Publication Date

8-2001

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Jane Olmstead, Katherine Green, Kathryn Abbott, Karen Schneider

Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

Throughout Native American Literature the state of identity in connection to one’s tribal culture, nature, and spirituality is vital to understanding both the struggles that Native Americans have endured during contact with Europeans and then Americans and the current ongoing cultural negotiations of contemporary tribal peoples. Native American writers use literature as a venue to reclaim and reconstruct identity, particularly in relation to a rapidly changing and commercial world.

Grounded in identity theory and Native American literary criticism, this thesis explores how Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko “unsettles” identities in her two novels Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes. The introduction presents the politics surrounding Native American identity and literature while discussing Silko’s own views on the importance of Laguna Pueblo traditions of storytelling, landscape, and spirituality to the process of reclaiming and reconstructing individual and community identities. The first and second chapters investigate aspects of identity in Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes, respectively. In each of these novels, Silko looks at how the hegemonic American culture has almost annihilated Native Americans, while also exploring how Native Americans have coped both positively and negatively with these cultural exchanges. According to Silko, the recovery of individual and community identities hinges on the reconnection between people and their stories, landscape and spirituality.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | Literature in English, North America | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority | Native American Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

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