Predicting a Revolt to Reclaim the Americas

Leslie Marmon Silko was 8 years old in 1955 when her tribe prepared to file a land claim against the United States government for stealing 50,000 acres of the Laguna Indians’ land in New Mexico.

Her father was the tribal treasurer. The Marmon household on the Laguna reservation was filled with the tangled evidence for the case--legal papers, archeological charts and the advice of the elders.

The tribe eventually prevailed in the U. S. Court of Indian Claims, but what was justice to the court was humiliation to the Lagunas: The government paid them 25 cents per acre.

By the time of the verdict, Silko was on her way in the world as a 16-year-old student at the University of New Mexico. But the seeds of fury were planted.

Today, the child who came of age with the Lagunas’ struggle and loss is a 43-year-old Tucson-based author who was called “the most accomplished Indian writer of her generation” in the New York Times Book Review when her first novel, “Ceremony,” was published in 1977. She received a John and Catherine MacArthur Prize in 1981 for her works of fiction, short stories and poetry. She has taught American Indian literature at the universities of New Mexico and Arizona, and her own books are used in Indian literature classes.

The praise for the “Indian writer” did not please her. “They never say Norman Mailer is the best white man writer of his generation,” Silko says. “I just want to be known as a novelist.”

Perhaps as a result of her wishes, Silko’s recently published second novel, “Almanac of the Dead”--763 pages and 10 years in the writing--makes no mention on the dust jacket of the author’s ethnicity.

However, inside is an angry indictment of the conquerors by the conquered, with a vengeful justice leveled at “European destroyers” for the centuries of crimes committed against American Indians. Against the bloody backdrop of American Indian annihilation, Silko spins an apocalyptic tale of the end of European domination as prophesied in American Indian oral tradition and ancient Mayan almanacs.

As the novel ends, the water has dried up in Tucson, the world is careening toward its end and Arizona’s white ruling class is calling in the National Guard. In the meantime, millions of American Indians, Mexicans and Central Americans led by Indian visionaries are heading toward the U.S.-Mexican border to join forces to take back the Americas.

Silko calls herself “the archetypal character of the New Age.” Born in Albuquerque, N.M., she was raised on the reservation 50 miles west of her birthplace by her mother, who was part Cherokee, and her father, who was a mix of Laguna and Plains Indian, Latino and Anglo ancestry.

“I became a writer because I felt that I wasn’t that good as a storyteller at the Laguna Pueblo,” Silko says. “When I first started out, I tried to re-create the feeling, the ambience, but with the written word. I remember as a little girl, I felt so secure and safe during storytelling. I was in the fifth grade and I was really unhappy because I had changed from a reservation school to a public school in Albuquerque. I would sit in the back of the classroom and I would write and evoke that feeling of being protected and soothed by the story. I still do that working alone in the room.”

The idea for the second novel came to Silko while studying Mayan almanacs. Although many of the almanacs that recorded history, prophecies and traditions of Mayan and Aztec cultures were destroyed, remnants have been translated and published.

“In a sense, ‘Almanac of the Dead’ is trying to do what the old Mayan almanacs are doing, projecting or looking into the future,” Silko says.

Authentic Mayan and American Indian writings in the book include predictions of Cortez’s arrival in the Americas to the day and “the end of all things European” in the Americas.

The latter is in all the prophecies, says Silko. “The Plains, Laguna and Navajo all have it. The Hopis say that European ways and followers of things European will fall away eventually. You can’t find a Native American culture that doesn’t know this and think this.”

Although some critics applaud Silko’s ambition, the immense opus that spans 500 years, with 12 sets of characters on four continents, has received mixed reviews. A Village Voice reviewer compared “Almanac” to “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “The Brothers Karamazov.” The New Republic said, “Her premise to world revolution is tethered to airy nothing. It is, frankly, naive to the point of silliness.”

“This whole novel is about reasserting claims for ideas and the truth that all people in America--African, Mexican, Native and Anglo Americans--forget,” says Silko. “It is not just about reasserting claims for the artifacts, pottery and land, but ideals. These ideas and ideals were destroyed 500 years ago when the Europeans burned old Mayan and Aztec almanacs.

“Freud talked about forgetting, and it happens to people collectively and as a nation. And so, in America today, whether it’s personal or collective, (history) needs to be articulated and remembered. Painful as it might be. . . .”

Silko believes that a revolution is unavoidable but that it will be a peaceful one of demographics, with a multicultural orientation replacing a European one in the United States. American Indians can expect more respect, she says, because Latinos, Asians and other immigrants, uprooted from their own lands, will be more sensitive to the native experience.

It was partly Silko’s interest in displaced tribal people that drew her to Tucson, where many Papago and Yaqui Indians live. Living 20 minutes outside of downtown on the border of the Saguaro National Monument, Silko describes her residence as a run-down ranch house where “the urban sprawl is quickly catching up.”

Sharing the house are her companion of four years, Gus Nitshe, an artist, and a menagerie including five dogs, five macaws, several cats, a few Vietnamese potbellied pigs and a rattlesnake named Eve.

“I feel, at all times, a real awareness of spirit things, and that’s where all the animals come from,” she says. “When Eve was born she was just the size of a piece of spaghetti. There were six of them and they had the misfortune of crawling into the living room. The cats got them, but Eve escaped the slaughter.”

Given free run of the house, Eve gets lots of respect. Silko notes that snakes are sacred messengers in American Indian and African mythology. The reappearance of a sacred stone snake on the Laguna reservation at the end of “Almanac” signals the revolution building on the U.S.-Mexico border.

A violent image for this gentle woman whose house is a sanctuary for survivor snakes and other wayward creatures.

“The only kind of revolution I really believe in is one of awareness of perception,” says Silko.

“At the end of my novel, I try to show the awareness or the change moving to be something organic, a part of this continent and something inclusive, which is the American Indian way.

“I would hope it would be a gentle revolution over hundreds and hundreds of years.”