Week One: Silko’s Interior and Exterior Landscapes

Keywords:  worldview, landscape, storytelling, and people

These particular insights will frame our discussions in and outside of class.  

“Traditionally everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and be able to recall or tell a portion of, if only a small detail from, a narrative account or story.  Thus, the remembering and the retelling were a communal process.”  P. 31

“Ancient Pueblo sought a communal truth not an absolute truth.  For them this truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions…”  P. 37

Pay special attention to Silko’s discussion of interdependence, emergence, cohesiveness, extinction, and survival (pp. 38-39)

The “individual [was] simultaneously bonded to family and clan by a complex bundle of custom and ritual.”  P. 39

About stories:  “Two points seem clear:   the spirits could be present, and the stories were valuable because they taught us how we were the people we believed we were.”  P. 43