American Indian cultures tend to be right hemispheric because of the ways in which they acquire knowledge. Over the thousands of years that American Indian peoples have lived in this hemisphere, strong visual rhetorics were developed, because of this tendency to engage in visual thinking and the socioeconomic need to communicate with others who might not speak the same language or who share situations in which speech was either inappropriate or dangerous. Because of the unique cultural developments in Native America and because of the relationship of that heritage to their contemporary literature, the author deems it important to examine how image has acted and continues to act "as" and "with" text in their cultures. In this article, the author provides a few examples of how some visual rhetorics have evolved over the years and shows their continuing importance in Native American life and literature. In addition, the author examines the visual rhetoric of Leslie Marmon Silko's "Almanac of the Dead" by focusing briefly on one image: the snake. The author chose the snake, along with Silko's "Almanac of the Dead," because she saw it as being metonymic for the intertribal metanarrative with much slipping between signifiers. (Contains 6 figures and 77 notes.)