This amazing novel contains many themes I'm familiar with from Alexie, Erdrich and Dorris: ruminations about loss and healing; struggles with an Indian identity, particularly for "half-bloods"; conflicts with alcohol, family, and the white world. Silko weaves the story of Tayo, a WWII veteran who has returned home to his Laguna pueblo deeply damaged by his wartime experiences and without his cousin and childhood friend, Rocky, with a poem that narrates the healing of the earth after some dangerous magic distracts the people. The poem feels ancient and timeless, and Tayo's difficult journey towards healing and acceptance is epic. ( )

Like the other Native pop novelists of the 60's and 70's, Silko's voice is competent when not distracted by over-reaching, and like the others, she spins a story which is vague enough to please. She also never really escapes the fact that her depiction of Native culture is thoroughly westernized.

Her monomyth is tied up with enough Native American spirituality to make it feel new and mystical (at least to outsiders); it was even criticized for giving away 'cultural secrets'. It is somewhat telling that many of these secrets have been so subjugated by colonialism that what she shares never really feels new. Though this doesn't mean that what she shared didn't still feel private to her and her tribe.

The spiritual philosophy of 'New Agism' aims to recapture a non-christian view. Unfortunately, the cultures so held up as examples of this are usually too colonized to provide an unbiased view. Often, the only references to their practices have been recorded by Christian authors, and any currently living members have had to practice their traditions under strong Western influence.

The Native Americans do have this unbroken lineage, though they are not free from the influence of the slavery, exile, and attempted conversions of the west. This sets them apart from all of the European Pagans, especially the Druids, for whom we have no good source of knowledge. Most of these New Age beliefs are simply a rejection of Christianity and an embracement of something--often anything--else.

It does not help that such movements were started by egotistical self-promoters like Crowley who cobbled together whatever seemed risque or interesting without much history or philosophy to connect them. It is no less common for Native American beliefs to be overtaken in such a way and represented as more 'pure' and 'balanced' than our own Western traditions.

Like most of New Agism, this is bunk made up to sell people things. Native Americans were as expansive and destructive as any other peoples, and drove their share of animals to rarity and likely, extinction. Indeed, archaeological evidence indicates that the current 'native' Americans came only as recently as several thousand years ago, and wiped out the older aborigine population that had called the Americas home for millennia.

Another archaeological excavation of some Southern Californian tribes showed that they were driving certain species of bird to extinction until the point when smallpox reached them and they themselves were wiped out.

This isn't to say the Europeans saved the animals or any such thing, merely that there is likely no people that is 'in touch with nature'. To imagine such a thing is to try to remove one of the great difficulties of philosophy and replace it with a silly romantic notion. Of course, this is the sort of thing people tend to be quite comfortable with, as philosophy is hard and pleasant ideas are easy.

I would not fall so hard upon Silko as to suggest that she is such a blind idealist; indeed, she often gives us moral ambiguity and difficulty. This pessimism should be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the current position of Natives, making poverty and hardship common in Native books.

Silko's is an early work in the movement, and like many such, it struggles with finding a voice. It is the mark of a strong author when they can conscientiously utilize and reject portions of a dominating culture in order to present a satire or redefinition of the relationship. However, Silko may still be too steeped not only in the dominant culture but in its own ideas of the 'Native American' to escape into something more profound.

It may be that this American culture is too insidious and pervasive to provide the underprivileged with enough opportunity to escape it, which may be why some of the 'Magical Realism' coming out South America may work as a better cultural refutation. That is, if you can find the small indications of differing belief stashed in amongst the endless Catholic fetishism.

There are still important cultural differences to be found between the West and the Natives, but Silko is no anthropologist. Perhaps she has fallen to the fallacy that being something makes you an expert in it. Unfortunately, our position in life often blinds us as much as it informs us. A man can drive a car without knowing how to build one.

Like Achebe, Silko's work arrives colonized and westernized, immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with Western tradition. And like Achebe, its concessions to culture are mainly the savagery and unexplained mysticism that the West already projects onto it. Here, then, is another book to make suburban housewives feel worldly and 'tolerant' without really shaking up their assumptions. ( )

I was required to read this book as part of a college lit class. It was not originally part of the curriculum, but it was the professor's favorite book and she recommended it so highly, the class opted to read this instead of the planned book. I was truly disappointed. I wish I could have back the hours I spent reading this book. It could be that I was just put off by the narrative style, but I felt that I had to make a huge effort to get through the story, and when I did, it wasn't worth the effort. Ultimately, the characters were not engaging and the story was not interesting. In fact, the whole experience was so irksome, this has become one of the very few books I actually hate and regret wasting the time reading. ( )

native american, ptsd ( )

Powerful, thought provoking. A book you'll read and reread. ( )