instead, Noble’s concepts and historical perspective lend themselves specifically to
the themes I am discussing in this thesis because he paints the national landscape and the way
that “others” fade into and out of the picture as it is painted.
According to Noble, the theories of Hegel, who believed that one nation, a necessarily
Protestant nation would “lead the exodus from a lower to a higher civilization,” formed the basis
4
of what would become Ame rica’s national landscape (1). Theoretically, the Protestants’ lack of
allegiance to the Holy Catholic Church made them capable of leading this revolution in thought;
Protestants were “autonomous individual[s] who [were] capable of giving total loyalty to the
nation-state” (Noble 2). By the early 1800s, America in general had already cast Catholics aside
as archaic and attached to the past (Noble 1). This disavowing of Catholicism placed the
southwest and Mexico immediately outside of the national landscape, since many cultures of the
southwest and Mexico are, to the present day, a blend of American Indian spirituality and
Catholicism: “When Catholicism displaced the Oriental civilization of the Aztecs and the Incas,
one could not expect that Protestant liberty would supersede Catholic tyranny. Central and
South America were a hopelessly profane space” (Noble 3). This objectification of Native
American and Mexican cultures as “Other” becomes exceedingly clear in Almanac, where the
push to consume all the natural resources, to exploit the people that originated from this profane
space, reigns supreme. As Richard Haly writes in an essay in the collection Native American
Spirituality: “From the perspective of nationalism, indigenous religion can be described only in
terms of syncretism, a bastard and adopted (read illegitimate) mestizaje of Spanish Catholicism
and preconquest practices” (159).
The national landscape immediately became defined by
groups which the majority denied membership in the national landscape.
Noble makes clear that the dichotomy between two worlds found its genesis in the
European middle class as the split between the Old World and the New World:
“In this
metaphor of two worlds the medieval world represented a pattern of complex traditions created
by human imagination.
But the new World represented the simple laws of nature to be
discovered by human reason. And reason was the attribute of individuals, while imagination was
the attribute of groups” (Noble xxvi). As the first colonists came to America, they sought to free
themselves from what they saw as a class-ridden, feudalistic society. They saw the new world as
a place for the individual, a place where so-called reason would over-ride class. However, part
of what they encountered instead was a pre-existing society of groups, wrought with what they
saw as imagination, superstition: “Irrational group cultures had always kept Indians from being
in harmony with nature” (Noble xxvii).
Immediately, the concept of nature formed a split
between Anglo and Native American cultures.
Nature, for Anglo culture, combined
individuality, reason, order and the superiority of human beings. Native American culture
experienced nature by blending into the landscape, living communally and respecting all life as
5
equal. The clash between these two ideas continues to endure and divide the Anglo and Native
American cultures.
From the very moment the European culture encountered Native American culture, the
two cultures clashed regarding the ideal of being in harmony with nature. Even the concept of
nature, which in Native American terms means being equal with all living beings and
contributing to the community and to the earth, contrasted sharply with the European concept of
nature founded on scientific reason and individualism. In the Native Americans, Europeans
encountered a people that they thought they had to save—in their own terms of salvation.
Centuries later Tomas J. Morgan, the United States Government’s Commissioner of Indian
Affairs, wrote in 1889: “The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the
family and the autonomy of the individual substituted” (qtd in Irwin 300). From the moment that
the colonists appeared, the concept of the individual began to chip away at Native American
communal culture; the government took great stock in ensuring that the concept of the individual
reigned supreme. Yet white society offered little to emulate: “Had whites been able to maintain
a sense of stability in their own society, which Indians had been admonished to imitate, the tribes
might have been able to observe the integrity of the new way of life and make a successful
transition to it. But the only alternative that white society had to offer was a chaotic and extreme
individualism, prevented from irrational excesses only by occasional government intervention”
(Deloria “Out of Chaos” 247). The individual achieved primacy in the national landscape from
its very conception.
But today, some scholars wonder if the cost of the emphasis on the
individual might have proven detrimental to American society as a whole: “[T]he philosophy of
the primacy of the individual has in fact stripped individuals of the social and spiritual structures
that define their humanity” (St. Clair 141). Stripped of most societal ties, the individual has little
responsibility for his actions and the ways they affect the greater community.
Europeans, detached from their homeland and their ancestry, glorified the concept of the
individual. What European society failed to realize was that, for Native American cultures
grounded in community and place, “Exile was the ultimate punishment” (Noble xxxviii). Tribes
living in the Americas believed that the Great Spirit had specifically given them that land to use;
for them, land is inextricably tied to the sacred (Deloria “Religion” 127). Land served not only
as a place one resided, but as a nurturer and a teacher: “like a mother, [the land] shapes and
teaches our species and, according to the peculiarity of the area, produces certain basic forms of
6
personality and social identity which could not be produced in any other way” (Deloria “Native
American Spirituality” 131). But, as Noble argues, how could Europeans who had left their
homeland of their own volition ever understand this notion of land? As opposed to seeing the
land as maternal, the Europeans saw themselves as coming into what the mid-twentieth century
critic Henry Nash Smith labeled virgin land, “emancipated from history, happily bereft of
ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race” (Noble 118).
There was no consideration of the ancestry that came before them; “’virgin land’ … had taken
Europeans and made them American” (Noble 123). Europeans quickly replaced the maternity of
the land with the rape and destruction of the land.
For Europeans, the individual was more sacred than ancestral land, more sacred than
community. The right of the individual overshadowed all. While Native American culture
passed sacred beliefs, stories, traditions, ceremonies, and songs from generation to generation,
Europeans scoffed at this idea of the sacred: “In contrast to this sense of generational continuity,
the English Protestants had redefined the sacreds passed from generation to generation in the
medieval world by Catholics and Jews as profane” (Noble xxxviii).
National boundaries,
founded on European conquest, created and defined the national landscape and what it meant to
be American:
“[D]ominant Anglo-Protestant men, in monopolizing the term American for
themselves, had often justified their exclusion of the peoples of color because those peoples had
relationships to cultures outside the national boundaries…. Even the Native Americans could be
imagined as having links to indigenous peoples throughout the Americas” (Noble 149). Links to
any culture other than the Anglo culture, no matter how long those links had existed or how deep
their roots, were now null and void.
From within these boundaries, the confinement of other ways of knowing and other
modes of community, Native American literature now fights to create a space in the Borderlands.
Understanding the national landscape as Anglo-defined and dominated, “[a] borderland is a
vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary…. The
prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants” (Anzaldúa 25). Many images of indigenous people
clash, meld and swirl in the minds of the white majority. Silko and Hogan address these images,
confronting white culture with the gravity of its own sins and dispelling myths regarding Native
American peoples. Silko’s and Hogan’s novels create a uniquely indigenous space that neither
ignores the outside white culture nor accepts its long-standing abuses and stereotypes. Linear,
7
rational, European-based modes of narrative lose their authority in the Borderlands: “Native
spiritual traditions live in song, story and ceremony,” according to Robin Ridington. “Songs,
stories, and ceremonies have an internal consistency. They represent the way things are. They
constitute a language of performance, participation and experience. They represent the cosmic
order within which the world realizes its meaning” (98).
Europeans paint landscapes of
nationality; Native American literature and expression weaves a tapestry of shared, communal
experience.
Native American writers battle against a canon that, as Noble explains, once saw only
Protestant Anglo males as the “universal national”: “No arts by other Americans could be
canonized because they represented only a particular class, a particular section, a particular
gender, a particular race or ethnicity” (130). The national landscape allowed for recognition only
of literary works by Anglo males; no other group could be part of the national landscape. For
literary theorist Phillip Fischer, the “national uniformity of capitalism of individual competition
was periodically challenged by the formation of groups that wanted to draw boundaries around
themselves” (qtd. in Noble 238). Native American authors recognized their position as “Other.”
They created their own voice based from on exclusion.
The national landscape remained closed to “Other” groups to the point that Anglo
scholars no longer recognized the exclusionary practices on which the national landscape found
its grounding: “Fischer … could not imagine economic, political and cultural power used by
Anglo-Protestant men to impose the stigma of inferiority… He could not imagine that …groups
felt a sense of otherness imposed on them. If they did, according to Fischer, it had been imposed
on them by academics who had themselves chosen their identities as outsiders, as nonparticipants
in the normal society in which the vast majority of Americans participated” (Noble 239). Paul
Jay, however, recognized the sense of alienation of other cultures from American literature and
called for the teaching of writings from all of the multi-cultural groups that constituted America
(Noble 240).
No matter how exclusive the new Americans envisioned the national landscape, the
indigenous people who resided on the continent before the concept of a national landscape—or
even the concept of a nation—created a blemish:
[Native Americans] had been part of what Anglo-Protestants called the national
landscape for thousands of years. This meant, for Anglo-Protestants, that
American Indians had to be removed from the landscape. This could be done by
8
physical genocide or cultural genocide. By the 1880s, many Anglo-Protestants
believed that if Indian cultures were purged from the landscape, the surviving
people could be integrated into Anglo-Protestant culture. What was essential,
however, was that the memories of separate Indian cultures, once deeply
embedded in the landscape, vanish. Going into the twent ieth century, the AngloProtestant vision of the vanishing Indian meant the death of Indian cultures and
their burial in unmarked graves. (Noble 246)
Native Americans, existing on the canvas even before the Europeans had painted the national
landscape, now had no place.
To even be acknowledged as “Other” in this landscape, Native Americans must recreate
themselves to fit the European concept of the new stage of Anglo-America: “Indians must play
out their roles, act out the transformation of their ‘self’ into that fictive vanishing other, so that
the white man may continue to be the hero in the national script of progress in the name of
prosperity and equality” (Krasteva 55). The American landscape relegated Native Americans to
reservations. Anglo Americans believed that the Native Americans, removed from the world of
their ancestors, would assimilate and blend into the national landscape or exit the stage
completely: “[T]he removal and attempted alienation of Native peoples from their ancestral land
bases by government forces almost ensures cultural genocide. The land bases give form and
sustenance to Native cultures; the ceremonial, spiritual life of any Native culture is guided
intimately by the land base as teacher as well as provider” (Hernandez-Avila 18). If the national
landscape had to accommodate the presence of the Native “Other,” it would demand exile and
eventual extinction.
As Hogan’s narrator points out, the Native American world exists in isolation, a fringe of
the national landscape: “[W]hite people rarely concerned themselves with Indian matters, …
Indians were the shadow people, living almost invisibly on the fringes around them, and this
shadowy world allowed for a strange kind of freedom” (Mean 81). The majority culture has
written Native Americans out of the national landscape as if they never existed, as if they were a
dream: “Native American people can be tolerated as long as they stay in the margins of society,
as long as they remain poor, or invisible…. They are treated as mere commodities, investment,
objects for circulation, enrichment or entertainment” (Krasteva 56). It becomes obvious, when
whites are murdering Indians in Watona at an alarming rate in Hogan’s Mean Spirit, that the
white sheriff sees them as less than human: “[T]hese Indians aren’t like us….[U]nder it all,
they’re still different. Half savage maybe” (125). Whether they vanish by cultural genocide or
9
murder, their suffering matters little to the larger Anglo society that, at every turn, attempts to
erase the ir mere existence from history.
Native Americans have long existed on the national landscape as a fiction, a myth. In his
introduction to The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III notes that the idea
of the noble savage has been long-standing: “[I]n the second half of the eighteenth century the
Noble Indian ruled … presenting ‘savage’ life as simple, communal, happy, free, equal and
pure—as inherently good, and exemplified by America’s indigenous people” (18).
This
perspective formulates an interesting concept when juxtaposed against the notion that every
effort of the United States government from the time of colonization until recently (and some
may argue even now), sought to destroy the indigenous way of life and assimilate the Native
Americans into white culture. Always a pawn in the national landscape, in the 1960s and 1970s
Native Americans became part of the counterculture: “As critics linked many current global
predicaments to industrial society, spoke openly of earlier less complex times as being more
environmentally friendly, they marshaled Ecological Indians … to the support of environmental
and antitechnocratic causes” (Krech 20). Krech argues that stereotypes of Native Americans,
even in a positive light, “are ultimately dehumanizing. They deny both variation with in human
groups and commonalties between them” (26). Stereotypes of any kind dehumanize the “Other.”
Much more useful is looking at the Native American cultures, presently and historically, and
determining how they differ from Anglo culture and what those differences offer in the way of
lessons.
Native American literature spent much time in exile before Native American writers
began, in the 1930s, to reclaim their place in the national landscape. Early Native American
writing efforts often depicted protagonists who succumbed to their prescribed role of “Other”:
“Louis Owens, one of the first nationally recognized American Indian literary critics, pointed out
in his work, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992), that the two
major novels written by Indians in the 1930s…presented protagonists who were lost between
their tribal cultures and the dominant culture, and they could not escape their alienation. It was
important for Owens, therefore, that a generation later, in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the
protagonist escapes his alienation and returns to tribal culture” (Noble 247). Almost thirty years
later, Silko and Hogan write unapologetic narratives, demanding a place in the national
landscape—and Anglo repentance for Native American exile.
10
In order to fully understand Silko’s and Hogan’s work, we must view them within the
literary world as Native American writers, but also as eco- feminists. In fact, as Mellor notes in
Feminism and Ecology, the Native American spiritual beliefs and the Native American view of
their own relationship to the land have had a powerful influence in areas of the ecofeminist
movement (48). Mellor does, however, find it “problematic” that Anglo- feminists are co-opting
the beliefs of Native Americans and using them “out of context” (55). I would have to agree that
co-opting Native American beliefs without the cultural understanding of what it means to be
Native American amounts to little more than cultural imperialism. However, Native American
authors’ ecofeminist works can blend indigenous beliefs and ecological concern to create
powerful, strong works—and rightfully so.
Ecofeminists view the destruction of the earth as a direct corollary to the subjugation and
oppression of women. The ecofeminist movement today places primary emphasis on “the crisis
of modernity, as the ecological cost of ‘progress’ became apparent; a critique of (western)
‘patriarchal man’ as the cause of that crisis; a call to women/female/the feminine/feminism to be
the agent(s) of change; a seeming prioritization of the ‘female gender,’ but a commitment to a
non-gendered egalitarianism rather than ‘power-to-women’” (Mellor 44). For society to reach
an egalitarian plateau, the subjugation of the earth, of women, of the “Other,” must cease.
For the earth to continue to exist, a new order must come into play, an order where all
living things are equal. As ecofeminist writers, both Silko and Hogan acknowledge the need for
equality and respect and demand that Anglo culture respond to the need. As Andrew Smith
notes in a recent article on Mean Spirit, Ana Carew-Miller “has argued, [that] Hogan presents an
‘alternative model [for living]’ which has no ‘male/female power struggle . . . because of the
value placed on interdependence’” (176). I believe that the same generalization applies to
Silko’s novels, Almanac and Gardens. The themes of the struggle against domination and the
interconnectedness of all life resurface repeatedly in these novels, weaving through the Native
American community’s relationship to the land, the struggle for recognition of land rights from
dominant Anglo-America, the relationships that Native American men have to their own
community, and the view the dominant society has of those same men.
Mellor points out that Ynestra King “sees the domination of men over women as the
‘prototype’ of all other forms of domination, so that potentially feminism creates a concrete
global community of interest through interconnection with other dominations, ‘its challenge …
11
extends beyond sex to social dominations of all kinds because the domination of sex, race and
class, and nature are all mutually reinforcing’” (59). By breaking these stereotypes, in what
Janet Biehl defines in another context in 1988 as an “ethic of care,” the men and women in the
four novels break away from the very forces that stifle this sort of caring: “commercialism and
bureaucratization” (Mellor 157). It is important to note that Biehl later disavows ecofeminism
entirely, due in part to what she considers “privileged quasi-biological traits” (Mellor 158).
Biehl need not have worried that Silko would devolve into biologism; both Almanac and
Gardens cast certain women as destroyers, having absolutely no connection to the natural world.
In Almanac, Leah Blue drains the remaining water from the Arizona landscape to build a posh
community for the wealthy, and Gardens depicts Edward’s sister, Susan, ripping up gardens and
changing them at her every whim and treating animals as mere objects.
Stereotyping Native Americans as close to nature functions as another form of biologism:
“[Anglo society] victimize[s] Indians when they strip them of all agency in their lives except
when their actions fit the image of the Ecologic al Indian” (Krech 216). And this “victimiz[ing]”
is a reduction into biologism, which patriarchal cultures have used to tie women to nature and
make them incapable of rationality. I believe—and research has led me to conclude that this
belief would be supported by Native American culture—that, as Ynestra King noted, “since all
life is interconnected, one group of persons cannot be closer to nature” (paraphrased in Birkeland
22). Forcing a stereotype of a biological closeness with nature on Native Americans places the
onus on them to save the environment. What is more productive is to look to Native American
cultures and beliefs for a different way of seeing the world, a different value system and cultural
and spiritual structure . In her article “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice,” Janis
Birkeland points out the crucial need for equality as society begins to transform: “Ecofeminists
believe that we cannot end the exploitation of nature without ending human opposition, and vice
versa” (19). As different in construct and theme as their novels are, Silko and Hogan emphasize
that the national landscape must change. There must be no “Other,” human or nature. Equal
respect must exist for all human life and for Nature itself.
As the restrictions on Native American religion loosened in America, when practitioners
no longer feared for their lives and received their First Amendment rights, the tribes began to
seek what they had lost—spiritually and materially—in the conquest. For instance, in Almanac,
Sterling reminisces about the Laguna delegation’s trip to Santa Fe to reclaim the “little
12
grandparents,” spirit beings carved in stone that greedy whites had stolen from them. At that
moment the curator and the delegation catch a glimpse of what will unravel through the
remainder of the novel: “The Laguna delegation later recounted how the white man had suddenly
looked around at all of them as if he were afraid they had come to take back everything that had
been stolen. In that instant white man and Indian both caught a glimpse of what was yet to
come” (33). The conflict between Native American as “Other” and the dominant Anglo culture
fortifies these novels with a justified, quiet rage and a strong determination to resist.
In Almanac, years of separation from their land and culture cause even the Indians to
have difficulty defining their being, their identity. They have become disconnected from their
own way of life, through disbursement and disconnection with the tribes and the traditional ways
of life: “Sterling had begun to realize that people he had been used to calling ‘Mexicans’ were
really remnants of different kinds of Indians. But what had remained of what was Indian was in
appearance only—the skin and the hair and the eyes. The cheekbones and nose like eagles and
hawks.
They had lost contact with their tribes and their ancestors’ worlds” (88).
Such
assimilation had none of the benefits; its only reward is soul loss.
Sterling reminds the reader that boarding school, designed to facilitate assimilation into
the white world, served to sever Indian children from their way of life: “Sterling knew that
sending the children away to boarding schools was the main problem. He and the other children
had to learn what they could about the kachinas and the ways to pray or greet the deer, other
animals, and plants during the summer vacations, which were too short” (87-88). Assimilation
and “progress” caused the death of knowledge that can never be reborn. A large part of the
knowledge regarding healing medicines ceased to exist due to the banning of tribal religions and
practices, the confinement of Indians to the reservation, and the flooding of lands by dams
created by the government (Deloria “Tribal Religions” 319). In “Freedom, Law and Prophecy:
A Brief History of Native American Religious Existence,” Lee Irwin notes that the United States
government established boarding schools to strip Native American children of their language,
culture and religion (301). These compulsory boarding schools functioned in this fashion, with
much the same mission, until the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 (304).
Perhaps boarding school served its purpose all too well.
The protagonist of Solar Storms, Angel Wing, learns about her mother’s boyfriend, the
town’s “chosen one.” His destiny ended where boarding school began: “At school they told him
13
everything he had learned was wrong, and with these two knowings, that’s when he got lost”
(246). Deloria articulates the two knowings as the difference between practical knowledge,
which “seemed to concentrate on making a student a useful member of society,” and an “abstract
body of knowledge,” with no real practical application (“Burden” 161). Native, communal
culture and knowledge, built on experiential knowing, suffocated beneath abstract, ideals
divorced from the experience of life.
Without the experience to apply practical ways of knowing, however, these ways of
knowing exist only as cliché. In Almanac, Zeta and Lecha become jaded by the need to employ
the idea of the “Indian Way” when it is expedient for Indians to justify their actions or their
positions on issues, whether they have ever really acknowledged or lived their heritage (133).
To say that one is justified by living the “Indian Way,” or behaving in that manner, when he or
she has fully assimilated into white culture, becomes the ultimate in hypocrisy.
The dichotomy between Native American culture and Anglo society engenders another
point of contention: the artificial nature of borders. Fixated on a national landscape and an
American people that live only within this nation’s confines, borders—no matter how arbitrary—
serve as a cornerstone of the national landscape.
However, Native American characters in
Almanac draw the futility of borders into light: “We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders.
Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites …. We know where we
belong on this earth. We have always moved freely…. We pay no attention to what isn’t real.
Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that” (213).
The imaginative nature of these boundaries exposes them for what they are: constructs of a
fictitious national landscape.
Borderlands become even more evident when characters exist in the liminal world of the
amalgamation of cultures, when white people live among Indians, learning from them and
translating that experience into a life pattern, not just a moment of exotic thrill of the “Other.”
As Noble notes, assimilation runs not only from dominant to minority cultures, but also the other
way around (cite). Of white ancestry, Floyd Graycloud, Belle and Moses Graycloud’s son-inlaw, serves as the “mestizo,” the blend between white and Native American culture in Mean
Spirit: “Floyd imitated Indian ways. He had proudly taken the Graycloud name when he
married Louise” (34). As Floyd moves further away from his white ancestry, Louise moves
toward it (Mean 35). Not until the tragedy of Belle Graycloud’s near death, brought on by the
14
murderous tendency of white culture to consume valuable land at all cost, does Louise return to
the traditional ways (321). In Mean Spirit, as the whites kill Native Americans like animals they
would hunt for sport, the two ways of living exist as so mutually exclusive that there can be no
compromise.
In this same novel, Stace Red Hawk realizes this chasm between white and Native
American culture as he begins to note how different he is from his white partner. He comes to
the understanding that the white man sees crying as a sign of weakness. But, as Stace notes,
“Black Elk also wept. All the good, strong men cried” (266). The theme of the white man’s
weakness being the mark of the Native American man’s strength resonates in Solar Storms when
the old man, Tulik, takes Angel’s baby, Aurora, and holds her at a town meeting with the
government contractors regarding the dam that is ruining the land. White men see humanity,
emotion, and compassion as weaknesses.
When Tulik speaks at the meeting with the
government officials and contractors, he commands attention until he picks Aurora up to stop her
from fussing: “Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they
considered soft and unworthy. From that moment on they seemed not to consider Tulik to be a
leader of his people” (281-82). In Anglo culture, nurturing and caring fall under the feminine
realm and, therefore, are not only undesirable but shameful. There exists no such dichotomy in
Native American culture.
Ben Graycloud, the young grandson of Moses and Belle in Mean Spirit, feels the pain of
his people deeply. At the peyote gathering where Native American people pray, chant and
lament the misery that has fallen upon them, as Ben prays, Moses “thought how his grandson had
a good heart and a man’s strong words and he was proud at the same time that he was miserable
under the weight of their history” (75). Yet the misery of his people was bound to take its toll on
the sensitive young man. When the misery caught up with him, he employed self-destructive
coping mechanisms to escape the pain. Gloria Anzaldúa notes that this sort of coping
mechanism resonates as familiar in the world of the American Indian: “In order to escape the
threat of shame or fear, one takes on a compulsive, repetitious activity to distract oneself, to keep
awareness at bay. One fixates on drinking, smoking, popping pills…; repeating, repeating to
prevent oneself from ‘seeing’” (67).
Ben Graycloud disappears into this self-destructive phase when he comes home from the
boarding school, shortly after Nola has gotten married. When he returns home, he does not first
15
go to see his family. Instead, he decides that “[h]e wanted a drink, to ease his pain, and with a
deep wave of sorrow and fear, he … entered the smoky speakeasy” (252). Is the wave of sorrow
and fear because he knows what will come next, that one drink can never ease his pain, and that
the quest to be numb will overtake him? It is as if, as Inez Hernández-Ávila claims, alcoho lism
is “directly related to the immense grief and despair over [Native] losses” (24).
A similar type of situation occurs as Angel, Dora-Rouge and Bush return to the land of
the Fat-Eaters, Dora-Rouge’s people. The hydroelectric dam project has devastated their land.
The government has relocated the people, and they are in a state of despair, having turned to
alcohol to numb their pain: “Those without alcohol were even worse off, and the people wept
without end, and tried to cut and burn their own bodies. The older people tied their hands with
ropes and held them tight hoping the desire to die would pass…. The devastation and ruin that
had fallen over the land fell over the people, too. Most were too broken to fight the building of
the dams, the moving of the waters, and that perhaps had been the intention all along” (226).
In the dominant national landscape, created to feed the Anglo ego, many historians and
American Studies scholars have defined Native Americans as a people with what Russell Piesing
has historicized as an unusable past, a people who are outside the universal national landscape
(Noble). However, these are the same Native Americans that served in the armed forces and
fought for the rights of all Americans and who wear Honor Blankets with American beaded flags
(Mean 153). Hogan’s novel makes the point that Native Americans are suited to defend the
national landscape, but not to exist as a vibrant part of it.
Almanac creates a subtle but pervasive emphasis on storytelling, centering around
Lecha’s actual translation of the A lmanac of the Dead. This translation comprises the story
dwelling in the sub-context of the novel. The A lmanac is a map, a story that serves as a
guidepost for the people: “[T]he almanac was what told them who they were and where they had
come from in the stories…. The people knew if even part of their almanac survived, they as a
people would return some day” (246). The A lmanac seems separate from all that happens in the
novel, yet it is the focus and driving force that weaves its way through the novel. As Gregory
Salyer notes in “Myth, Magic and Dread: Reading Culture Religiously,” “Storytelling can spin
webs around otherness and loss in ways that are creative, meaningful and ultimately healing”
(268). Healing, resonating, the stories, not only in Almanac but in all four novels, command a
life of their own.
16
Storytelling functions as a way to keep tradition alive, tradition that defines the Native
American tribes as a people: “They have lived in a world of storied experience. They have lived
in a conversation with the spiritual. They have brought a world into being through discourse”
(Ridington 98). In “Freud, Marx and Chiapas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,”
Deborah Horvitz makes the point that the A lmanac serves as a pointed reminder that “the past,
no mater how painful, must be recognized and remembered” (48). She refers to Almanac as a
“ceremony” because, according to Paula Gunn Allen, “the purpose of a ceremony is to integrate”
individuals, communities and other realms (qtd. in Horvitz 49). Almanac synthesizes different
modes of storytelling, viewpoints, characters and cultures (Horvitz 49).
Authors of American Indian ancestry have forced a place in literature where they now
exist as subject—a subject that determines what the role of Anglo readers should entail. As
Anzaldúa asserts, addressing a white audience: “We need you to own the fact that you looked
upon us as less then human, that you stole our lands, our personhood, our self-respect. We need
you to make public restitution: to say that, to compensate for your own sense of defectiveness,
you strive for power over us, you erase our history and our experience because it makes you feel
guilty—you’d rather forget your brutish acts” (108). I feel it necessary to point out that scholar
Richard Haly, in his essay “Nahuas and National Culture,” which I have quoted in this thesis,
seems to take issue with Anzaldúa’s use of a “female Nahua divinity… to make her own
argument as to what it is to be Chicana and lesbian.” He further implies that this sort of usage is
academically irresponsible and may lead to “cultural imperialism” (162). I take issue with this
statement because, ultimately, these four novels strive for peace, a dissolution of boundaries
between humankind and an understanding of the interconnectedness, the divinity, of all life.
Anzaldúa claims Nahua ancestry as part of being Chicana.
It certainly does not seem
imperialistic to use one’s own heritage to bridge the gap in understanding that she knows exists
between her Chicana heritage and her lesbian identity.
What seems to be at issue is the
amalgamation of the two cultures. If Haly were correct, then even a woman of shared heritage
would not have the right to blend those two distinct cultures.
Native American culture considers the stories of the people or their history sacred, the
source of their entire existence: “If the people had not retold the stories, or if the stories had
somehow been lost, then the people were lost; the ancestors’ spirits were summoned by the
stories” (Almanac 316). Ridington notes that “Indian stories do not begin and end like the lines
17
of words that make up a book. Rather they stop and start at meaningful points within a circle.
Stories, songs and ceremonies constitute a body of tribal literature passed down from generation
to generation” (112). As the story of Angel’s life begins to unfold in Solar Storms, Agnes tries
to find the right words, the right beginning for Angel’s story: “As in Genesis, the first word
shaped what would follow. It was of utmost importance. It determined the kind of world that
would be created” (37). Words can shape a person’s life, alter their very being; but words lose
their generative power in the face of the government’s bureaucratic machine.
When the
government agents remove Angel from Bush’s custody, Bush who had raised her since Angel’s
mother tried to end her infant life by freezing Angel to death, Angel knows that “Bush had
fought hard for me against the strongest of our enemies, a system, a government run by clerks
and bureaucrats” (72). However, the system does not care to hear people’s stories or their songs.
Beginnings are not important to the system; process is. Angel feels as though her story is
fragmented, split by people and events that she cannot connect with, that she cannot sort through
to begin to weave her own story: “I didn’t know then that what I really wanted none of us would
ever have. I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past” (77). Only when she returns to
her people and her ancestors does Angel realize that she had “searched all my life for this older
world that was lost to me, this world only my body remembered. In that moment I understood I
was part of the same equation as the birds and the rain” (79). The language one uses to tell one’s
own story defines that life and shapes it. Before Angel learned the art of storytelling, she
considered herself and her life a void. The storytelling she is learning from her people gives her
the power to shape her own being through language: “I had been empty space, and now I was
finding an language, a story, to shape myself by” (94).
In each of the novels, “[S]tories are alive with the energy words generate” (Almanac
520). This energy may be formative or healing, as the words that Belle uses as “a road out of
pain and fear” after her adopted daughter, Grace Blanket’s murder for the oil that runs beneath
her land (Mean 33). Even inanimate objects have stories to be told; Michael Horse listens for the
story of the explosion that killed Sarah, Grace Blanket’s sister and Benoit’s wife, in a ring he
finds at the site of the explosion that took Sarah’s life, destroyed their home, and landed Benoit
in prison for a crime all of the Native Americans knew that he did not commit (79).
Anzaldúa notes that “[t]he ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller
and listener into something or someone else is shamanistic” (88). Traditionally, Anglo stories
18
follow the storyteller-and- listener pattern. Resigned to childlike passivity, the listener does not
engage in the mutual dialogue of respect that exists in Native American storytelling. In Native
American culture, stories transform the teller and the listener. Native American stories assume
their own power, affecting the teller and the listener: “this power ensures the story to be retold,
and with each retelling a slight but permanent shift took place” (Almanac 581). These novelists
do not create the power of Native American storytelling in a vacuum. Native American scholar
Jo-ann Archibald notes that “Respect is essential. Everyone has a place within the circle…. All
also have a particular cultural responsibility to their place, their role: the storyteller-teachers to
share their knowledge with others; the listener- learners to make meaning form the storyteller’s
words and to put meaning into everyday practice, thereby continuing the action of reciprocity”
(qtd in Ridington 100). Without this mutual respect, a kinship between the teller and the listener,
the story would be reduced to mere tropes and meaningless myth.
In Mean Spirit, the rules which create the narrative define Anglo storytelling. Michael Horse,
diviner and journal writer, notes in his journal: “Right or wrong. For us, it is such a simple
thing, only a matter of whether a wrong has been done, or someone harmed. But they have
books filled with words, with rules about how the story can and cannot be spoken. There is not
room enough, nor time, to search for the real story that lies beneath the rest” (341). These rules
consume the meaning of the story, suck the power from the story, relegate it to the sidelines.
Horse asserts that, in Anglo storytelling, the narrative structure matters more than the meaning.
Even in death, the story (or song) transforms the teller and the listener. In Solar Storms,
Angel has her first encounter with the singing of a death song: “But what touched me most was
that they buried with her a song that was not ever to be sung again. Her song” (142). The
(singing) storytelling provides closure for the singer and a lasting eulogy for the subject. Songs
can also forge a beginning. They can cleanse a person, renewing their spirit. When taking
healing plants still has not helped a person, the singers are called in. Songs then become a
cleansing and healing force: “when there was nothing to be done but sing into the patient, to
place new songs inside their body, songs that would replace illness with a song of mending”
(Solar 261).
The novelists show that stories, history, may even be written in the body. Nola’s pain,
and the history of her people, unleashes itself in the moment that she tries to kill herself, after
swarming crickets have overtaken her in her bedroom: “A history of fear and sorrow had come
19
undone in the child” (Mean 105-06). Other times, suffering and agony always exist just below
the surface. Agnes tells the story of Loretta, Angel’s biological grandmother, who carried
around the aura of her pain. One could sense her suffering by simply being close to her:
The curse on that poor girl’s life came from watching the desperate people of her
tribe die …. But after that, when she was still a girl, she’d been taken and used by
men who fed her and beat her and forced her. That was how one day she became
the one who hurt others. It was passed down. I could almost hear their voices
when she talked, babbling behind hers, men’s voices speaking English.
Something scary lived behind her voice (39).
Loretta later produces a child of pain: Hannah, Angel’s mother. Hannah becomes the
sum total of her abusers; her soul is no longer in her body. She is an empty shell where evil
meets. She never sleeps; her abusers live inside of her, commanding a life of their own at
various times: “They came awake at night, those who’d hurt her. Them. Those who walk the
floor in her skin” (Solar 100). No one can help this child of pain and suffering. The shaman,
Old Man, says he is not strong enough to sing the song that could save her. The Christians also
turn away: “The religious people would never go near her. She tested their faith and next to her,
their faith failed….They felt the world that was wounded and would never be whole again”
(101). Beyond redemption, a product of the white man’s wanton abuse, Hannah begets Angel,
whom she then attempts to absorb back into her own body by gnawing on her face, leaving the
lasting scars of a tormented soul: “Scars had shaped my life. I was marked and I knew the
marks had something to do with my mother …. While I never knew how I got the scars, I knew
they were the reason I’d been taken from my mother so many years before” (Solar 25). Just as
pain can be written on the body, so too can healing. When Angel catches Bush looking at the
scars on her face, Bush tells her: “Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To
me they are proof of the fact that there is healing” (125).
Hogan explains, through Stace Read Hawk’s prayers, the spiritual and mortal danger in
which the people of Watona dwell. His prayers also delineate his own journey through his faith
and his battle to believe and connect with the spirits in the most dire times (Mean 205). His
prayers take on the power of a story, seeking help and peace. Although they do not follow a
linear form, the raw honesty and emotion apparent in this method of storytelling clearly
expresses the desperation of the situation.
20
Memory tells its own story; often, in Native American communities, it is a communal
story of grief and suffering. As Agnes notes in Solar Storms, for Native Americans “mourning
was our common ground … loyalty for the act of grief” (15). When the government takes Angel
away from Bush, she mourns publicly: she “cut her long hair. The way we used to do long ago
to show we had grief or had lost someone dear. She said it held a memory of you . . . She had to
free that memory” (16). The community serves as more than passive bystanders; they are
actively grieving beside Bush, in solidarity. This suffering unites the community: “They came to
love her that night. She’d gone to the old ways, the way we used to love. From the map inside
ourselves” (17). As Deloria explains in “Christianity and Indigenous Religion,” “The individual
is not an isolated entity that must stand alone. We experience everything together as a unity and
both grief and sadness are communal experiences; the intensity of human emotions is not borne
completely by one or even a few people” (150). Even in suffering, the individual does not stand
alone. Grieving is communal.
In the traditional times, Angel finds that knowledge came from dreaming, the border
between sleep and consciousness: “But there was a place inside the human that spoke with the
land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams.
They dreamed charts of land and currents of water. They dreamed where food animals lived.
These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their
prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. People found their cures in the
same way” (170). But today’s Native Americans do not live in a traditional world. They cannot
heed much of the knowledge of their ancestors because life, the terrain, the communities are so
vastly different. Sometimes the knowing that comes from dreaming only chaffs against the raw
wound of having lost a way of life. As Anzaldúa muses, “Knowledge makes me more aware, it
makes me more conscious. ‘Knowing’ is painful because after ‘it’ happens I can’t stay in the
same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before” (70). If one
remembers, if one finds knowledge, one must act or realize the consequences for his or her
apathy.
How do Silko and Hogan create their own space within the Borderlands? By taking away
the lessons Angel learns while protesting the building of the dam in Solar Storms: unity
produces a newfound sense of community, victory comes one small step at a time, and the spirit
guides the teller of the story and the listener and shows them the lessons that they must learn:
21
“For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been
resistance. To not strike back has mean certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant
loss and death, only with a fighting chance…. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The
old songs were there, came back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we
would return, that we are returning. Even now” (Solar 325). Angel and her community must
find new ground from which to build their lives, new space in the Borderlands. Hogan and Silko
forge their way into new literary territory within the Borderlands, opening the terrain for new
modes of expression and messages that cross cultural lines.
22
CHAPTER 2
WATER & LAND
Colonization has taught that “it is power—not past, not story, not nature—that defines one’s
practical, as opposed to spiritual, relationship to the new (Other) land and indigenous (Other)
people” (Brice 135)
In each of the novels, the primary struggle—or at least the most blatantly visible—is the
struggle of the Native American people to reclaim their land. Living on the land—and with the
land—for thousands of years, being systematically relocated away from their sacred lands
against their will, and viewing the slow annihilation of the land by a people who do not
understand or care for it, many of the Native American characters in the novels feel that they
must return to the land and reclaim it, in order to be whole again. The Earth, following Paula
Gunn Allen’s theory, “is being as all creatures are also being: aware, palpable, intelligent, alive”
(qtd. in Brice 128).
Destruction of the land and decaying of the soul permeates Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.
Set primarily in Arizona, amid a culture that gained its wealth from the Indian Wars, the novel
shows that the land and the people have been victim to European culture. The battle over water
in Almanac exemplifies the indigenous revolt against the wastefulness and the lack of respect for
the powerful fragility of nature in the path of civilization.
The overpopulation and over-
development of Tucson for housing and spas for the wealthy has left the land parched. Yet,
personifying the cavalier capitalistic destruction of resources, developer Leah Blue is determined
to build Venice, Arizona, complete with sweeping waterways. She is willing to drill deep into
the earth, battling with Native American people and environmentalists in court to gain access to
the scarce water supply. Leah underestimates the rage welling up in indigenous peoples and in
ecologists as they watch the destruction of irreplaceable resources.
23
Water takes on a rejuvenating power, a healing power in Gardens in the Dunes, Solar
Storms and Almanac of the Dead. Gardens opens with “heavenly” smelling rain and Sister Salt
(named for one of the rivers running through Arizona) dancing naked in the rain. She swallows
the rain that tastes like wind, making it part of her, imbibing its freedom (13). In Solar Storms,
Anges seeks her solace and renewal where two bodies of water greet each other: “Each evening
after supper, Agnes walked to the place where the Perdition River flowed into Lake Grand. She
went alone, to think … and to be silent. Always she returned, refreshed and clear-eyed, as if the
place where two waters met was a juncture where fatigue yielded to comfort, where a woman
renewed herself” (Solar 44). Silko describes ancestors returning as rain in Gardens (15). A
thunderstorm welcomes Sister Salt’s new baby home. She knows that it is good that his “rain
cloud ancestors came to greet” him: “If not properly welcomed, a baby that tiny might give up on
the world and leave” (Gardens 346). Water serves as a blessing, but water can also withhold its
bounty as a curse: “Too much taken away and not enough given back—the clouds avoided
placers where people showed no respect or love” (Gardens 419). Water interacts with people,
bringing them spiritual refreshment, rejuvenation and fortitude.
The land and the water once created a pact, now broken like the pact between the humans
and the animals. Both these novelists and many of their characters recognize water as a viable,
living spirit. In Solar Storms, a circle exists in the river where the winter ice never froze:
“[T]he older ones, whose gods still lived on earth, called it the Hungry Mouth of Water, because
if water wasn’t a spirit, if water wasn’t a god that ruled their lives, nothing was” (62). The water
that they so cherish soon becomes the rallying point in the novel, as the women join together to
stop the dam from being built, stopping the destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems and the
displacement of Native Americans by flooding their ancestral lands.
Husk, Agnes’ partner in Solar Storms, remembers his transgression against the pact
between animals and humans. Hunger forced him to trap animals for money one winter: “All
these years later, he still felt guilt for having done this. There had once been a covenant between
animals and men, he told me. They would care for one another. It was an agreement much like
the one between land and water. This pact, too, had been broken, forced by need and hunger”
(35). This need and hunger was a product of the white man’s invasion of the natural resources
and encroachment on Native American land. Husk’s guilt engenders a driving goal in his life, to
achieve an atonement for the pact that he broke: “His main desire in life was to prove that the
24
world was alive and that animals felt pain, as if he could make up for being part of the broken
contract with animals” (35).
If Husk never reaches the whole world with his theory, he certainly impacts Angel’s life:
her compassion for living things and her awareness that life is interconnected shape her behavior.
She becomes distraught when LaRue is fishing and, instead of killing the fish right away, he
pulls them, alive, through the water. He insists that they feel nothing, but Angel knows that
“[h]e offended the spirits of the fish” (84). He lacks mutual respect for life. Once Angel can
finally fish again, after the experience with La Rue, she shows her respect for the fish and their
place in the universe: “We treated the fish well. We respected their lives and their deaths. We
put them out of their pain as soon as they were caught” (85).
These novelists clearly show that Anglo-American culture, refusing to consider the life
in all of nature, in the land, in the water, has trapped itself within its own destruction. In
removing the spirit from everything, white culture has come to mirror the barren landscape it has
created, the soulless void: “Their legacy….had been the removal of spirit from everything, form
animals, trees, fishhooks, and hammers, all things the Indians had as allies. They’d forgotten
how to live. Before, everything lived together well…. Now most of us had inarticulate souls,
silent spirits and despairing hearts” (Solar 181).
Anglo-American culture has not been completely devoid of attachment to the land and
the ancestry so deeply tied to the land. David Noble points out that in the 1920s and 1930s, the
Southern Agrarians saw their attachment to the land and to their ancestors as a saving grace from
“the fragmenting tendencies of capitalism” (135). This sense of connection to the land and to the
ancestors had as much to do with economics in general, and the desire to stave off capitalism, in
particular, as it did in a genuine interest in place and generational continuity: “Without an
economy rooted in a particular place, one had to participate in the marketplace. Working for
money intensified alienation from a sacralized economy of production” (Noble 136-37). As
Noble points out, it is also important to remember that these Southerners, due to the outcome of
the Civil War, were a defeated culture in themselves. Although generational continuity, strength
from the land and ancestral ties did surface on the national landscape, the majority culture
quickly dismissed it as a remnant of a past glory that the South longed for, instead of a viable
cultural alternative: “In this traditional world people produced for use, not for the marketplace.
Their economy, therefore, was in harmony with the generational rhythms of land and of the
25
family” (136). For Southern Agrarians, “capitalists were ruthless invaders and conquerors. They
had no respect for the integrity of local communities. All the world needed to be absorbed
within their empire. They justified their wars of conquest as wars of liberation. They insisted
they were freeing people from their bondage to an outmoded past” (139).
From the moment Columbus set foot on his “New World,” Europeans have considered
themselves intellectually superior to Native Americans. In fact, these Europeans and their
descendants have referred to indigenous peoples as “a ‘monstrous species,’ lacking
understanding and incapable of conducting an orderly human life” (Frost 120). A society that
prided itself on individualism and reason, relegated indigenous peoples to a sub-human status:
“Based on the great authority of Aristotle, … humanity was divided into beings created to rule
and beings created to be ruled” (Frost 121). As Protestant Christians, the Anglo Americans
believed in their cultural and spiritual superiority and their inherent right to rule the superstitious
and childlike Native Americans that arbitrarily resided in their American landscape.
Europeans severed their ancestral ties when they left their native land in conquest of new
territory. They considered this conquest a divine calling, their right as Protestant men capable of
creating an independent nation. The belief that theirs was a Manifest Destiny precluded the
existence of the indigenous people as part of their nation. The European invaders believed “that
the New England coast was a New Israel, a promised land, that the American people had a
‘Manifest Destiny’ to control and settle, exploit and eventually destroy the interior of the
continent.” Since theirs was, in their eyes, a divine calling, “God was always on the side of the
American people.”
This belief shaped the way that the “new” Americans dealt with the
indigenous people. Deloria asserts that the belief in Manifest Destiny stemmed from the more
basic “fundamental Christian belief that the world was intended for a certain group of people
who followed the commands of Genesis to populate and subdue” (Deloria “Completing” 167).
The Manifest Destiny included conquering the land, yet it could not teach the Americans
to love and respect the land within the national boundaries they created. Seeing this world as
temporary, the quasi-purgatory to endure before the promised land of heaven, did not foster a
kinship relationship with the land. The European colonists gravitated toward the ideal of the
national landscape more than they were drawn to the literal landscape.
So separated were these Americans from the literal landscape that, obliviously, they
began to destroy the “virgin land” of plentiful resources that they believed was their birthright:
26
The immigrants had believed wilderness was full of demons, and that only their
church and their god could drive the demons away…. They had forgotten wild. It
was gone already from their world, a world according to Dora-Rouge that, having
lost wilderness, no longer hand the power to create itself anew … Even now they
destroyed all that could save them, the plants, the water …. ‘They were the ones
who invented hell.’ For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for
them, hell was this world in all its plentitude. That’s why they cleared space to
build a church on the mainland and sent for the pipe organ, as if a church would
transform this world into a place of tile and gold. (Solar 86)
Deloria notes that the Judeo-Christian culture is cut off from connections with the land and
natural world because they “have special rituals that are designed to cleanse the building so that
their services can be held there untainted by the natural world” (Deloria “Sacred” 330).
The boundaries which the Anglo-Protestant males constructed as national boundaries
may have been fictitious creations of their own desire for the supreme, destined nation state. But
force that they used to remove the indigenous populations, broken treaties and starving Native
Americans bound to foreign, untenable land made the boundaries of the American nation a
reality. Yet the cultural domination was not yet complete: “After bourgeois nationalists created
national history as an art form to help construct their nations, they created anthropology in the
nineteenth century to give them authority of the traditional people they were colonizing.
Anthropologists used their imagined gaze as independent, rational individuals to define the
inferiority of traditional peoples trapped within their irrational conventions and superstitions”
(Noble 265). This positioning of Native Americans as somehow less than rational beings creates
a possibility for understanding why Americans are not outraged, and anthropologists find no
issue, with the continuing display of Native American remains in museums. If the majority
culture does not see Indians as rational creatures, they are on a lower intellectual level than
Anglo-society and, therefore, are appropriately subjects of study.
Inés Hernández-Ávila
recognizes that the feeling of “entitlement regarding Native American ceremonial and cultural
tradition, artifacts, and gravesites” is simply a contemporary extension of Manifest Destiny (25).
All that belongs to the Native Americans, whether it be land or traditions, now belongs to the
European invaders.
Boundaries are diametrically opposed to Native American philosophy and spirituality,
which sees the Earth as living entity with a spirit. Yet time after time, the government has
pilfered Native American land, often under the guise of paternalism. From 1783, the United
27
States government had declared its control in “managing all affairs with the Indians” (First
Continental Congress Indian Proclamation qtd in Irwin 297). In Mean Spirit, the Indian Agent
leases Belle’s land out because she has failed to make improvements on it (213), a rationale that
Deloria’s commentary reflects: “The justification for taking Indian lands has always been: they
are not doing anything with them. Underlying this complaint has been the idea that the earth
itself can have no rest” (Deloria “Violated” 75). Even the land that they own is not their own. A
short time later in the novel, when the Native American people refuse to sell their land for
substandard prices, the government simply declares all full-blooded Indians incompetent (Mean
241). As Deloria aptly notes, “allotment was a contemporary way to strip the tribes of their
physical assets by ostensibly legal means” (“Indian Affairs” 191). The paternalism also reaches
into the realm of religion, where even the earliest conquerors felt it was their calling to preach
the gospel to the Indians, in order to save their souls. Being able to conquer their land was just
an unspoken privilege (Frost 132).
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner described a society that “had become ‘strong and full
of life out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new
frontier’” (qtd in Noble 116). This quest for renewed democracy, for the resurrection of the
strength of the American spirit may have been a catalyst in the push Westward, the push placing
Native Americans on reservations, the impetus for broken treaties. Hogan’s novel Mean Spirit
exemplifies the struggle between white culture’s romanticization of Native American culture and
the intense desire to destroy the land and the traditions that build Native American culture. The
Osage people, as a result of the Dawes Act’s provision of allotments to Indians, could choose
any piece of land white settlers had not already claimed. However, the government of the United
States had not counted on oil flowing underneath land that was unfarmable (Mean 8).
Allotments served the purpose of splitting communal living and “ma[d]e it easier to convert [the
Indians] as individuals” (Deloria “C hurches” 53).
Based on the ideal of individual property rights and capitalism, white society could not
imagine why Native American culture would not embrace the new way of life that the Europeans
proposed. The Europeans offered what they believed to be civilization, what was ultimately the
decline of Native American culture: “[A]griculture was the next step in civilizing the Indian.
Thus … Indian reservations should be broken into farming plots and tribal assets should be
divided among the tribal members. With the injection of the magical properties of private
28
property, the individual Indians would raise their heads and their sights beyond the limited
horizon that hemmed in their tribal existence. The debate, if any existed, was whether the magic
of private property could work on the savage psyche” (Deloria “Indian Affairs” 190). Hogan
shows that the struggle between the capitalistic system and the Native American way of life
became not only a struggle between cultures, but also an economic and spiritual struggle: “They
had long admired the stories and photos of our dead, only to find us alive and threatening” (305).
She represents how the chasm between the two cultures and belief systems yawns so wide that it
seems nearly impossible to bridge the gap. When Native Americans protest the destruction of
the earth, they meet with strong resistance, threats and/or violence.
As Hogan notes, Eurocentric American culture romanticizes Indian power of the past.
Piece by piece they have taken ancestral lands, yet wished the Indians were the way they used to
be (Mean 81). But, as both Hogan and Silko write, the “law is on their side, because it is their
law” (Mean 113). Boundaries are arbitrary creations, imaginary lines that divide up land for
ownership. Ownership holds little luster in a communal society, where feeding the hungry is a
primary concern before ownership of land: “Before the government drew reservation lines, there
was plenty for everyone to eat because the people used to roam up and down the river for
hundreds of miles to give the plants and animals a chance to recover. But now the people were
restricted to the reservations, so everyone foraged those same few miles of river” (Mean 414).
Angel muses on the effect of these boundary lines, when they go to court to stop the dam
construction: “In their minds we were only a remnant of a past. They romanticized this past in
fantasy, sometimes even wanted to bring it back for themselves, but they despised our real
human presence.
Their men, even their children, had entered forest, pretended to be us,
imagined our lives, but now we were present, alive, a force to be reckoned with” (Solar 343).
Hogan’s Solar Storms, a fictionalized account of the Hydro-Quebec James Bay Project,
chronicles the fight to save ancestral lands from the destruction of the progress of civilization.
The building of a hydroelectric dam that will reroute two rivers, changing the landscape,
submerging plants and animals, leaving dehydrated riverbeds also threatens the land of the Fat
Eaters. Immediately a conflict explodes between power, money and civilization and a tradition
that prizes simplicity, community and nature. The Native American people have no legal rights
to the land, nor does the government offer them any compensation for the destruction of their
land, their lives (Solar 58). The people had lived there for thousands of years; the government
29
now called the land empty and useless. The land became as irrelevant to the white government
as the people who once occupied it: “If the dam project continued . . . a way of life would end in
yet another act of displacement and betrayal” (Solar 58). Even the land that the government
provides for Native Americans can be subject to a multitude of horrors that would never occur in
suburban America. In Solar Storms, in addition to re-routing the land and destroying ecosystems
and the people’s way of life, the military uses the land “for a bombing range, for target practice”
(241).
As much as Anglo-Americans desire the conquest of the land, guns cannot intimidate the
land or enforce the arbitrary lines on maps. The land scoffs at the imaginary lines that people
can force other people to acknowledge: “[T]he land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps.
Land had its own will” (Solar 123). Solar Storms pits the Native American population against
the government that wants to subdue the rivers by redirecting and damming them. The Native
Americans realize that absolute destruction of their ancestral land will occur if the project
continues. They also realize the futility of trying to draw lines on a living being like the earth
and expecting that people will obey them: “It was a defiant land. It had been loved, and even
admired, by the government’s surveyors, for its mischief and trickiness and for the way it made it
difficult for them to claim title. Its wildness, its stubborn passion to remain outside their sense of
order made them want it even more” (123). In a mutual kinship relationship of respect, the
Native Americans realize nothing on a piece of paper will pin down the land: “These maps are
not our inventions. Maps are only masks over the face of God. There are other ways around the
world” (Solar 138). As the government redirects the rivers for the construction of the dam, the
waters become angry, roaring “so loud it sounded like earth breaking open and raging” (192).
Not only are the whites re-routing waters to create hydroelectric power, but “[t]he land was being
drilled to see what else could be taken, looted, and mined before the waters covered this little
length of earth” (219). Hogan acknowledges that, for the government, the destruction of the
earth, the draining of the resources for capitalistic gain must be complete.
Eco-terrorists, making their appearance at the end of Silko’s Almanac, sacrifice their
lives to rebel against the ravages of what the Anglos consider progress on the land. They begin
by blowing up a dam to free the Colorado River. Significantly, the eco-terrorists choose to let a
torrent of water loose; water signifies rebirth, the cycle of life, the return to the past and the
promise of the future. Once a symbol of the power of nature, free waters flowing strong, “the
30
rivers were dammed into submission, the Salt in 1910 with Roosevelt Dam, and the Gila
nineteen years later with the Coolidge Dam, leaving dust swirling in dry riverbeds” (Krech 70).
As a result of the destruction of the dam, Eco-terrorists have once again allowed the powerful
waters to flow strong and free. Hogan picks up the terrorist reference in her novel, Solar Storms:
“Reversing the truth, they would call us terrorists. If there was evil in the world, this was it….
Reversal” (283). If Anglo civilization desires the taming of Nature, calling it progress, it does
not matter how many beings must surrender their lives. But if the Native American people
refuse, if they want to let Nature have its own way, if they struggle to keep the last remnants of a
land and of a way of life that they love, then white civilization labels them as destroyers. It treats
them as outlaws, an obstacle in the way of the progress of capitalism: “The men were shielded
inside
their machines’ metal armor, certain nothing could touch them, not in any part of
themselves, certain that this was progress. They would tear the land apart and break down our
lives. It would be done. It would be finished and over. It takes so little, so remarkably little to
put an end to a life, even to a people” (Solar 285).
Regardless of the desires of the Anglo Americans to control their destined land, land and
water have an agency all of their own. It responds; it rebels; it destroys the efforts to subdue it.
As the workers re-route the river, Angel remarks: “And in time it would be angry land. It would
try to put an end to the plans for dams and drowned rivers. An ice jam … would break loose
and rage over the ground, tearing out dams and bridges…. The Indian people would be happy
with the damage, with the fact that water would do what it wanted in its own way. What water
didn’t accomplish, they would” (Solar 224). In Solar Storms, Manifest Destiny stands in sharp
contrast to the beliefs of the Native Americans, who know Nature is not theirs to conquer or
control and that mutual respect between the land and people dictates that they would not even
attempt to harness her or break her spirit.
Silko’s cast of characters in Almanac mirror the destruction in which they live. Even the
indigenous people, struggling to retake their land, lack a basic sense of connection to humanity.
Perhaps it is separation from the land that has bled their sense of humanity dry. Throughout the
novel, Silko’s reader can hear the roar of a quiet rage. Retaliation and conquering, in the name
of the land, drives the majority of the Native American characters. The primary setting, the sunparched Arizona desert, sets the tone for the novel. The scene of destruction and depletion that
Silko paints appears to be true to form. According to Shepard Krech in The Ecological Indian,
31
“Today’s restricted plant and animal life, as well as rivers noted for their dry beds, are cultural
products of numerous forces, especially decades of overgrazing by cattle” (47). The capitalistic
bent to over- use resources to depletion only intensifies the situation: “Currently, the thirst of Sun
Belt Arizonans for water for domestic, leisure, industrial and agricultural purposes draws on a
water table falling away each year” (Krech 48). Silko personifies this blatant disregard for the
dire peril in which the environment now hangs in Leah Blue, developer of the Venice property of
sweeping waterways, even in the face of a critical water shortage. Leah uses her connections to
over-ride Native American opposition to the project, further desecrating the land for profit.
For Native American cultures in these novels, land does not equate to profit. Instead,
land becomes identified with personal identity. There is a sacredness of space, a kinship with
land that the ancestors have lived on for centuries. Forcible separation from this land can have
devastating effect: “Most of the people at the territory’s outermost edges had been resettled after
having lost their own lands to the hydroelectric project, lands they’d lived on since before
European time was invented. They were despondent. In some cases, they had to be held back
form killing themselves” (Solar 225). As Noble has argued, there is no way for the AngloAmericans inhabiting the national landscape to understand this tie to the land or the way it has
defined, shaped and taught the people. Silko’s narrator in Almanac makes a similar point: “In
the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man
didn’t seem to understand that he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of
ancestors here” (313). Capitalistic society is inherently migratory, as playing in the international
market demands flexibility and lack of attachment to place. Progress means letting go and
adapting to new and better ways. To the government engineers, the dam building caused a need
for Native American “resettlement”; for those losing their ancestral land, now flooded and
uninhabitable, “[I]t was murder of the soul that was taking place there.
Murder with no
consequences to the killers” (Solar 226).
People residing on broken and abused land begin to reflect that abuse. The people that
inhabit the land become a mirror image of the state of the land, perhaps due to kinship ties to
ancestral land. When the traditionalist in Hogan’s novel Mean Spirit, Lionel Tall, hears that the
Indians in Oklahoma are in dire need of assistance, he responds quickly. He knows people in
Oklahoma need to connect with the Spirit, to be immersed—if only for a short while—in
traditional ceremony: “He carried sacred stones and a small leather suitcase of ceremonial items.
32
He was going to set up an altar and perform a sing, a ceremony for healing everyone, even the
injured earth that had been wounded and bruised by the oil boom. He knew he could not stay
long or he, too, would lose his inner core of harmony. This was the problem with places in the
world that had been broken” (213). Lionel Tall is willing to sing for the people, drawing them
back to the Spirit, exemplifying the healing power of words, of the human voice, of
connectedness. Yet Hogan communicates through the narrator that becoming too connected to a
broken community could fracture Tall’s own peace and connectedness with the earth and the
Spirit.
In Solar Storms, Angel feels a kinship to a land that she has never encountered, yet it is
the land of her people: “A part of me remembered this world . . . ; it seemed to embody us. We
were shaped out of this land by the hands of gods. Or maybe it was that we embodied the land”
(228). For Deloria, the line between human identity and identity of the land becomes blurred in
memory: “[O]ur memory of land is a memory of ourselves and our deeds and experiences”
(“Reflection” 253). Signifying a milestone in Angel’s journey toward herself and her ancestors,
“Tulik looked across the land and said to me, ‘You know, Angel, here a person is only strong
when they feel the land. Until then, a person is not a human being’” (Solar 235). Between the
land and the intricate kinship relationships established in the la nd of the Fat-Eaters, Angel has
come back to herself, reflecting the pattern Deloria describes in “Native American Spirituality”:
“When Indians speak of returning to their own culture, they are really speaking of reforming the
circle of individual and social existence, a renewal of meaning, not a flight from reality” (133).
For Angel, her past has met her present. Her circle is now complete.
In Almanac of the Dead, the reader encounters a constant stream of Destroyers, most of
which are European. Soulless, ruthless and cruel, they destroy the land, murder each other,
rejoice in the despair of those around them. After encountering the Europeans devoid of basic
humanity in Almanac, Silko’s acknowledgement and embracing of a European-based pagan
affinity for rocks, which symbolizes a connection to the Earth, seems to be a radical departure.
Perhaps it is only traditional Christianity that is not compatible with a kinship with the land. In
his essay, “Relativity, Relatedness and Reality,” in the collection Spirit & Reason, Deloria
explains the Native American relationship to and concept of stones: “stones were the perfect
beings because they were self-contained entities that had resolved their social relationships and
possessed great knowledge about how every other entity, and every species, should live. Stones
33
had mobility but did not need to use it. Every other being had mobility and needed, in some
specific manner, to use it in relationships” (34). Silko reinforces the connection with spirits and
with the Earth that Pagan Europeans felt in Gardens as Hattie’s Aunt Bronwyn explains to Indigo
that stones house spirits of long ago, powerful spirits, ancestors: “The stones and groves housed
the ‘good folk,’ the spirits of the dead. Never interfere with the fairies! When sheep were
brought by the English to graze Scotland, the good folk and the people living on the land were
displaced, and the fairies waged war against the sheep” (252).
Aunt Bronwyn goes on to describe a multitude of ways that different Kings and the
Church tried to suppress paganism: “Yet despite the persecution, the old customs persisted”
(261). Indigo and Aunt Bronwyn discuss sightings of the Messiah, who has also been seen on
the remote islands of England: “the people saw his Mother, sometimes with a child they called
the Son of God” (262). Hattie is horrified to realize that her aunt believes what Hattie considers
superstition and exaggeration and her “enthusiasm for Celtic mythology. Why, her aunt had left
the church altogethe r! Hattie was critical of developments in the early church, yet she never
considered leaving the church entirely. Hattie did not want the child to become confused—
certainly not by the notion old stones should be worshiped” (263). These sightings of the
Messiah across the Americas and in Europe find their basis in Silko’s own studies of the legends
of sightings of Christ. She notes in an interview that “[t]here’s always been the Messiah and the
Holy Family that belong to the people” (qtd in Arnold 3-4). Yet Hattie’s Anglo Protestant
beliefs have taught her that an uncivilized child cannot possibly have grasped the truth of
spirituality.
Vine Deloria Jr. affirms the existence of sacred land in Europe, sacred places much like
the places that Native Americans hold sacred in the Americas: “There can be no denying that the
European continent has a multitude of sacred places, and it is no accident that, as different
religions have come and gone, the same locations appear as sacred and receive adoration, even
though the language and religious context continues to change” (Deloria “Reflection” 256). The
European continent was once home to paganism, goddess worship, free from the confines of
Christianity, more aligned with nature and the movements of the earth. As Indigo and Hattie
explore the gardens of the professoressa, Laura, with whom they are staying on one of Edward’s
expeditions, “explained the meanings of the symbols found on Old European artifacts: The wavy
lines symbolized rain; Vs and zigzags and chevrons symbolized river meanders as well as snakes
34
and flocks of waterbirds; goddess of the rivers transformed themselves to snakes then waterbirds.
The concentric circles were the all-seeing eyes of the Great Goddess; and the big triangles
represented the pubic triangle, another emblem of the Great Goddess” (291). The river, the
snakes resemble Native spiritualism. She has no statues of the Virgin and Child in her garden,
no crucifixes. All of the artifacts are aligned with nature, for which ancient Europeans held great
reverence.
Solid and steadfast in their relationship with the earth, stones ground people in times of
trouble, guiding them toward solutions to problems. Amid the deaths in Mean Spirit, Lionel Tall
arrives in Watona to perform a healing ceremony. He uses sacred stones, which “came from a
long tradition, from the movements of the earth” (216). Stace Red Hawk wears a stone strapped
to his armpit so that it will speak to him through his body and direct his thoughts (249).
The Native American people have an appreciation for the land’s ability to rejuvenate
itself, to follow the cycles of life instinctively: “A few of the older people, including Belle
Graycloud, conditioned their fields with words and songs, first sprinkling sacred cornmeal that
was ground from the previous year’s corn, to foster the new life. The old corn would tell the
new corn how to grow” (Mean 209). They offer up words to the land, expressing their kinship
relationship to the land, honoring its knowledge—a knowledge greater than their own. Even the
progressive Indians that use the white man’s fertilizer finally relent, because the corn won’t grow
without being blessed (Mean 210).
Silko celebrates the resilience of nature in Gardens, as Sister Salt reflects on the damage
the Anglos have done to the land around her: “Right before dawn it got quiet for a while, and
that’s when she got up to watch the earth. She walked to the high sandy hill above the river and
looked all around: she could see how the vegetation would grow back someday…. Even their
dam would fill up with sand someday; then the river would spill over it, free again” (219). Silko
reinforces, through Sister Salt’s musings, the Native American belief that Nature renews itself.
Man and his creations are insignificant and impermanent in the face of the power of rebirth.
Regardless of the bleak outlook, neither Hogan nor Silko indicates that all people who are
born into white culture are beyond redemption. Mean Spirit depicts China, the oil developer
Hale’s girlfriend, having quasi-spiritual experience as she realizes the power, the agency of the
land itself. Her Judeo-Christian ideals of the Earth’s domination by man change in a second:
“She knew then, she knew that the earth had a mind of its own. She knew the wills and whims
35
of men were empty desires, were nothing pitted up against the desires of the earth” (186). Even
a driven capitalist like Edward in Gardens feels a kinship with the earth at his weakest moment.
After he has been injured and left for dead on an expedition to steal rare orchids from their native
environment, crawling across the ground, dragging his injured leg, he is “soothed by this contact
with the earth and her gravity that held him close with no danger of a fall” (142-43). The land
holds no grudges, yet it does not forgive the scarring, burning and raping of resources. The land
demands respect.
In Solar Storms, after acquainting herself with the land of her ancestors and establishing
her own identity as a member of that community, Angel becomes a plant dreamer, dreaming of
different plants with healing properties and drawing them. Simply watching the plants closely,
noticing their germination patterns, the area in which they grow and the animal life that eats and
surrounds them provides a very basic knowledge of plant life.
Certain people would then
“receive, either in dreams or visions, very precise knowledge on other ways in which the plant
could be used by humans—information that could not have been obtained through experiment or
trial and error use” (Deloria “If You Think About It” 53). Tulik then journeys with Angel to
assist her in finding the plants and removing them from their habitat. They treat the plants with
respect: “We were careful, timid even, touching a plant lightly, speaking with it, Tulik singing,
because each plant had its own song” (260).
Hogan makes it clear that, regardless of background, it is possible to have a relationship
with the earth.
However, one must place aside old ways of knowing and be open to the
instruction of the earth itself. As Deloria notes, “The Christian teaching is to love others as one
loves oneself. This requirement suggests that the individual is completely at peace with himself
or herself, although this situation cannot possibly occur since the individual is part of nature and
yet alienated from it” (Deloria “Christianity” 152).
Hogan creates the character of Father Dunne in Mean Spirit to illustrate the bridging of
the gap between Anglo-Catholicism and Nature. His church destroyed by Tornado Nola, the
Catholic priest takes up residence in the forest. He begins holding Mass in the forest, away from
the constructions that hold a concept of God within four walls. Although Father Dunne is
progressing on his journey toward knowing the earth, he still misreads her at times, looking for a
miracle and missing the blatant pain of the earth as the fire rages beneath it (Mean 189).
36
Inextricably tied to separation from nature and the dissolution of communal tribal culture,
the American paternalistic desire to “tame the savage” sometimes seems as though it will break
Native American culture completely. After one week at the Indian School, the children return
looking paler and less vibrant (Mean 89). The Indians, who arrive for the healing ceremony, shy
away from the local boys who have been off to school: “men go to Indian School and return with
their lives full of holes” (217). As the white government agents raid the healing ceremony, Stace
Red Hawk realizes that “[t]heir sacred eagle is on paper and coins” (Mean 246). What is sacred
and true for Native American culture holds little worth in a capitalistic society.
The more that white culture emotionally and spiritually flogs the Native American
people, the more the characters realize the depth of the heritage they carry within their ancestry
and within themselves. Even though Reverend Joe Billy still holds strong ties to the Christian
religion at the opening of the novel, he realizes that the Native American respect and
commitment to the land is diametrically opposed to white culture’s capitalistic quest to exploit
the land for monetary gain, no matter what the environmental or spiritual cost. Although he
firmly acknowledges these opposing viewpoints, Joe Billy’s faith remains firm:
“They are
waging a war with earth. Our forests and cornfields are burned by them. But…our tears reach
God. He knows what’s coming round, so may God speak to the greedy hearts of men and move
them” (14). Their interconnectedness with the Earth, and their place in the world become a
source of peace. They find strength in nature existing before them and the knowledge that it will
exist when they are gone. Hogan affirms that instead of being a linear process, life is cyclical:
“the river was going to the sea, had been rain clouds and lakes. It had been snow. Now it was
on its journey back to the great first waters of life” (345).
In Almanac, the white citizens manage to turn nature into a murderous setting by hanging
Indians in giant, beautiful cottonwood trees (117). Only a white culture bent on destroying even
the connectedness that Indians had to Nature could turn an intricate part of tribal culture into a
murder tool. Silko turns the tables—slightly—in Gardens, when Edward’s sister Susan injures a
tree simply to move it into her ever-changing garden: “wrapped in canvas and big chains on the
flat wagon was a great tree lying helpless, its leaves shocked limp, followed by its companion;
the stain of damp earth like dark blood seeped through the canvas. As the procession inched
past, Indigo heard low creaks and groans—not sounds of the wagons but from the trees” (183).
Silko uses language that displays Indigo’s equation of all life: trees bleed and groan like people.
37
However, Deloria cautions that “[t]o . . . attribute a plentitude of familiar human characteristics
to the earth is unwarranted. It would cast the planet in the restricted clothing of lesser beings,
and we would not be able to gain insights and knowledge about the real essence of the earth” (“If
You Think About It” 50). Each being has roles in the kinship relation to the earth; neither people
nor the earth can be cast in another role. Deloria indicates that it is important to respect and
understand the differences.
Angelita La Escapia respects the earth, and she remembers that it belongs to the
indigenous people—the ones who were here before the creation of the national landscape and the
fictitious and murderous Manifest Destiny. Angelita places Bartolomeo, a “white” Cuban, on
trial for crimes against history.
She includes in her long list of sins punishable by death:
“1807—U.S.A.—‘The Meteor’ or ‘the Shooting Star,’ Tecumtha, notifies the governor of Ohio
that all former treaties are invalid: ‘These lands are ours. No one has a right to remove us, but
we are the first owners” (529). Angelita’s desire for resistance, to have access to ancestral lands
is part of her “Chicana identity [which] is grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance.
The Aztec female rites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which
disrupted the equality and balance between female and male, and protesting their demotion to a
lesser status, their denigration” (Anzaldúa 43). As Angelita leads the armed resistance following
the army of the people, as she executes Bartolomeo for his crimes against history, she turns the
concept of the servile woman on its head (Anzaldúa 43). The warrior-woman Angelita claims
that “[t]he dispossessed people of the earth would rise up and take back lands that had been their
birthright, and these lands would never again be held as private property, but as lands belonging
to the people forever to protect” (Almanac 532). Refusing to submit, refusing to surrender,
Angelita serves as the war general for the dispossessed.
Silko’s writing reiterates the concept of the permanence of the sacred. The sacredness of
a place lives on, even if it functions as a bastardization of Indian spirituality: “The massive stone
towers of the old cathedral caught his eye; they were built with stones of the Mayan temple that
once stood on the site” (Gardens 87). It is not necessarily the occurrences that take place on
specific sites that make them holy, rather it is the site itself: “These Holy Places are locations
where human beings have always gone to communicate and be with higher spiritual powers.
This phenomenon is worldwide and all religions find that these places regenerate people and fill
them with spiritual powers” (Deloria “Sacred” 210).
38
Although Manifest Destiny has meant the destruction of Native American lands, the
Earth—with its sacred powers to rejuvenate itself, and the sacred spirits that reside within the
water, the land, the rain, the breeze—cannot ultimately be destroyed. As Silko makes eloquently
clear, its power reaches far beyond the means of one being to destroy it:
“Burned and
radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to
desecrate her” (Almanac 762). Nature refuses to bow to the creed of Manifest Destiny. Nature
may bend but will not be broken; only respect for the Earth can ultimately be the savior of
humanity.
39
CHAPTER 3
ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM
If there were any serious concern about liberation we would see thousands of people simply
walk away from the vast economic, political, and intellectual machine we call Western
civilization and refuse to be enticed to participate any longer. Liberation is not a difficult task
when one no linger finds value in a set of institutions or beliefs. (Deloria “On Liberation” 101).
Noble sets the parameters between what commentators in the late 1800s viewed as
capitalism and what they viewed as virtuous private property ownership: “Capitalist private
property expressed self- interest, in contrast to the public interest of virtuous private property.
Capitalists threatened to replace the equality and fraternity of the democratic people with class
divisions and class conflict. Capitalists were ready to subvert the harmony of homogenous
people because their true environment was that international chaos that existed outside national
boundaries” (5). However, it is interesting to note that fraternity and equality in these terms
extended only to Protestant, Anglo males.
The Natives were a lower race, incapable of
individualism, the pride of America. The Native’s presence was “accidental and irrelevant”
(Noble 7).
The individual held little consequence in Native American society: “in the indigenous
community identity rests in the relationship between the individual and the collective. Collective
cultural identities are primary in the religious lifeways of American Indian communities” (Grim
45). Similarly, ecofeminists will argue that the “abstract, autonomous individual” is itself a
construction of capitalism.
As Mary Mellor argues, human beings do not exist outside of
society: “Only a small minority of men, and an even smaller minority of women, actually
achieve sufficient power to function independently, socially, politically, or economically, but
that does not prevent the public world from being structured on that basis” (173). Noble argues
that the American vision of founding fathers who were willing to give up their “social, political
and economic privileges . . . to achieve that vision of a deep fraternity of a homogenous, middle40
class people” is itself an illusion (Noble 9). In order to have a bourgeois nationalism, people
would have to relinquish these privileges (Noble 9). But what happens to the “other,” the
laborers who do not own private property, the Native Americans, the women?
Noble calls attention to early 1900s historian Charles Beard, who adamantly fought
against capitalism. He viewed capitalism as a destabilizing force, but, unlike Marx, he made a
distinction between the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. He believed that “most of the middle
class was committed to the use of private property for rational production” (Noble 20). And,
unlike Marx, he did not believe revolution should be violent. Rooted in his concept of the nation
and national boundaries, capitalism threatened to blur the national lines: “[A]dherents of the
vision of an American civilization in the 1930s had expected that the combination of the national
landscape and the industrial landscape would give the fraternal democracy of the people the
strength to defeat the soulless materialism of international capitalism” (109).
The basis of
fraternal democracy is “social and economic experience of an agrarian world of many small and
essentially equal producers” (111). This idea of small groups fits in with the kinship idea where
each kinship unit offers something to the society as a whole. All are equal. But this equality and
self-sufficiency is soon consumed by “corporate capitalists [who] controlled the nation’s
economic and political life” (114).
Noble emphasizes that at one point, historians believed that “Marxist analysis [was] a
tool that would help restore the national democracy that existed before the Civil War. Their
socialism imagined that social and economic reality was contained within national boundaries”
(132).
However, by the end of World War II, sentiment regarding Marxism had changed
dramatically: “By 1945 only an insignificant remnant of the literary radicals of the 1930s still
saw in Marxism usable theories for the critique of literature. More importantly they no longer
believed that there was a usable past that had sprung from the national landscape” (Noble 133).
As an ecofeminist, Janis Birkeland draws an interesting conclusion in her essay “Ecofeminism:
Linking Theory and Practice.” She discounts Marxist theory as a serious approach to ecology
because “an approach that relies on crisis conditions resulting from structural or ecological
contradictions is incompatible with environmental protection” (15). By 1950, Henry Nash Smith
had determined that “[T]here was no longer a virtuous people, a fraternal democracy, when the
majority of individuals opted for material wealth” (Noble 113).
41
Silko delineates the struggle between virtue and wealth in the philosophical battle that
takes place between Hattie and her husband, Edward, in Gardens in the Dunes. Hattie’s quest for
spiritual healing creates a chasm between herself and Edward.
Edward collects rare flora
specimens from foreign lands. Deep in debt from a plant smuggling venture gone awry, Edward
constantly schemes to regain his financial footing, ensuring him social comfort and a level of
respect in his family. He deceives his wife and risks arrest to smuggle rare flowers that will
command a high price. The European pull toward capitalism could not be clearer. Edward does
not grow these flowers to sell them; instead, he steals them from their environment and robs the
ecosystem and the indigenous people for the cash they will bring.
Edward’s relationship with
Hattie exemplifies one of the founding principles of ecofeminism: “ecofeminists give priority to
patriarchy as the source of women’s subordination and ecological degradation, with capitalism as
its latest, and most destructive manifestation” (Mellor 169). Edward degrades not only the
ecosystems from which he pilfers life, but his wife whom he betrays on the basis of her trust in
their relationship by making her an accomplice to his crimes against Nature in the name of
capitalism.
As Indigo (the “orphaned” Native American child whom Hattie has taken in for the
summer) and Hattie grow closer, Hattie begins to emulate more of Indigo’s actions and embrace
her vision of the world. At the same time, she is drifting further and further from Edward. In
these two female characters, a love for the natural, a love of peace, and the pull toward a simpler,
communal life all clash with the capitalistic desire to possess, to suppress radical ideas (such as
Indigo’s belief that the parrot she owns has feelings and thoughts), to gain material wealth.
Ultimately, Silko shows that these two belief systems, two ways of life are not compatible;
Hattie and Edward separate, Edward ultimately dying at the hands of his deceitful, murderous
business partner. Even as Edward is dying, his regrets are not about Hattie and the loss of their
relationship—they are about meteor irons that he wished he had purchased so that no one else
could obtain them (427).
One of his final musings is that “Livorno, even Hattie and the
separation, would scarcely matter beside the wall of silver and gold” (426). For Edward,
material wealth has become a panacea, eclipsing love and connection with other human beings.
Silko foreshadows Edward’s ultimate demise at the hands of his own avarice during his
attempt to buy the meteor irons from the African and Maya woman. The woman rages at him:
“Go away! You cannot buy them but you will pay!” Edward “got the sudden impression that
42
the blue-face woman knew him and had hated him for a long time.” Maybe in Edward she
recognizes the destructiveness of imperialism, the death of communal culture and indigenous
spirituality that caused the stones from the Mayan temple to form two cathedral towers. As
Catholicism has taken over her land, perhaps she sees it as related to capitalism. When Edward’s
ship left the port, a huge storm came upon them that did not abate until the seamen began to
throw valuables overboard to wash up for the Black Indian who could cast spells. Edward
laughed at their superstition but then suffered a headache so intense that he wanted to overdose
to escape from the pain (Gardens 89-90). Rationality, capitalism and individualism cannot save
Edward from the curse of the old ones who resent the destruction of their way of life.
Similarly, in Almanac of the Dead, abstract theories—such as Angelita la Escapia’s
immersion into the teachings of Karl Marx--wax somewhat superficial against the twins’ innate
sense of a community based on a spiritual connection to the land and humanity. The twins who
lead the revolution to reclaim the land seem to have discovered that peace and experiential
spirituality muster more power than force and abstract ideals: “Wacah, El Feo and the people
with them believed the spirit voices; if the people kept walking, if the people carried no weapons,
then the old prophecies would come to pass, and all the dispossessed and the homeless would
have the land; the tribes of the Americas would retake the continents from pole to pole” (711).
Silko notes in a 1998 interview that the retaking of the land in Almanac is not literal; rather it is
“a spiritual way of doing things, getting along with each other, with the earth and the animals. It
would be for all of us” (qtd in Arnold 10). In “Freud, Marx and Chiapas in Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” Deborah Horvitz claims that in 1991 Silko “predicts a revolution
beginning in the Chiapas that is astonishing in its similarities and parallels” to the actual
revolution in 1994, when “[I]ndigenous and peasant armies in Chiapas, revolting against the”
dictatorship of Mexico, wreaking havoc and demanding “democracy, justice, housing, food, and
most critical, a plan by which land stolen from native people must be redistributed” (47).
In her 1998 interview, Silko remarks that the expanse of a political system often leads to
its corruption. Communism and socialism on a large scale were no more beneficial to the people
than capitalism (qtd. in Arnold 24). This belief surfaces in Almanac, when Angelita begins to
rally the revolution in the south: “European communism had been spoiled, dirtied with the blood
of millions. The people of the Americas had no use for European communism. That was why
she and the others had voted to break with the Cubans” (291). Rosemary Radford Ruether, eco-
43
activist and theology professor, puts forth a socialist solution to the ecological problems that the
world faces today: “a ‘communal socialism’ loosely modeled on the Israeli kibbutz. Women’s
dependency is to be overcome by ‘transforming the relationship among power, work and home.’
Women’s work would be communalized and collectivized but always under local communal
control, as state socialism, like all state power, was potentially fascist. Children would thereby
gain ‘a tribe while remaining routed in the family’” (Mellor 51).
Silko addresses the question of control of resources and egalitarian distribution of those
resources in Almanac: “Commune and communal were words that described the lives of many
tribes and their own people as well. The mountain villages shared the land, water, and wild
game. What was grown, what was caught or raised or discovered, was divided equally and
shared all around” (314). In Solar Storms, Hogan shows that Angel discovers for the first time,
after being raised among white people, tribal communal living with her extended family: “Each
one of us had one part of the work of living. Each of us had one set of the many eyes, the may
breaths, the many comings and goings of the people. Everyone had a gift, each person had a
specialty of one kind or another…. All of us formed something like a single organism. We
needed and helped one another” (262). Similarly in Mean Spirit, Belle remarks on a marketplace
based on effort and understanding of the land, not capital.
Besides existing within an intricate
kinship system in which all share the resources and responsibility for the land and the
community, Belle Graycloud shuns even the more surface level shopping on Sundays after
church: “The earth is my marketplace” (16).
Silko connects Marxist theories to traditional Native American communal living in
Almanac:
“Marx had been inspired by reading about certain Native American communal
societies, though naturally as a European he had misunderstood a great deal. Marx had learned
about societies in which everyone ate or everyone starved together, and no one being stood
above another—all stood side by side—rock, insect, human being, river, or flower.
Each
depended upon the other; the destruction of one harmed all others” (519-20). As Horvitz notes,
in Angelita la Escapia’s vision of Marx, “the philosopher and shaman have become
amalgamated” (50). Yet Marx also believed in the supremacy of industrialism as a “force of
nature” (Noble 17). Marx was not concerned that the cultures of traditional people stay intact; he
was concerned with bringing them into the “exodus from irrationality and power toward
rationality and liberty” (Noble 18). Janis Birkeland claims that this fixation with industry as a
44
form of salvation, and Eco-Marxists’ view of “‘progress’ as emancipation from nature,” places
them on the fringe of the ecofeminist movement (27).
Indigo, the Native American child in Gardens, does not understand the capitalistic system
when she sees the farm hands working on Mr. Abbott’s land. She wonders if they have livestock
of their own and when they tend to it if they spend all their time with Mr. Abbott’s animals
(180). Indigo seems to feel that no one should have more than he or she, or people in their
kinship group, can care for.
In Almanac, it quickly becomes apparent that Anglos had built the city of Tucson on the
blood and misery of the Indians: “The old Tucson mansions along Main Street were the best
proof that murders of innocent Apache women and children had prospered. In only one
generation government embezzlers, bootleggers, pimps and murders had become Tucson’s ‘fine
old families’” (80). The people of Tucson serve as a microcosm for the larger United States
government, which also made its fortune off broken treaties with the Indians and took land in the
name of private property, even though it meant the end of the livelihood for hundreds of
thousands of Native Americans.
Solar Storms directly addresses the view of communism in the United States. Justin,
Frenchie’s boyfriend, becomes outraged at the AIM members he sees on television: “ ‘Those
young men act just like Reds!’ Communists, he meant. That’s what he called AIM members”
(156). Irwin explains that, in the 1970s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) pushed toward a
reclamation of Native American culture, land rights and traditional Native American spirituality
(303). In “Religion and Revolution Among American Indians,” Deloria claims that, despite the
best of intentions from the Left, “the connection between the Indian movement and the ideology
of the New Left is utterly superficial. People who accept the Third World ideology or the
various Marxist interpretations of social and class struggle find the real ideology behind the
Indian protest incredible and outrageous. Rather than seeking a new social order or a new
system of economic distribution and management, Indians are seeking no less than the
restoration of the continent and the destruction, if necessary, of the white invaders who have
stolen and raped their lands” (39).
Justin later blames his views against communism on his time spent in military service. Is
it possible that militant, capitalistic voice of white American culture that has been indoctrinated
in him enough to believe that Native Americans demanding equal treatment and return of the
45
land are wrong and, therefore, should be labeled communists? Was communism that strong an
epithet in America? Undoubtedly so. “It was clear by 1948 that consensus… defined Marxists
and possible Marxis t sympathizers as the most dangerous others, the most dangerous unAmerican within the nation’s boundaries” (Noble 222).
The national landscape painted
capitalism as existing to set people free from the traditions that bound them: “One did not focus
on the power they used to destroy the traditions of those without history. One focused on the
liberty that individuals from traditional societies would enjoy when they were free from
suffocating traditions” (Noble 16).
The hypocrisy of middle class America throws Almanac character Mosca into a rage.
Living outside of what he sees as the capitalistic hierarchy by running drugs for a living, Mosca
feels justified in expressing his disdain that these people have lost their souls to the capitalistic
machine:
Mosca had noticed cars and pickups carrying the middle-aged couples, mostly
white people but with a scattering of Hispanics and blacks. They were the lowlevel civil servants and clerks: the meter readers and delivery truck drivers who
had risen to managerial level by obeying the rules, written and unwritten. Mosca
became outraged by the suck-ass expressions on their faces. They were the
Puritans who believed they were the chosen, the saved, because they were so
clean, because they were always so careful to obey every rule and every law.
Every yellow and red light was one of their lights, and Mosca plowed through full
speed, scattering vehicles at intersections, while he raved and ranted about the
churches, rotted with hypocrisy. (212)
Silko chooses to use “chosen” and “saved” to reflect Judeo-Christian tradition where the Jews
are the Chosen people and Christ died to save people from their sins. She notes that they are
careful to obey every rule and law, as one must follow rules in the Judeo-Christian religion not
out of kinship relationships with others, as in Native American spirituality, but because salvation
depends on it. Deloria notes that Anglos often behave as if something detrimental will happen if
Native Americans do not follow ceremonies exactly, but they do not understand. People do not
perform ceremonies due to letter of the law. People perform ceremonies to enhance and honor
the mutual kinship relationships between all creatures, human and non- human and the earth
(Deloria “Kinship” 227). In “Religion and Revolution,” Deloria clearly delineates his belief that
Native American ceremonies and forms must rely on the “truth” of the “everchanging experience
of the community” to guide and shape them (42).
46
The dichotomy between Native American culture and Anglo society engenders another
point of contention that I discussed in Chapter 2 of this thesis: the artificial nature of borders.
Fixated on a national landscape and an American people that live only within this nation’s
confines, borders—no matter how arbitrary—serve as a cornerstone of the national landscape.
However, Native American characters in Almanac draw the arbitrary nature of borders into light:
The people had been free to go traveling north and south for a thousand years,
traveling as they pleased, then suddenly white priests had announced smuggling
as a mortal sin because smuggling was stealing from the government. . . . How
could one steal if the government itself was the worst thief? There was not, and
there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the
Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and
laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. (133)
Throughout all four novels, these authors question the legality of the Anglo occupation of the
entire United States. However, Anzaldúa’s description of the expansion of the border and the
loss of Mexican land speaks to Zeta’s accusation:
In the 1800s, Anglos migrated illegally into Texas, which was then part of
Mexico, in greater and greater numbers and gradually drove the tejanos (native
Texans of Mexican descent) from their lands, committing all manner of atrocities
against them. Their illegal invasion forced Mexico to fight a war to keep its
Texas territory. The Battle of the Alamo, in which the Mexican forces
vanquished the whites, became, for the whites, the symbol for the cowardly and
villainous character of the Mexicans. It became (and still is) a symbol that
legitimized the white imperialist takeover… Tejanos lost their land and,
overnight, became foreigners. (28)
The imperialism of the United States’ capitalistic government and economy continues to
encroach on Mexican land by placing large corporate empires in Mexico, where they can force
indigenous peoples to work for a wage that would be sub-standard in the United States. In fact,
the United States has a chokehold on the Mexican economy—and thereby the Mexican people—
because “[c]urrently, Mexico and her eighty million citizens are almost completely dependent on
the U.S. market” (Anzaldúa 32). Mexico serves as a remarkable study on capitalism and its
imperialistic nature.
The contempt that Anglo culture has bred towards indigenous cultures that did not fit the
ideal of the national landscape appears to have leaked past the United States’ borders into the
nations to the south: “while there is a majority of Indian blood present in the gene pool of those
nations, …. [p]eople go out of their way to separate themselves from Indian ancestry, denying
47
sometimes even the heritage that is patently obvious on their faces and in their behavior”
(Deloria “Popularity” 232). For instance, in Almanac, Menardo, a mixed-blood businessman,
disavows being Indian by saying he got his nose broken in a boxing match. Menardo not only
denies his heritage but turns away from the concept of communal survival and toward the
promises of capitalistic profit. Menardo, who owns a profitable insurance company, knows that
a tidal wave is looming in the distance, ready to crush all in is path: “Once it was clear the
contents of the warehouse would be saved, Menardo had sent ten workers, three pickups, and a
dump truck to evacuate the hospital” (Almanac 263). As Horvitz notes, once Menardo breaks
completely from his heritage, he is “reborn a Destroyer” (59). Capital retains value over human
life.
Silko draws attention to the fact that Native Americans do not even own the reservation
land on which the government has placed them: “Indians had never held legal title to any Indian
reservation land, so there had never been property to mortgage. But winters those years had been
mild and wet for the Southwest. Harvests had been plentiful, and the game had been fat for the
winter. The Laguna people had heard something about ‘The Crash.’ But they remembered ‘The
Crash’ as a year of bounty and plenty for the people” (Almanac 40-41). She juxtaposes the
materialistic desire for money with the basic desire to have food. Indians are so far removed
from capitalism that the worst economic crisis in the United States has literally no effect on
them.
Hogan points out that, even when the Indians own small allotments, the Indian Agents
force them to present certificates of competency (M ean 60). In Mean Spirit, when Moses
Graycloud chose to argue with the Indian Agent because the government had decided that he
should not receive all of his allotment money because he was a full-blood, the Indian agent
reminded him:
“If you carry on that way, Mr. Graycloud, the judge will declare you an
incompetent” (62). Not only can the government now change the rules at any given moment,
but protesting such a change may mean that the bureaucrats will declare an Indian incompetent:
“With this mention of the competency commission, Moses knew he was beaten…. The courts
had already named at least twenty competent Indian people incompetents, and had already
withheld all their money until they were assigned legal guardians” (62). As Yonka Kroumova
Krasteva posits in her article “The Politics of the Border in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit,” “the
issue of identity, which is most fragile on the borderlands, does not refer only to personal
48
identification and subjectivity, but is of utmost significance in determining the status of
citizenship for Native Americans: their right to property or to receiving annuity in a white
people’s world” (50).
Unfortunately, land is not the only resource Anglo culture greedily
consumes within its national boundaries. The ceremonies, the songs, the stories that many
Native cultures hold sacred are also at risk. Hernandez-Avila asks “Is the parallel relationship
between ‘discovery’ and appropriation, desacralization and consumerism a guiding principle of
the Western world regarding the treatment of Native peoples?” (21).
Silko clearly draws the parallel between Anglo greed and the destruction of the natural
world: “This was the end of what the white man had to offer the Americas: poison smog in the
winter and the choking clouds that swirled off sewage treatment leaching fields and filled the sky
with fecal dust in early spring. Here was the place Marx had in mind as ‘a place of human
sacrifice, a shrine where thousands passed yearly through the fire as offerings to the Moloch of
avarice’” (Almanac 313). In Solar Storms, Hogan also clearly draws the parallel between greed
and destruction. As Angel watches this destruction in progress, she lacks the capability to
understand what could steel the Anglos’ hearts against the livelihood and the homeland of an
entire tribe, what could make them so callous to the brutality they were inflicting on the earth.
She realizes that the small amount of monetary gain that they amass from this project will never
repair the blight against their souls: “Later I wondered how these men, young though they were,
did not have a vision large enough to see a life beyond their jobs, beyond orders, beyond the
company that would ultimately leave them broke, without benefits, guilty of the sin of land
killing. Their eyes were not strong enough, their hearts not brave enough, their spirits not inside
of them. They had no courage” (288). The patriarchal culture that has raised men to be able to
commit these atrocities is exactly what ecofeminists wish to exterminate. Instead, they would
like to replace it with a society that is “egalitarian and ecologically sustainable… [and in which]
any necessary work would be integrated with all aspects of communal life.
Relationships
between humans and between humans and nature would be harmonious and co-operative”
(Mellor 69-70).
The Franciscans, as monks that shunned material possessions and lived in poverty, found
in the indigenous population “a people living in true poverty, without material worries, without
ambition, without anger, without greed, without bickering” (Frost 134). What capitalists and
social Darwinists have seen as weakness, a sign of inferior intellect or lack of destiny to succeed,
49
Franciscans celebrated. Until contemporary history, they may have been the only major group of
people within the Judeo-Christian tradition to celebrate a life free of capital, of materialism, of
conquest—to celebrate the indigenous way of life. However, even this celebration comes at a
price: “The discoverer wants them subjugated; the monk wants them protected and supervised in
order for them to become the best Christians in the world. Ironically, neither ever came to
understand them” (Frost 138).
Silko claims in Almanac that the “Indians’ worst enemies were missionaries, who sent
Bibles instead of guns and who preached blessed are the meek…. Missionaries warned the
village people against the evils of revolution and communism. They warned people not to talk or
listen to spirit beings” (Almanac 514). Indeed, Noble notes that Beard considered the Catholic
Church the bane of the poor because it encouraged “political passivity” (29). Deloria also notes
that the motivation behind attempting to convert Native Americans to Christianity was not
always noble: “Land acquisition and missionary work always went hand in hand in American
history” (“Missionaries” 22). And, unfortunately, the churches who dealt directly with Native
American tribes “often saw their role as helping subdue the Indians rather than impartially
guaranteeing justice for the Indians” (Deloria “Churches” 52).
Much like the Church refuses to allow the Native Americans to worship in their own
traditional ways, the dominant culture in the United States, based on the idea of private property
and capitalism, cannot fathom a structure where all survive as one. Silko notes that, after placing
the Indians on the reservation, thus making their former lives impossible, the greed of the Indian
agents take over and the Indians do not even receive most of the livestock that the government
has purchased to feed them (Gardens 17). The corruption spreads even to those willing to save
the soul of the Indian; the churches “received choice grazing lands and used the income from
these lands to support their own ventures” (Deloria “Churches” 53). Excess goes unused in the
United States on a regular basis, as Silko aptly noted in Almanac: “The United States allowed
huge stores of grain and cheese to rot” (523).
In Mean Spirit, Hogan shows that greedy Anglo men see Osage women only as a
commodity for white men who seek out their hands in marriage as a business proposition.
Women become capital (34). However, Hogan represents the Indian society as so far removed
from capitalism that the Indians “nudged each other laughing about the large sums of money
being spent on black oil that trickled beneath this worthless earth. This time, at last, they were
50
coming out ahead. They thought it was about time” (Mean 147). Krasteva claims that “such
instances are stunning illustration of self-depreciation and internal colonization. By leasing their
land to the oil company, the Indians in fact help the intruders destroy their community and
ultimately their way of life” (53). Even though he doesn’t drive, Jim Josh buys a car for show
and ends up using it as a greenhouse to grow beefsteak tomatoes (Mean 156). The discovery of
oil on Graycloud land initially thrills Rena, the Grayclouds’ granddaughter. She believes the oil
will bring money and an end to the hardships her family has suffered. However, upon further
reflection, fear that her family will be killed for the wealth that runs underneath their land
overtakes her (Mean 229). The creators of the capitalistic marketplace attempt ruthlessly to
indoctrinate the virtues of capitalism into the savages, but when the Indians can become players
in the capitalistic marketplace, the whites would rather kill them than share the profits of the
broken land.
The United States Government offered little to no protection to the Indians. As Hogan
notes in Solar Storms, every entity involved in the capitalistic marketplace becomes suspect:
“No one trusted the government and corporation officials…. They were clearly in cahoots and
would go to unethical lengths to get what they wanted. And when the officials and attorneys
spoke, their language didn’t hold a thought for the life of water, or a regard for the land that
sustained people from the beginning of time. They didn’t remember the sacred treaties between
humans and animals. Our words were powerless beside their figures, their measurements, and
ledgers.
For the builders it was easy and clear-cut.
They saw it only on the flat, two-
dimensional world of paper” (279). Unfortunately, as Deloria notes, the federal government
favors Indians who have embraced capitalism and who strive for economic development, even at
the price of the destruction of reservation lands, and assumes they articulate the view of the
entire tribe (“Vision” 108).
In Solar Storms, Bush and Angel arrive at a camp where men are mining for silver.
Suddenly, after their adventure on the river, they are aware of “time and commerce and men
digging their way to hell, thinking it was heaven” (Solar 201). Angel remembers reading a
history book, in which “Cortes was quoted as saying, ‘We white men have a disease of the heart,
and the only thing that can cure it is gold.’ With those words, with that disease, came the end of
many worlds. So Agnes could very well have been right: precious metals signaled an ending”
(Solar 203). Not only does the drive for gold snuff out people, land and cultures, but eventually
51
capitalism will devolve into its own end.
James O’Connor, editor of Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism, argues that “[c]apitalism cannot guarantee an adequate physical and social
environment for its own functioning. When social movements respond to this crisis they are
responding to a crisis of capitalism” (qtd in Mellor 164). The push by Silko and Hogan for a
new Borderland society directly, and poetically, responds to this crisis.
52
CHAPTER 4
SPIRITUALITY
[O]ne of the chief failings of Christianity, [is] namely that it traditionally sees other religions as
foes rather than simply as different. It sees other traditions as inferior rather than as having their
own integrity. (Deloria “Christianity” 145)
In the article in the collectio n South and Meso-American Spirituality, Marzal points out
that the Roman Catholic Church had outlawed the worship of nature, the “cult devoted to certain
‘forests, trees and fountains … and the recitation of ‘magic formulas or superstitions when
[collecting] medicinal herbs” since approximately the fifth century A.D (143).
When the
Catholics encountered the paganesque traditions of Native Americans, it is no wonder that they
sought to squelch what appeared to them as blasphemous.
dominance is legendary.
The history of the Church’s
In Spain, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jews and
Muslims faced a choice between baptism or exile (Marzal 159). Therefore, the outlawing of
sacred Native American ceremonies in the United States is hardly shocking. Missionaries were
relentless in the vigorous push toward conversion from Native American spirituality to
Christianity:
“[M]issionaries would make the most incredible efforts to ensure baptism of
Indians in the most regions; indeed, this served as a just pretext for conquistadors to take their
military campaigns into territories populated by unbaptized Indians” (Marzal 160). Is it any
wonder in Almanac of the Dead Silko portrays the church as “irrational, bloody, cannibalistic
and cruel” (St. Clair 146)?
In Silko’s Gardens, Hattie’s Aunt Bronwyn believes that “plants have souls and human
beings exist only to be consumed by plants and be transformed into glorious new plant life”
(240). She also has done research on the old Europeans and “discovered [that] carved and
ceramic figures of toads were worshiped as incarnations of the primordial Mother” (241). This
53
acknowledgement of European paganistic roots stemmed from Silko’s experience of the
Europeans’ unbroken—even if unconscious—tie with the old spirits: “As hard as Christianity…
tried to break that connection between the Europeans and the earth, and the plants and the
animals…that connection won’t break completely” (qtd in Arnold 6). As Linda Vance writes in
an essay in the collection Ecofeminism, “Until the last two decades, even the most radical
environmentalists accepted the idea of human superiority over nature; they urged only that we be
responsible, that we not abuse our rights to shape nature to human ends. Ecofeminism goes
further, and relinquishes all claims to inherent human power-over” (134). This sort of egalitarian
view of all life begins to bridge the gap between Anglo and Native American cultures.
The prophets in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, twin brothers El Feo and Tacho, lead the
people’s revolution from the South. They gather the people together, with their message of
reclaiming the land. The peaceful gathering, gathering so the spirits would return what was lost,
is reminiscent of the Ghost Dance, when people believed that the Messiah would come to them
and bring back the buffalo and loved ones lost. The brothers communicate with the spirits,
receiving guidance from spirit macaws and seeing visions in spirit stones: “The followers of the
spirit macaws believed they must not shed blood or the destruction would continue to accompany
them” (Almanac 712). Silko sharply juxtaposes the pacifism and spirituality of the brothers with
Angelita La Escapia, the Marxist militant armed with an arsenal to protect the brothers on their
march: “Angelita heard from the spirits too—only her spirits were furious and they told her to
defend the people from attack” (712). In her argument against mysticism in the ecofeminist
movement, Janis Birkeland asserts “the insufficiency of spirituality alone to effect social change
is obvious when the military industries and arms trade are seen for the international extortion and
protection racket that they really are” (48). The twins relay the message of the spirits; Silko does
not intellectualize their quest toward tribal/communal living. Angelita’s force and immersion
into the teachings of Karl Marx waxes somewhat superficial against the twins’ innate sense of a
community based on a spiritual connection to the land and humanity: “Wacah, El Feo and the
people with them believed the spirit voices; if the people kept walking, if the people carried no
weapons, then the old prophecies would come to pass, and all the dispossessed and the homeless
would have the land; the tribes of the Americas would retake the continents from pole to pole”
(711).
54
For Native American cultures, death does not end the journey; a person goes on to live
through other life forms or to become a revered ancestor to kinfolk. Native American people do
not approach death with the dread that seems to consume the Anglo-Protestant fixation with
death: “As the human soul approached death, it got more and more restless and more and more
energy for wandering, a preparation for all eternity where the old people believed no one would
rest or sleep but would range over the earth and between the moon and stars, traveling on winds
and clouds, in constant motion with ocean tides, migrations of birds and animals, pulsing within
all life and all beings ever created” (Almanac 235). Silko demonstrates this approach to be quite
different from the Christian version of death, which is an escape from this world. When Indigo
fears that she will die, her grandmother does not assure her that she will not die. Instead,
Grandma Fleet reassures Indigo that, no matter what happens, “[s]ome hungry animal will eat
what’s left of you and off you’ll go again alive as ever, now part of the creature who ate you”
(Gardens 51). Similarly, Hogan shows the belief in reincarnation, of a lasting presence of a
loved one in the universe after death, comforts Angel when she thinks about Dora-Rouge dying:
Husk “said death was only matter tuning into light or energy, that we were atoms, anyway, from
distant stars, and that we’d once been stones and ferns and even cotton” (Solar 138).
The Native American way of living and dying is the polar opposite of the Christian view
of life and death. Tribal law dictates that Native Americans may leave this life upon their own
decision (Solar 217). Even birth is associated with the ancestors: “The Fat-Eaters believed the
ancestors returned in the new bodies of children” (Solar 256). Tulik begins to call Aurora,
Hannah’s daughter and Angel’s sister, “my grandfather” (257). In Gardens, when Sister Salt
gives birth to her baby, alone in the desert, she looks into his eyes and recognizes him as an old
soul, a wise ancestor. Why is it that children born into turmoil end up being the source of peace?
Is it because they embody the souls of those who existed when the world was more whole, so
they themselves are more whole?
In Almanac, Root nearly loses his life in a motorcycle accident. As a result of his
subsequent, severe injuries, he has theoretically died to his family. Root’s family does not want
to address his imperfections; Root does no t wish to endure their coldness and superficiality. On
the other hand, while his family has rejected him completely, his indigenous friend, Mosca, is
entranced by his experience: “Root knows they feel the accident has significance, that it was a
journey to the boundaries of the land of the dead” (199). There is significance in Root’s
55
experience because, as Deloria asserts, “Indians believed that everything that humans experience
has value and instructs us in some aspect of life” (“If You Think About It” 45). While Root’s
family is embarrassed of him, ashamed of his disabilities after the accident, Root finds
acceptance from the indigenous community that employs him: “They did not expect what white
people might call ‘normal’ or ‘standard.’ There had never been anything such as ‘normal’ for
them” (201). This lack of the expectations that exist in the dominant culture is a product of
being “Other,” living in the borderland.
Mosca tries to make sense of Root’s experience during the accident, to find the deeper
meaning and how it can teach them about life: “he wanted Root to talk about the soul journey
and about the visions” (200). To Mosca, visions do not exist as a completely separate realm
from daily experience, a point that Deloria makes in “Chrisitanity”: “The tribal people see what
we experience in the world as real; they also believe that what we see in dreams and visions is
real” (152-53).
Visions and Ghost Dance images, as well as philosophical ponderings on religion and
spirituality, permeate Silko’s Gardens as she adeptly explores the amalgamation of paganism,
Christianity and Native American spirituality. Gardens chronicles a Native American child’s
quest to return to the land and the family from which she was taken. As Indigo runs away from
the Indian Boarding School, she wanders—quite literally—into the world of a high-class,
spiritually frustrated young woman, Hattie. Indigo dances naked in Hattie’s garden, completely
unbeknownst to Hattie, exemplifying the Eden- like innocence and the lack of shame that
traditional religious principles impose.
Hattie, an intellectual and independent thinker, lives in horror of her graduate thesis,
which her committee had refused to approve. Never a believer in the portrayal of an angry,
damning God in the Bible, Hattie begins to explore Gnostic Christianity. Hattie is stricken with
the injustice that the disciples would not believe Mary Magdalene when she first saw Christ risen
from the dead; Hattie feels as though “the reason Jesus appeared to her first was to teach the
other disciples a lesson in humility” (95).
Tied in closely with ancient pagan beliefs and
traditions, Gnosticism radically breaks from mainstream Christianity. In fact, as Silko notes in
an interview in 1998, “in Europe, there’s the corporate church, that kind of Christianity, and then
there’s this other Jesus. Jesus would have a fit, just like I wrote in Almanac of the Dead, if he
could see what his followers did” (Arnold 7). The Gnostic Carpocrates “taught the world was
56
made by six angels, and all believers are equal with Christ; man could be free of vice and sin
only after enslavement to vice and sin” (Gardens 97). This kind of egalitarian spiritual belief
allows Hattie to eventually embrace the tenets of Native American spirituality.
The teaching of the Gnostics takes a radical departure from traditional Christianity. Silko
delineates the core Gnostic beliefs that Hattie embraced to be that one should “[a]bandon the
search for God and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the
starting point. Learn who is within you who makes everything his own and says: My God, my
mind, my thoughts, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. If you
carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself” (Gardens 99-100). This
position is a far cry from the almighty power of the church, but still puts a tremendous emphasis
on the individual, which is a primary issue that Deloria has with people attempting to co-op
Native American religion without communal ties: “Community is essential because visions are
meant for communities, not for individuals” (“Vision” 113).
Birkeland finds the same
individualism apparent in green Liberalism, which “attempts to reunite Man with nature” but
“leaves community and the women’s culture in the background” (45).
Hattie suffers at the hands of her thesis committee because she asserts that Jesus had
women disciples, that he provided a Gospel to Mary Magdalene.
Hattie believes that the
Messiah saw women as worthy of recognition, as capable of a deep spirituality. These concepts
have long been a part of paganism as well as of Native American religions, yet traditional
Christianity has frequently denied them. As she begins anew her search for true spirituality,
Hattie gives up the conventions of the church and embraces the teachings of the Gnostics that
glorify the Holy Mother:
She passed the holy water font by the door, and ignored the crucified Jesus in the
center of the altar; instead she stood in the alcove with the statue of Mary with the
baby Jesus in her arms …. My Mother, my Spirit—words from the old Gnostic
gospels sprang into her mind. She who is before all things, grace, Mother of
Mythic Eternal Silence . . . . Incorruptible W isdom, Sophia, the material wold and
the flesh are only temporary— there are no sins of the flesh, spirit is everything!
(450).
Hattie’s views are dangerous to the church because they take away the need for a
mediator between God and man; if God has unconditional love, then the church has no power to
punish (Gardens 99). Hattie reaches a point of transformation after Edward’s arrest, when she
decides to leave him. The next morning she awakens: “She lay back on the pillow to watch the
57
dust specks glitter, rising and falling in the light. How beautiful and perfect it was—there was
no need for anything more, certainly not her attachments to the past” (377). Hattie dreams that
“she was back in the hidden grotto in Lucca alone with a cleft oval stone, which began to softly
shimmer and glow until it was lustrous and shining, too bright to look at directly. The light
itself, not the stone, spoke to her, though not with words but feelings. She woke still embraced
by a sense of well-being and love; she wept from a happiness she did not understand” (406).
Perhaps Silko has the stones teach Hattie that she must resolve her own internal conflicts and
become spiritually self-sufficient before embarking on other journeys.
Native American religion is experiential in nature, not history-based. Native American
spirituality is alive and vibrant and has a tangible impact on the lives of people experiencing it
(Deloria “Vision” 116).
During Hattie’s trip to Europe to visit her Aunt Bronwyn, she
encounters a brilliant light as she awakens from sleepwalking one night: “How beautiful the
light was! … [N]ow a prismatic aura surrounded the light. It was if starlight and moonlight
converged over her as a warm current of air enveloped her; for an instant Hattie felt such joy she
wept” (248). It is as if a force has called her to witness the sacredness of this place. As Sister
Salt dances at the first Ghost Dance in the novel, “she was enveloped in the light and she herself
was the light. She felt them all around her, cradling her, loving her; she didn’t see them, but she
knew all of the –the ancestors’ spirits always loved her; there was no end to their love” (28).
Paula Gunn Allen’s description of ceremony clearly describes the all-consuming experience that
the Ghost Dance had for its practitioners: “Soon breath, heartbeat, thought, emotion and word
are one. The repetition integrates or fuses, allowing thought and word to coalesce into one
rhythmic whole” (qtd in Horvitz 51). Gunn describes ceremonies “as inducing an ‘hypnotic state
of consciousness’ allowing the ceremonial participant to devote his/her complete attention to
‘becoming one with the universe’” (qtd in Horvitz 51-52). When a Mormon’s ancestors visit
him, he behaves no differently than the Indians (Gardens 30). In his essay “Sacred Places and
Moral Responsibility,” Deloria notes that “Indians who have never visited certain sacred sites
nevertheless know of these places from the community knowledge, and they intuit this knowing
to be an essential part of their being” (327). Hattie feels drawn to the Garden perhaps to prepare
her for the light, the true revealing of the sacred that she will experience at the Ghost Dance.
When Hattie first encounters Indigo, Hattie fights Indigo’s assertion that she has, in fact,
seen the Messiah. According to the child, he and the Virgin and his eleven children came down
58
from the mountains to meet with his faithful followers as they danced for him. She seems almost
horrified at the idea that Jesus would not be white, that he would appear to Native American
people. Yet, as she grows farther away from her roots in class, materialism and stifling religion,
she begins to accept that all humanity is connected. The egalitarian nature of the Messiah draws
Hattie, and she finds a connection even stronge r than the connection she had felt with the
Gnostic Gospels: “In the presence of the Messiah and the Holy Mother, there was only one
language spoken—the language of love—which all people understand…because we are all the
children of Mother Earth” (32). Once she is free of the restrictions that her relationship with
Edward entailed, Hattie follows Indigo to Sister Salt’s home. On a trip to the girls’ dwelling
from town, Hattie is raped and badly beaten, presumably as a result of her involvement with the
Indians. She recovers enough to travel to the encampment where the Native American people
are dancing for the return of the Messiah.
In Mean Spirit, Lionel Tall reminisces about the Ghost Dance and about the new messiah,
Wavokah: “He was an Indian who was thought to be Christ, and he preached that if the people
danced and believed, the buffalo would return, life would return to what it had been before
settlers and hunters, and the ancestors would return” (220). However, what he says is in direct
opposit ion to what Silko says in Almanac; he remembers that the messiah had said bullets would
not penetrate the shirts. “It was a faith of survival, of the desire for life. It was water for the
thirsty, food for the hungry. It was survival” (220). The narrative in Almanac claims that the
Native Americans did not consider whether the shirts were bulletproof, given that death was not
their largest fear: “The ghost shirts gave the dancers spiritual protection while the white men
dreamed of shirts that repelled bullets because they fear death” (722). Even if the Ghost Dancers
died, they experienced life through renewed hope. The renewal of their hope and faith allowed
their spirits to live on, although their bodies perished.
The need to endow Native American communities with Anglo characteristics becomes
obvious in the fear that the Ghost Dance would become violent. In fact, “[t]here is no one single
instance of wars or conflicts between or among American Indian tribes, or between Indians and
non-Indians, which had as its basis the differences in religious practices or beliefs” (Deloria
“Vision” 115). Yet, the government clearly did not perceive that there was no threat from Indian
religious ceremonies, as Irwin clearly notes: “The tragic consequence of the Lakota practice of
this dance resulted in the U.S. Army’s slaughter of eighty- four men, forty- four women, and
59
eighteen children at Wounded Knee, in December 1890” (300). The relations between the
United States government and Native Americans attempting to act upon their spirituality has
been a dismal failure at best and has done little more than prove the rampant intolerance the
government has for Native American expressions of faith and cause Indians to believe, with just
cause, Deloria’s point that “the white man will kill his opposition rather than win it over by
example or reasoning. There was Ghost Dancing at Wounded Knee in 1890 and also in 1973 but
in neither case did it stop the marshals’ bullets” (“Theological” 35).
Indigo claims that the “United States government was afraid of the Messiah’s dance”
(14).
Quite obviously the government feared something—a political and spiritual uprising,
perhaps? Native American religious practices were illegal from 1880 to 1940 (Deloria
“Religion” 125). In 1892, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan, specifically
made all dances illegal and punishable by withholding rations or imprisonment (Irwin 296), and
Silko depicts the Indians’ rejection of the white man’s claim of ownership of the Messiah, their
claim to be owners of his history, his life and the salvation he offered (Gardens 49).
Wovoka claims that Jesus is angry at what the whites had done to the earth, animals and
people. If the Indians would dance and believe, the spirits would renew the land and return the
sacred buffalo (Gardens 23). The return of the buffalo by the spirits resonated with the Indian
community, as “Indian complaints of white hunters fell on deaf ears; their ‘guardians’ in the
Department of the Interior linked the disappearance of the bison to the civilization and eventual
assimilation of the Indian tribes” (Krech 141). By 1884, “[w]ith very few exceptions, the buffalo
was gone” (Krech 141). Ynestra King expressed most forcefully the influence that patriarchy,
including the paternalism the dominant culture in America expressed toward Native Americans,
and capitalism has had on the environment and the economies of economically underdeveloped
societies, which I would argue would include today’s Native American reservations. Ecology,
for King, is “a political word… [that] stands against the economics of the destroyers and the
pathology of racist hatred. It’s a way of being, which understands that there are connections
between all living things” (qtd. in Mellor 40). Deloria notes that, for Native Americans, their
love of nature is very specific to the environment in which they live (“Kinship” 223).
Knowing how the Ghost Dance played out historically makes the appearance of the
Ghost Dance in Gardens poignant. Too sick to attend the dance, Hattie awakes from a deep sleep
to a warm glowing light, like the one she had encountered in England, surrounded by sacred
60
stones and pagan mythology. Sister Salt explains to her, “The light she saw was the Morning
Star, who came to comfort her” (469).
Yet, again, European culture clashes with Native
American culture: Hattie’s father arrives at the encampment to retrieve Hattie, and the police
disband the dancers before the Messiah arrives.
Gardens creates strong ties between European paganism and Native American religion.
Hattie’s character most explicitly begins to question what the church has taught her, as she
becomes exposed to the sincerity of Indigo’s beliefs and her Aunt’s knowledge of Celtic tradition
and the Professoressa’s collection of ancient European artifacts depicting familiar figures from
Native American religion: “Hattie drifted off to sleep recalling the pictures and statutes of the
Blessed Virgin Mary standing on a snake. Catechism classes taught Mary was killing the snake,
but after seeing the figures in the rain garden, she thought perhaps the Virgin with the snake was
based on a figure from earlier times” (304). Gardens connects Native American spirituality to
European spirituality, focusing on the unifying concepts and the similarities rather than the
differences. Many indigenous religions today are a blend of Catholicism and an indigenous
spiritualism: “The Mexican Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe is often cited as a prototypical
example of religious syncretism, the merging of … (Aztec) and Spanish Catholic religious
traditions, of Aztec mother goddess and Spanish Virgin” (Burkhart 198).
Indeed, the two
cultures blended so much in the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, that it remains difficult to
determine where Catho licism ends and indigenous spirituality resumes.
Silko asserts that the Anglo searching for a spiritual connection stems partly from the
desecration of their own religion: “European descendants on American soil anxiously purchased
indigenous cures for their dark nights of the soul on the continents where Christianity had
repeatedly violated its own canons, and only the Indians could still see the Blessed Virgin among
the December roses, her skin and clothing Native American, not European” (Almanac 478). The
indigenous people in Mexico have long had a deep and enduring relationship with the Virgin
Mary; they viewed her “as a maternal figure personally connected with them” (Burkhart 209).
As opposed to the rigid judgment of traditional Christianity, the Virgin Mary “became the object
of emotional attachment: she was precious, merciful, loving, and beloved” (Burkhart 210). The
Virgin interceded for the indigenous peoples; this intercession becomes increasingly important as
life under Anglo rule attempts to further separate American Indians from their own spiritual
beliefs: “Mary offered not judgement and punishments but sympathy and mercy. In her role as
61
intercessor, she intervened at the moment of death to ensure that the souls of her devotees would
be admitted to heaven. She frequently intervened in the affairs of the living as well, saving her
devotees from peril” (Burkhart 211). The similarities between American Indian spiritual beliefs
and the amalgamated Catholicism are historical; however, Christianity tends to find fault with
any aberration from the teachings of the Church, much as Hattie’s thesis committee found fault
with her independent research and conclusions about the human relationship to God.
Hattie and Indigo visit a farm in Cervione, Italy, where the host takes them to see the
image of the Blessed Virgin that appears on the wall of the schoolhouse:
[H]e explained that recently a disagreement between the townspeople and the
church officials sprang up. Since the apparition of Our Lady on the schoolhouse
wall, the visitors and pilgrims who used to visit the gold and silver portrait of
Mary in the abbey shrine seldom went there any more. Who could blame them?
If they knelt or stood long enough in front of the schoolhouse wall, they might get
to see the Blessed Mother herself (316).
Silko again ties Church officials to control of the people and capitalism; they feel that their gold
and silver rendition of the Virgin should be more sacred than the Virgin herself: “The abbot
alleged the image on the wall was the work of the devil because the miraculous appearance
overshadowed the monks’ shrine to the portrait of Mary in silver on gold” (318). However, the
monks’ shrine of silver on gold cannot compare to the pure spiritual connection that the
townspeople seek and receive from the apparition of the Virgin: “A faint glow suffused the
white washed wall and Hattie felt her heart beat faster as the glow grew brighter with a subtle
iridescence that steadily intensified into a radiance of pure color that left her breathless, almost
dizzy” (319). The experience moves Hattie; her previous encounters with the Anglo, capitalistic
Catholic Church left her unprepared for her feelings: “She was surprised to feel tears on her
cheeks and saw that the others… wept though their faces were full of joy” (Gardens 320).
Silko takes a stab at Christianity’s need to vilify other religions. She sees Christianity as
a divisive, rather than unifying force: “Snakes crawled under the ground. They heard the voices
of the dead: actual conversations, and lone voices calling out to loved ones still living. Snakes
heard the confessions of murderers and arsonists after innocent people had been accused. Why
did Catholic priest always kill snakes?” (130-31). Schools capitalized upon the Anglo desire to
stomp out Native American religion; at the schools the elders had no voice to tell the children
that the white man’s spirituality was corrupt and broken, enabling the Church to maintain
62
spiritual control over the reservations: “[O]ld nuns had got the story of benevolent, gentle
Quetzalcoatl all wrong too.
The nuns had taught the children that the Morning Star,
Quetzalcoatl, was really Lucifer, the Devil God had thrown out of heaven. The nuns had
terrified the children with the story of the snake in the Garden of Eden to end devotion to
Quetzalcoatl” (Almanac 519). Silko writes that “Quetzalcoatl gathered the bones of the dead
and sprinkled them with his own blood, and humanity was reborn” in Almanac of the Dead
(136). According to Miguel León-Portilla’s article in the collection South and Meso-American
Spirituality, this recreation of human beings comes directly from Aztec myth. Quetzalcoatl, the
feathered serpent in ancient Aztec religion, conveys “divine wisdom” (42). The creation of
humans is vastly different from Judeo-Christian mythology: as Quetzalcoatl was creating the
human beings, the gods sought to be worth of the desire of bringing humans into being and they
did penance (43). The Aztecs believed that the sacrifice of the gods to bring them into the world
deserved reciprocal sacrifice, sometimes including human sacrifice (44). Indian spirituality calls
for sacrifice not as a means of atonement, but as a “means to match the contribution of other
forms of life” (Deloria “Reflection” 259).
Angel, in Solar Storms, claims that the Christian version of the creation story has
forgotten the loneliness of god, “the yearning for something that shaped itself into the words, Let
there be.” On the tenth day of creation, animals and people learned to communicate: “And those
that didn’t know it were unfinished creations, cursed to be eternal children on this earth, lacking
in the wisdom that understands life” (181). Dora-Rouge counts the white culture as “drifting
ones” that did not learn the entire story of creation. They were there on the day that the gods
created war but did not stay long enough to hear the antidote for war (Solar 181).
White culture seems consumed with the desire to kill what is sacred to the Indians. The
eagle hunters in Mean Spirit find nothing wrong with killing the creatures for profit, while Belle
is wracked with grief at the sight: “She stared at the dead, sacred eagles. They looked like a
tribe of small, gone people, murdered and taken away in the back of a truck” (110). Brice notes
that the eagle hunter’s “motherlessness—the state of being cut off from the maternal, life-giving
force—has made them seem less than fully alive” (128). In fact, the white people think as little
of killing India ns for their land as they do of killing sacred eagles. In a state of motherlessness—
a detachment from the teachings and the community in which he was born to dwell—Ben
Graycloud returns from the Haskell School. He is consumed by despair and drunkenness. Belle
63
realizes the extent of Ben’s detachment from himself and the Native American way of life when
she realizes that he has killed and mutilated an eagle to obtain its feathers to pray: “You took a
life in order to pray?” Belle asks (276). Nothing could fly in the face of Native American
spirituality as much as destroying a kinship/respect relationship in order to offer a prayer to the
Spirit.
No character experiences a more drastic spiritual awakening than Father Dunne. When a
tornado destroys the Catholic Church, the young priest moves the church to the woods, where the
tornado set down the Virgin and the saints (Mean 170). A bit later, Father Dunne is with
Horse—the diviner—listening to what the Priest believes is the voice of God’s earth. Horse
corrects him: it is the rage of mother earth (189). Ultimately the priest begins to embrace the
divine in all living things. He blesses chickens and pigs; he offers last rites to a trout. That is
when the Indians believe that “the priest went sane” (189). He realizes that life spirit lives in
animals and nature, as well as in churches and cathedrals (238). Father Dunne’s openness,
radically different from the face of Catholicism that Native American writing typically shows, is
a malleable spirituality. He may still believe in the Virgin, the Messiah, the saints; that is not
mutually exclusive to realizing the living spirit in all that exists in the world.
Father Dunne’s willingness to embrace Native American thought may be a product of the
Protestant national landscape considering both Catholics and Native Americans as the “other,”
forces that impede reason, that stand in the way of civilization. Seen as remnants of the past with
no history, the Protestant national landscape seeks only to eradicate Catholics and Indians from
the landscape. In history, in literature, in culture, this eradication was ruthless and complete for
centuries (Noble 3). In fact, as Noble points out, for most historians, Native Americans were an
irrelevant issue; they would “vanish from the landscape” because they were “dying races” (5).
However, historians failed to consider the possibility of the Anglo adopting tenets of
Native American religion, like the concept of complete unity with Nature. In Mean Spirit, a
rattlesnake bit es Father Dunne. He believes he is going to die and is quite afraid. But then he
“tried to think like a snake and see things from its point of view, and in that effort I merged with
the snake” (262). Father Dunne wants to share his new knowledge with the Hill Indians, but he
has discovered a truth that even Indian children know. With childlike acceptance, the Catholic
priest allows his belief system to intertwine itself with the basic concepts of Native American
spirituality.
64
Native American diviner Mic hael Horse finds some good in the white man’s Bible, but
he wants to add his own gospel, one that will fix all the existing mistakes. Father Dunne is
incredulous. He claims that the Bible is the word of God, that men only wrote what he told them
to:
“Well, son,” Horse said to the priest, “I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I
would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?”
“The priest shook his head. ‘It doesn’t say that. It says man has dominion over the
creatures of the earth.’”
“Well, that’s where it needs to be fixed. That’s part of the trouble, don’t you see?”
(Mean 273-74).
Horse’s reference to Father Dunne as son indicates that there are some basic truths that one does
not have to have formal training to grasp, only the right level of respect and interconnectedness
with the earth.
Indigo knows that people do not have dominion over animals. Hattie gives her a pony to
ride, and she knows the pony is angry about being ridden. Hattie tells Indigo that she can “show
him who is boss,” but Indigo begins “to have second thoughts. She didn’t want to be the boss of
a pony that didn’t want to be ridden” (172). Indigo knows, as a result of Grandma Fleet’s
teachings, that “[I]t would have been better to take days or even weeks to make friends with the
fat pony before she tried to ride him” (174). Grandma Fleet’s wisdom told her that she must gain
the trust of animals like she gains the trust of people. The concept of animals as feeling beings
contrasts sharply against the beliefs and actions of Edward’s sister Susan, who bought parrots
because the two looked good in the cage. When one parrot died, she no longer cared about or
paid attention to the other parrot: “one died and now the whole look [was] spoiled. One parrot
alone won’t do” (187).
The contrast between god in all living things and the Christian god contained in churches
resonates in Solar Storms when the church is much cleaner than anything else in the town: “But
of course, the Anglicans had believed this was the domicile of God, who wouldn’t stoop to the
level of humans; it needed to look better than where mere humans lived” (276). Those who
believe in keeping the domicile of God pristine are the same ones destroying the Earth, redirecting waters and threatening the Native American people when they object. This sort of
desire to control what the Anglos view as spiritual ground, while destroying the Earth, reflects
65
the notion that “[p]atriarchal spirituality has been transcendent and earth-disdaining rather than
earth-honoring” (Birkeland 47). Christianity also preaches a detachment and disdain for the
body: “The Catholic and Protestant religions encourage fear and distrust of life and of the body;
they encourage
a split between the body and the spirit and totally ignore the soul; they
encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves” (Anzaldúa 59).
Deloria notes that “[m]ost Indians did not see any conflict between their old beliefs and
the new religions of the white man and consequently a surprising number of people participated
in these ancient rituals while maintaining membership in a Christian denomination” (“Sacred”
203). In a separate essay, in the collection Spirit & Reason, he also notes that a “surprisingly
high percentage of Native American clergy are also doing traditional ceremonies” (“Tribal”
321).
In Mean Spirit, “Reverend Joe Billy of the Indian Baptist Church was what they called
the road man. The road man shows Indian people the path of life, takes the stones out of their
way, and maps out the spirit’s terrain. Joe Billy’s face was rubbed with red clay and yellow
ochre, the elements of earth…. His eyes were closed and he was praying, but he was a different
man than the one who wore the black suit on Sunday mornings. And even his prayers were
different, deeper somehow, more heartfelt, more physical as if they came thought the body and
not just the mind” (73). This scene marks the beginning of a journey for Joe Billy that will result
in a return to his traditional spirituality, due to what Deloria defines as the “impotence and
irrelevancy of the Christian message” (“Missionaries” 24). After the deaths of Grace Blanket,
John Stink, John Thomas and Walker, Joe Billy remarks on the toll all of the destruction is
beginning to take on his faith: “I hardly believe my own sermons anymore” (137).
Upon leaving his official post as minister of the Indian Baptist Church, he returns to the
old ways of his father, a medicine man.
He begins to practice bat medicine; the bundles
containing the bats are sacred: “Horse had never actually seen one of the medicine bundles
opened. Until recently, the bundles were buried with the body of the person who owned them, or
maybe it would be more precise to say that the bundles owned the people” (169). In Almanac,
the bundle that Tacho receives owns him. He must be careful to open it in the right frame of
mind and only for spiritual endeavors to lead his people on a spiritual revolution toward the north
to reclaim the land. The bundles in Mean Spirit and in Almanac represent something sacred to
be revered and respected: “Assembling this spiritually nourishing matter is a ritual process and
66
opening the bundle responsibly at appropriate times constitutes a ritualization which may bring
blessings to individuals and communities” (Grim 53).
In the time of crisis, the Indians in Mean Spirit turned away from white culture: “the
Indians lost trust in the whites, so they stopped seeing Doctor Black for their illnesses and
pains…. They returned to the medicine people. They needed faith and hope more than they
needed pills” (170). Instead of praying with a rosary, Ona Neck makes a tobacco prayer string to
offer the spirits: “Her string of prayers was longer than a rosary, and filled with more hope than
a necklace of mustard seeds” (215). In times of crisis, there is a turning away from white
religion and culture because Indians have found the church’s efforts to sustain and protect them
as feeble as those of the government: “Like the justice and judicial system of the government,
the Church is another example of an ideologically compassionate and communally protective
institution that has been raped and butchered by the combative avarice of andocentric EuroAmerican individualism” (St. Clair 147).
Solar Storms chronicles white settlers and a government who had misunderstood Native
American spirituality—even the land itself—for generations:
The immigrants had believed wilderness was full of demons, and that only their
church and their god could drive the demons away. They feared the voices of
animals singing at night. They had forgotten wild. It was already from their
world, a world . . . that, having lost wilderness, no longer had the power to create
itself anew. . . . For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them,
hell was this world in all its plentitude. (86)
One of the primary beliefs that polarizes Judeo-Christian culture from Native American culture
is the Christian belief that “the flesh is sin and dwelling upon the Earth is merely a ‘travail’ in
preparation for the kingdom of heaven” (Mellor).
Anglo society does not necessarily stand alone in its alienation from Nature and
spirituality.
Simply being Native American in itself does not save one from spiritual
depravation. Native Americans that get wrapped up in materialism, in the ways of white culture,
who become disconnected from their ancestors and belief systems are also in danger:
“Pentecostal preachers appealed to the lost, cash-filled Indian souls who had been suffering from
spiritual malnutrition” (Mean 71). But it is significant that, as the world begins to unravel for the
people of Watona, Moses Graycloud literally walks past the Pentecostal revival tent and turns
67
toward his spiritual roots: “from the peyote teepee in the hilly, rolling country, Moses could hear
the drum. It calmed him. It was the song of a deeper life, the beating of the earth’s pulse” (72).
For Hogan’s powerful imagery and strong representation of the passion of Native
American spirituality, she does not falter into idealism. As the people defend their native land,
there are fractions and divisions among them. Bush and Angel, the two primary characters, leave
the northern land when it becomes much too unsafe to remain. The rift between the older
generation and the younger Native Americans rebelling against Anglo society becomes clear as
one of the Native American men who served in the military refers to the American Indian
Movement (AIM) members as communists (156-57). Yet as the characters reconnect with the
land, allowing their bodies to experience what their minds do not consciously remember (79),
they develop a personal peace that allows them to live more fully.
Perhaps the reason that white culture grasps so greedily at Native American religions is
that mainstream American has replaced true religion and spirituality with a “civil religion,” a
belief in the nation (Noble 10). This belief was nothing akin to the Native American belief of
sacred lands and unity with surroundings; it was a religion of ideas, a strong belief in a bourgeois
culture based on fraternity and equality. As Deloria observes, “Communism was the civil
religion of the Soviet Union, and it failed; chauvinistic patriotism is the civil religion of the
United States right now, and it will soon break into bickering pressure groups and oppression and
suppression of all dissenting views” (“Secularism” 228). Where are Anglos to turn when this
belief dissolves? Deloria posits that “[t]he collapse of the civil rights movement, the concern
with Vietnam and the war, the escape to drugs, the rise of power movements, and the return to
Mother Earth can all be understood as desperate efforts of groups of people to flee abstract
articulation of belief and superficial values and find authenticity wherever it could be found”
(“Religious” 281). Silko and Hogan strive to share the authenticity of their own experiences,
beliefs and spirituality with Anglo readers in a fashion that such readers can easily embrace and
incorporate into their lives. They offer their readers a space in the Borderlands.
68
CHAPTER 5
THE VISION FOR THE BORDERLAND SOCIETY
The answers we find in the heat of battle and in the quiet of meditation are answers to questions
we did not think we asked. (Deloria “Good” 87).
The four novels chart a path of faith in the return of Native American people to Native
lands. With that return comes a move toward a communal sense of living, loosening the ties of
capitalism. This is not to say that the ultimate goal is to shun all material possessions. Nor are
the authors asserting that all Native Americans are inherently good and Europeans are inherently
evil. Rather, there is a pull in the novels toward a new society. However, at this point, it
becomes necessary to challenge the notion of a dichotomy of two worlds, as David Noble does in
Death of a Nation. The new society toward which these novels point is not one that would make
Caucasians the “other.” The new society does insist on an annihilation of the current class
structure. It insists on sensitivity to the environment and to basic human rights. And, in order to
achieve these goals to their ultimate potential, it insists on the awareness of our own spirituality
and the divinity of all life.
After the 1940s, as Noble suggests, the notion of the American landscape became more
inclusive, offering greater flexibility, fewer boundaries: “Culture was seen as a necessary and
natural space for human beings. And culture as a dynamic space-time continuum could not be
contained within a nation’s borders; it could not be kept from flowing across national
boundaries” (xxix). After World War II, “Modern nations as sacred spaces had been replaced by
the sacred space of a universal marketplace” (xxxvii). While this trend indicates a triumph of
capitalism—at least temporarily—it also means that mainstream American culture no longer
needed to defend so vigorously the idea of the American landscape and the “Other” outside that
landscape.
69
While mainstream Anglo culture may no longer need to adhere to the idea of Native
Americans as the “Other,” Anzaldúa notes that Anglo society continues to have much to learn
from Native Americans regarding harmonious living with the Earth: “White America has only
attended to the body of the earth in order to exploit it, never to succor it or to be nurtured in it.
Instead of surreptitiously ripping off the vital energy of people of color and putting it to
commercial use, whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a
respectful way” (90). In the vision for a New World that these novels create, “One must be able
to let go of a great many comforts and all things European; but the reward would be peace and
harmony with all living things. All they had to do was retur n to Mother Earth. NO more
blasting, digging or burning” (Almanac 710).
Anzaldúa notes the origin of the rift between Anglo culture and Native American culture;
it is a lack of seeing all beings as equal: “In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made
‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with
them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence” (59). Silko makes clear that this “Other”ing
creates a chasm between white culture and people of color—any people of color: “Whites put
great store in names. But one the whites had a name for a thing, they seemed unable ever again
to recognize the thing itself” (Almanac 224). The Anglo society, which once prided itself on
creating the national landscape, must now unlearn the isolation and labels that it had placed on
people of color for so long.
Noble emphasizes that if, as the contemporary theory runs, “modern nations [are]
creations of human imagination and that they, too, were always in the process of recreation and
revitalization” then it stands to reason that Native Americans can and must be incorporated into
the national landscape (271-72). Postcolonialism “denied the sanctity of the boundaries of the
bourgeois nation” (Noble 272). To deny this concept of a nation disavows Manifest Destiny,
deconstructs the American ideal of a national landscape and forces mainstream society to reflect
upon the hybridity of the American nation as a whole: “No longer persuaded by the aesthetic
authority of bourgeois nationalism, postnationalist historians are deconstructing its assumptions.
They see evidence that contradicts the hypothesis that there is a bounded nation and a
homogenous people. They present evidence that the local and international are spaces in which
the actions of individuals have great meaning” (Noble 284).
70
Noble’s book calls attention to literary theorist Paul Jay’s point that “[h]ybridity, not
purity, was … the reality of human experience. And hybridity did not mean chaos as the
adherents of the national romance insisted” (Noble 233). Hogan notes this sort of hybridity in
the Native American community: “If you live on the boundaries between cultures, you are both
of those cultures and neither of those cultures, and you can move with great mobility in any
direction you want” (interview with Scholer qtd. in Smith 181). Jay, according to Noble,
“imagin[ed] a world in which a variety of cultures were always engaged in complex patterns of
interrelationships.
Reality was embodied in these dialogues.
In this world there were no
absolute boundaries that protected a pure and timeless entity. Jay, unlike modern nationalists,
did not imagine the inevitable patterns of cultural border crossings both within the nation and
between nations as symbols of contamination” (233).
In fact, the results of such hybridity,
according to Anzaldúa, can only be liberating: “A massive uprooting of dualisting thinking in
the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that
could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (Anzaldua 102).
Perhaps no one in Almanac seems to find redemption because the anger is too great: “To
rage and look upon you with contempt is to rage and be contemptuous of ourselves” (Anzaldúa
110). The twins are at peace, but they lead a peaceful revolution to take back the land, to
reconnect. And they invite all who are willing to join them. Twins hearken back to the Aztec
mythology, which considered the twin serpents, Quetza lcoatl and Cihuacoatl, Precious Twin and
the Feminine Twin, “the most revered pair” (Leon Portilla 44). Peace has been inherent in
American Indian tradition since the time of the Aztecs. In order to be worthy of one’s existence,
humans were to “live in peace near and close to others” (Leon Portilla 50). The American Indian
call to peace directly clashed with Columbus’s theory that firepower equated with reason (Frost
121). If American Indians believe it is their duty to be peaceful, and Europeans believe that guns
are a product of a reasonable civilization, is it any wonder that the eradication of Indians from
the national landscape was almost complete? Deloria laments the fate of most non-violence
practitioners, without arguing that the ethics behind non-violence are wrong: “It is too easy to
examine non-violence as a technique without recognizing that most significant practitioners of
non-violence now lie in their graves, sacrificial victims of a process that demonstrated high
ethical and social commitment in a world devoted to survival at any cost” (“Non-Violence” 45).
This desire for peace contrasts, as Deloria claims, with the Christian churches in America who
71
have “preached peace for years yet have always endorsed the wars in which the nation has been
engaged” (“Missionaries” 25). Although Deloria openly acknowledges that, in an Anglo,
patriarchal, Christian society, non-violence can easily lead to death, he expresses the hope with
which Solar Storms, Mean Spirit and Gardens ultimately end their journey: “The demonstration
of non-violence is the ultimate expression of expectation, because it opens the possibility of
discovering that one is not alone—which is the only affirmation we have of our existence”
(“Non-violence” 50). Silko adheres to the Native American prophecy for the world, that “[g]uns
and knives would not resolve the struggle . . . . the world that the whites brought with them
would not last. It would be swept away in a giant gust of wind. All they had to do was wait. It
would only be a matter of time” (Almanac 235).
What unifies the ecofeminist goal of all four of these novels is “a commitment to
bringing together all group oppressions to fight domination collectively, because as diverse as
our struggles are, the source of our oppression is patriarchal and capitalist privilege. Our goal is
not to seize a piece of it for ourselves, but rather to rid ourselves of its scourge before its too
late” (Vance 140). In a 1988 interview, Silko expresses a highly idealistic view of humans’
potential: “Our human nature, our human spirit, wants no boundaries, and we are better beings,
and we are less destructive and happier. We can be our best selves as a species, as beings with
all the other living beings on this earth, we behave best and get along best, without those
divisions” (Arnold 9-10).
Ultimately, these four novels strive for peace, a dissolution of
boundaries between humankind, and an understanding of the interconnectedness, the divinity, of
all life.
72
REFERENCES
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands (La Frontera): The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
Arnold, Ellen. “Listening to the Spirits: An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.” Studies in American Literatures.
10.3 (Fall 1998): 1-33.
Birkeland, Janis. “Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice.” Ecofeminism. Ed. Greta Gaard. Philadelphia:
Temple U P, 1993. 13-59.
Brice, Jennifer. “Earth as Mother, Earth as Other in Novels by Silko and Hogan.” Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction 39.2 (Winter 1998): 127-39.
Burkhart, Louise M. “The Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico.” South and Meso-American Native
Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation. Ed. Garry H. Gossen.
New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1993. 198-227.
Deloria, Vine Jr. “A Violated Covenant.” For This Land: Writings on Religion in America. Ed. James Treat. New
York: Routledge, 1999. 72-76.
---. “Christianity and Indigenous Religion: Friends or Enemies?” For This Land: Writings on Religion in America.
Ed. James Treat. New York: Routledge, 1999. 145-61.
---. “The Churches and Cultural Change.” For This Land. 51-57.
---. “Completing the Theological Circle: Civil Religion in America.” For This Land. 166-74.
---. “If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True.” Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader. Eds.
Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner and Sam Scinta. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing, 1999. 40-60.
---. “Indian Affairs 1973: Hebrews 13:8.” Spirit & Reason. 189-98.
---. “It Is a Good Day to Die.” For This Land. 84-91.
---. “Kinship with the World.” Spirit & Reason. 223-29.
---. “Missionaries and the Religious Vacuum.” For This Land. 22-30.
---. “Native American Spirituality.” For This Land. 130-34.
---. “Non-Violence in American Society.” For This Land. 44-50.
---. “On Liberation.” For This Land. 100-07.
---. “Out of Chaos.” For This Land. 243-49.
---. “The Popularity of Being Indian: A New Trend in Contemporary American Culture.” Spirit & Reason. 230-40.
---. “Reflection and Revelation: Knowing Land, Places and Ourselves.” For This Land. 250-60.
---. “Relativity, Relatedness, and Reality.” Spirit & Reason. 32-39.
73
---. “Religion and the Modern American Indian.” For This Land. 122-29.
---. “Religion and Revolution Among American Indians.” For This Land. 36-43.
---. “Sacred Lands and Religious Freedom.” For This Land. 203-13.
---. “Sacred Places and Moral Responsibility.” Spirit & Reason. . 323-38.
---. “Secularism, Civil Religion, and the Religious Freedom of American Indians.” For This Land. 218-28.
---. “The Theological Dimension of the Indian Protest Movement.” For This Land. 22-30.
---. “Tribal Religions and Contemporary American Culture.” Spirit & Reason. 305-22.
---. “Vision and Community.” For This Land. 108-17.
Frost, Elsa Cecilia. “Indians and Theologians: Sixteenth-Century Spanish Theologians and Their Concept of the
Indigenous Soul.” South and Meso-American Native Spirituality. 119-39.
Grim, John A. “Cultural Identity, Authenticity, and Community Survival: The Politics of Recognition in the Study
of Native Religions.” Native American Spirituality. Ed. Lee Irwin. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000. 3760.
Haly, Richard. “Nahuas and National Culture: A Contest of Appropriations.” Native American Spirituality. 15792.
Hernández-Ávila, Inés. “Mediations of the Spirit: Native American Religious Traditions and Ethics of
Representation.” Native American Spirituality. 11-36.
Hogan, Linda. Mean Spirit. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.
---. Solar Storms . New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995.
Horvitz, Deborah. “Freud, Marx and Chiapas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.” Studies in
American Literature 11.4 (Fall 1998): 47-64.
Irwin, Lee. “Freedom, Law, and Prophecy: A Brief History of Native American Religious Resistance.” Native
American Spirituality. 295-316.
Krasteva, Yonka Kroumova. “The Politics of the Border in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit.” Studies in American
Indian Literatures 11.4 (Winter 1999): 46-60.
Krech, Shepard III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: W.W. Horton & Company, Inc., 1999.
León-Portilla, Miguel. “Those Made Worthy by Divine Sacrifice: The Faith of Ancient Mexico.” South and MesoAmerican Native Spirituality. 41-64.
Marzal, Manuel M. “Transplanted Spanish Catholicism.” South and Meso-American Native Spirituality. 140-69.
Mellor, Mary. Feminism & Ecology. New York: New York U P, 1997.
Noble, David W. Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2002.
74
Ridington, Robin. “Voice, Representation, and Dialogue: The Poetics of Native American Spiritual Traditions.”
Native American Spirituality. 97-120.
Salyer, Gregory. “Myth, Magic and Dread: Reading Culture Religiously.” Literature & Theology 9.3 (September
1995): 261-77.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
---. Gardens in the Dunes. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1999.
Smith, Andrew. “Hearing Bats and Following Berdache: The Project of Survivance in Linda Hogan’s Mean
Spirit.” Western American Literature 35.2 (Summer 2000): 175-91.
St. Clair, Janet. “Death of Love/Love of Death: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.” MELUS 21.2
(Summer 1996): 141-56.
Vance, Linda. “Ecofeminism and the Politics of Reality.” Ecofeminism. 118-45.
75
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Kendra Gayle Lee holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a Bachelor of Arts in
English Literature from Florida State University. While completing her Masters coursework, she
was a Teaching Assistant for the First Year Writing Program. She presented three papers at
various conferences on topics such as Native American Literature, Lesbian Literature and Early
American Literature. Kendra currently is employed at the University of South Florida at the
Florida Charter School Resource Center.
76