NotesFAQContact Us
Collection
Advanced
Search Tips
Peer reviewed Peer reviewed
Direct linkDirect link
ERIC Number: EJ799697
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2008
Pages: 32
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0095-182X
EISSN: N/A
The "Lie" of the Land
Holm, Sharon
American Indian Quarterly, v32 n3 p243-274 Sum 2008
In Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel "Ceremony" the "primacy of the geographical" has often been interpreted as a particularly holistic and healing sense of place--what the critic Robert M. Nelson has characterized as the "spirit of place." This heightened awareness of the spiritual and redemptive power of the natural and the imaginative in Ceremony--the indelible link between land and story--is famously focused through the novel's protagonist, Tayo, as he (re)engages with the Laguna Pueblo landscape in a specific way: "Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it." Silko, in common with many Native American and Indigenous writers, sees an exact and direct relationship between oral narrative forms such as myths, ceremonies, and stories and a tribally specific geosacred relationship with the land or landscape--with the landscape encompassing the animate matrix between and including land and sky and all plants and beings within. In this article, the author explores how Silko's novel exhibits a particularly untroubled, almost unmediated, spiritual relationship between words and place. The author also explores the issues of Native sovereignty and Indian nationalism in Silko's "Ceremony." (Contains 67 notes.)
University of Nebraska Press. 1111 Lincoln Mall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0630. Tel: 800-755-1105; Fax: 800-526-2617; e-mail: presswebmail@unl.edu; Web site: http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/catalog/categoryinfo.aspx?cid=163
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A