Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko
Reading is a Political Act of Remembering
In 1850, Walter Colton predicted a “tide of Anglo-Saxon blood” spilling across the globe “to beat in every nation’s pulse.” Sadly, his prophecy has become a reality. In our shifting global economy, the world’s richest 1 billion people still use 80% of the world’s resources, and “every 14 days, a language dies.”
By the end of the century, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them not yet recorded — may disappear, “taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain” (National Geographic).
The expanded horizons of manifest destiny, linked to Enlightenment principles, have destroyed earth’s dynamic heterogeneous indigenous populations through transnational land-grabbing and resource-grabbing schemes. Prairies, plans, and valleys have been devastated by agribusiness.
Stories — resistance narratives help people to remember. At stake in the authority of resistance, literature is the claim of remembering as a means of maintaining local histories and as valuable means of cultural survival.
Attempting to capture the spirit of our indigenous populations and preserve their stories, Leslie Marmon Silko’s resistance narratives breathe…
