Research Question #2
Migration Stories: Mapping Cultural Survival Across Stolen Terrains
Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo author, emphasizes the importance of place in indigenous storytelling--identity is “intimately linked with the surrounding terrain,” whether it be a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place (43). When tribes migrated to find subsistence, exchange goods with other native peoples, or complete a holy journey, their stories often served as oral maps for travel, with descriptions of the notable dangers, resources, and characteristics of the landscapes they traversed (Johnson). In Deloria’s
Waterlily, Bluebird gives birth while migrating, and that sacred location becomes a central part of Waterlily’s identity. Waterlily’s life is mapped within the landscape, and in turn, Waterlily 4 reads the landscape as her tiyospaye migrates across the Great Plains and Rockies--she knows by red ocher paint that “those rocks and trees had been set apart and consecrated” by others and aptly recalls camping locations according to their features (e.g. Box Butte, a rectangular elevation that rises above the surrounding land) described within the camps’ stories (52). Through her characterization of Waterlily, Deloria captures how identity and collective memory are embedded within stories tied to the shifting landscape. However, her migration stories are set in a pre-colonial context and thus do not explore what migration stories might mean for native peoples who were forced to leave their homelands. Indigenous peoples’ contemporary sense of geographical space emerges from a complicated history of stolen land, forced migration, war, and artificial borders. Silko’s Garden in the Dunes provides a more realistic set of characters who must confront their identities as displaced Native Americans. She tells a fictional story of a young Sand Lizard girl, Indigo, whom white soldiers rip from her tribe and attempt to assimilate. Along the rhizomatic path of her wanderings through Western culture, Indigo searches for home in every rock outcropping, plant, and cloud. Through Indigo’s sense of geographical dysphoria, Silko writes indigenous space into a history of colonization and exploitation wherein migration stories map cultural survival across stolen terrains. Nor does Silko write exploitation and colonization into her plot just for dramatic effect--instead, her themes operate on a long truthful history of destruction. Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole all walked the 1,200 mile “Trail of Tears,” which bore over 4,000 deaths and 16,000 displaced peoples (Weiser). Under forced removal, the Navajo marched the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner and the Sioux trekked to Fort Snelling. From 1849 to 1870, bloodshed and expulsion left fewer than 30,000 of the 150,000 Native Americans in geographical California, making California the site of the worst slaughter of Native Americans in 4 Specifically, Bluebird names Waterlily after the flowers in that pond and also nestles her daughter in a nearby sturdy tree so that she “might grow up straight-limbed and clear-minded” (6). Cheever 9 U.S. history. Other acts and treaties reduced, divided, and seized Indian lands until only 275 Indian land areas are left in the United States …show more content…
Her first-person narration includes the voices of a Navajo electrician, a great-grandmother who endured the Long Walk, an aunt, and the speaker, tying the memories to geographical place across generations. Similarly, in “The People and the Land are Inseparable,”
Silko describes the Yaqui villages within the Tucson metropolitan area, exploring what homeland means for native people in urban areas, determining “The Yaquis may have had to leave behind their Sonoran mountain strongholds, but they did not leave behind their consciousness of their identity as Yaquis, as a people, as a community” (Silko 90).
Given that the “continuity and accuracy of oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape” (Silko 35), how do indigenous peoples compensate for the loss of their sacred land?
With regards to indigenous identity and collective memory, how did native peoples adapt their storytelling practices to retain a sense of place across stolen terrains? Eric Gary Anderson postulates that “there is a dynamic relationship between the grounded, rooted home places and an
American Indian’s intelligence of travel” that enables a “mobile poetry simultaneously to embody a rooted sensibility” (Fast 187). I seek to use historical, literary, and geographical
Migration Stories: Mapping Cultural Survival Across Stolen Terrains
Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo author, emphasizes the importance of place in indigenous storytelling--identity is “intimately linked with the surrounding terrain,” whether it be a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place (43). When tribes migrated to find subsistence, exchange goods with other native peoples, or complete a holy journey, their stories often served as oral maps for travel, with descriptions of the notable dangers, resources, and characteristics of the landscapes they traversed (Johnson). In Deloria’s
Waterlily, Bluebird gives birth while migrating, and that sacred location becomes a central part of Waterlily’s identity. Waterlily’s life is mapped within the landscape, and in turn, Waterlily 4 reads the landscape as her tiyospaye migrates across the Great Plains and Rockies--she knows by red ocher paint that “those rocks and trees had been set apart and consecrated” by others and aptly recalls camping locations according to their features (e.g. Box Butte, a rectangular elevation that rises above the surrounding land) described within the camps’ stories (52). Through her characterization of Waterlily, Deloria captures how identity and collective memory are embedded within stories tied to the shifting landscape. However, her migration stories are set in a pre-colonial context and thus do not explore what migration stories might mean for native peoples who were forced to leave their homelands. Indigenous peoples’ contemporary sense of geographical space emerges from a complicated history of stolen land, forced migration, war, and artificial borders. Silko’s Garden in the Dunes provides a more realistic set of characters who must confront their identities as displaced Native Americans. She tells a fictional story of a young Sand Lizard girl, Indigo, whom white soldiers rip from her tribe and attempt to assimilate. Along the rhizomatic path of her wanderings through Western culture, Indigo searches for home in every rock outcropping, plant, and cloud. Through Indigo’s sense of geographical dysphoria, Silko writes indigenous space into a history of colonization and exploitation wherein migration stories map cultural survival across stolen terrains. Nor does Silko write exploitation and colonization into her plot just for dramatic effect--instead, her themes operate on a long truthful history of destruction. Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole all walked the 1,200 mile “Trail of Tears,” which bore over 4,000 deaths and 16,000 displaced peoples (Weiser). Under forced removal, the Navajo marched the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo Reservation at Fort Sumner and the Sioux trekked to Fort Snelling. From 1849 to 1870, bloodshed and expulsion left fewer than 30,000 of the 150,000 Native Americans in geographical California, making California the site of the worst slaughter of Native Americans in 4 Specifically, Bluebird names Waterlily after the flowers in that pond and also nestles her daughter in a nearby sturdy tree so that she “might grow up straight-limbed and clear-minded” (6). Cheever 9 U.S. history. Other acts and treaties reduced, divided, and seized Indian lands until only 275 Indian land areas are left in the United States …show more content…
Her first-person narration includes the voices of a Navajo electrician, a great-grandmother who endured the Long Walk, an aunt, and the speaker, tying the memories to geographical place across generations. Similarly, in “The People and the Land are Inseparable,”
Silko describes the Yaqui villages within the Tucson metropolitan area, exploring what homeland means for native people in urban areas, determining “The Yaquis may have had to leave behind their Sonoran mountain strongholds, but they did not leave behind their consciousness of their identity as Yaquis, as a people, as a community” (Silko 90).
Given that the “continuity and accuracy of oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape” (Silko 35), how do indigenous peoples compensate for the loss of their sacred land?
With regards to indigenous identity and collective memory, how did native peoples adapt their storytelling practices to retain a sense of place across stolen terrains? Eric Gary Anderson postulates that “there is a dynamic relationship between the grounded, rooted home places and an
American Indian’s intelligence of travel” that enables a “mobile poetry simultaneously to embody a rooted sensibility” (Fast 187). I seek to use historical, literary, and geographical