What I've learned so far

I think that the main idea that has stood out to me all along is the realization of how little I really know. (If that makes any sense...)

By learning so much about a culture that is geographically so close to mine, I realize how very much I am in the dark about them. This class has brought to light not only my unintentional racism (I had no idea they did not like being called "Native Americans"), but also it has served to round out my knowledge of their world views and cultural practices as well. I feel like being exposed to a wide range of literature, from colorful trickster tales to more cut-and-dry accounts of their unjust treatments has served to give me a much broader understanding of what the American Indian experience entails.

I think without this class I never could have imagined the complexity that comes with talking about American Indians. The politics of a displaced people, the longing to cling to the past while needing the ability to remain relevant to the present, the drama of living confined as a nation unto itself on land that was not their home to begin with, and the real human face to a people often too ignored.

Photo of a Cherokee Indian from our local region

Another thing that has stood out to me in my experience in this class is just how much I can relate to a people and an experience that I have had no previous interaction with. The humor found inside the trickster tales is not lost, (especially when we performed them out loud in pantomime). The blending of the spiritual with the graphic humor of the body and human interactions, is an art form that I find extremely relevant to modern people!

Another striking familiarity was the silencing beauty of the ancient cave paintings in their immediacy. Even from only seeing them on film, I could easily throw myself back to the "cave man days", imagining my hand casting shadows on the rocky walls, while rendering the animals so important to my daily life. This place was clearly spiritual to the people who used it, and the fact that the spirituality was so tangible 30,000 years later is astounding.

Silko on Landscape as a Character in Fiction

   Silko begins this section with the notion that many of her stories include landscapes that "featured the presence of elements out of the landscape, elements that directly influenced the outcome of events," and it seems that she didn't even realize at first that landscape was so important to her work. She had been so influenced by her personal landscape and the presence in her own life, that the inclusion of it in her stories became second nature.

One particular work she hones in on is a short story called "Storyteller". The landscape here is a specific place in Alaska in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, and she gives a clear image of a harsh but beautiful wilderness. I took the liberty of googleing this site and here are some pictures from the places she describes:

One of the most powerful sections from this story is right after the murder scene where she says:

"For the Yupik people, souls deserving punishment spend varying lengths of time in a place of freezing. The Yupik see the world's end coming with ice, not fire. Although the white trader possessed every possible garment, insulation, heating fuel, and gadget ever devised to protect him from the frozen tundra environment, he still dies, drowning under the freezing river ice, because the white man had not reckoned with the true power of that landscape, especially not the power that the Yupik woman understood instinctively and that she used so swiftly and efficiently. The white man had reckoned with the young woman and determined he could overpower her. But the white man failed to account for the conjunction of the landscape with the woman. The Yupik woman had never seen herself as anything but a part of that sky, that frozen river, that tundra. The river;s ice and the blinding white are her accomplices, and yet the Yupik woman never for a moment misunderstands her own relationship with that landscape."

She basically makes the landscape the partner of the antagonist, an equal member in the plot, and of equal importance to her storytelling. I love how you can easily picture this landscape character as a living breathing component that holds its own place in her stories.