Leslie Marmon Silko was raised in a Laguna village in the American Southwest, but she also has "white" ancestors. In the present context I shall narrow down my focus to one short story written by Leslie Marmon Silko, i.e. These writers use the English language in their poems, stories, and novels, but at the same time they are very much concerned with their indigenous or tribal roots and cultural heritage. This cultural cliché is likewise proven wrong, if we take a look at the new Native American (literary) Renaissance, characteristic of the last three or four decades, and represented by important writers such as Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and N.
The ethnocentric - and Eurocentric - bias of Western anthropology (and other arts and sciences), when it comes to assessing the cultural heritage and traditions of Native Americans, is summed up by Gordon Brotherston in a thought-provoking article entitled "Towards a grammatology of America: Lévi-Strauss, Derrida and the native New World text":Īll told, we seem not to have moved very far from that highly interested account of the New World given, shortly after its 'discovery' by Montaigne, who spoke of its typical inhabitant as 'so new and infantine, that he is yet to learn his A.B.C.' Īs it is pointed out by Brotherston in this article and elsewhere, this is a thoroughly misleading account of Native American cultures and their degree of "literacy", but in the present context I shall leave out further reflections on the historical dimension(s) of this misapprehension as well as on the vast body of sacred literature that demonstrates the falsity of such a view. with the fact that we are (or regard ourselves as) masters of the written word. In the Western world we frequently come across the misconception that what makes Western civilization superior vis-à-vis other (non-European) cultures - and in particular vis-à-vis Native American culture - has to do with the importance of writing in our part of the world, i.e. Reflections on Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller" (1981) No.18 - Storytelling Narrative Power in Native American Fiction
Narrative Power in Native American Fiction
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