Visions for a New World: a Journey Through Leslie Marmon Silkoâ•Žs Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes and Linda Ho

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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

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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

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.

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.

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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

ABSTRACT

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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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

of what would become America’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

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

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,

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

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 twentieth century, the Anglo- Protestant 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

murder, their suffering matters little to the larger Anglo society that, at every turn, attempts to erase their 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.

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 …

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 Ecological 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

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

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-in- law, 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

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

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, alcoholism 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 Almanac of the Dead. This translation comprises the story dwelling in the sub-context of the novel. The Almanac 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 Almanac 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.

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 Almanac 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

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

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

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.

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:

“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.

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.

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

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

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:

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

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 “Churches” 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

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

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

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 sun- parched 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,

“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 Anglo- Americans 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.

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 land 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

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 altogether! 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

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

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).

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.

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).

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.

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, middle-

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).

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

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-

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

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

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 Marxist sympathizers as the most dangerous others, the most dangerous un- American 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 low- level 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).

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

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 (Mean 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

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,

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

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

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.

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 collection 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. The history of the Church’s dominance is legendary. 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

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).

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 not 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

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

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 Wisdom, 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

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

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 stronger 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 opposition 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

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

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 Catholicism 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

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

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 Indians 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

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 bites 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.

Native American diviner Michael 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

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

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 Euro- American 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

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.

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.

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 return 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).

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, Quetzalcoatl 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

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.

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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.