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 …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 …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