Book Review: Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination by Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko grew up amid the vast Hopi landscape of New Mexico, immersed in a tradition of storytelling. Though her topic is nature, the tone here is deeply personal as she personifies her (some would say) inanimate surroundings and calls them family. Nature itself is the main character here.

Taken in this context, human remains are intrinsically no different than animal bones and cast-off husks (83). Not because they are refuse, but because everything in the landscape has a story, a purpose. The very stones have spirit and being of their own. All—human, animal, inanimate—deserve the same kind of respect. Everything is a link in the chain of life. Continuity. Past, present, and future are linked under the enormous Southwest sky as surely as corporeal matter turns to dust.

It’s this sense of interrelationship that Silko brings across in this essay. The landscape brims with colorful character, as in the arroyo whose "existence needs no explanation" (93). That’s family; You might shake your head at its caprices, but you wouldn’t be able to stay mad at it for long.

And just as each member of the tribe, no matter how small, must be able to tell part of the whole story, each one has a responsibility to care for the whole of nature.

Looked at individually, every single thing stands out in sharp relief. What is unseen to most eyes is the web that binds it all together. And so, as she writes, “the continuity and accuracy of the oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape—and the Pueblo interpretation of that landscape is maintained” (90).

Work Cited

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination: From a High Arid Plateau in New Mexico.” Antaeus: On Nature. Ed. Daniel Halpern. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1986. 83-94. Print.

© Shaii Stone 2015