An Ecological Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead
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In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko gives us a warning that the oppression and exploitation of the weak, including nonhuman nature, has reached an extreme. The victims will begin to rise up against their oppressors who blindly worship a material-centered European culture through revolution and natural disasters. She reveals its greed, selfishness, corrupt capitalism and racism, and warns that the world will soon come to an end unless we recognize and escape from the lies of American ideology that are based on tacit belief in capital and linear progress. In Almanac, Silko proposes Native values which put the land in the center of their world view as an alternative to the false American ideology. Almanac is a political text aiming at changing current American society by cleansing corrupt European ideologies prevalent in it. Judged from this perspective, Silko's Almanac is a text of hope for humankind and the natural environment suffering from an absence of ecological justice. For Silko, the ultimate aim of social transformation is to build an ecologically just society in which all forms of oppression and dominating hierarchical structures vanish. This reflects Silko's belief that all oppressions are closely related and reinforce each other. The oppression of land and Native Americans are inseparably interconnected, and social justice and ecological justice cannot be discussed separately. For Native Americans, the land is not real estate or simply a space in which people live but the basis of a community's cultural and economic survival. Therefore, to fight for the environment is the fight to end all forms of interconnected oppression. Almanac is a subversive ecological text which criticizes the oppressive ideologies of colonialism and capitalism which have been revered in Western culture for the last two hundred years. I also argue that Almanac illustrates a way to realize ecological justice as an alternative to destructive Eurocentric culture.
Abstract
In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko gives us a warning that the oppression and exploitation of the weak, including nonhuman nature, has reached an extreme. The victims will begin to rise up against their oppressors who blindly worship a material-centered European culture through revolution and natural disasters. She reveals its greed, selfishness, corrupt capitalism and racism, and warns that the world will soon come to an end unless we recognize and escape from the lies of American ideology that are based on tacit belief in capital and linear progress. In Almanac, Silko proposes Native values which put the land in the center of their world view as an alternative to the false American ideology. Almanac is a political text aiming at changing current American society by cleansing corrupt European ideologies prevalent in it. Judged from this perspective, Silko's Almanac is a text of hope for humankind and the natural environment suffering from an absence of ecological justice. For Silko, the ultimate aim of social transformation is to build an ecologically just society in which all forms of oppression and dominating hierarchical structures vanish. This reflects Silko's belief that all oppressions are closely related and reinforce each other. The oppression of land and Native Americans are inseparably interconnected, and social justice and ecological justice cannot be discussed separately. For Native Americans, the land is not real estate or simply a space in which people live but the basis of a community's cultural and economic survival. Therefore, to fight for the environment is the fight to end all forms of interconnected oppression. Almanac is a subversive ecological text which criticizes the oppressive ideologies of colonialism and capitalism which have been revered in Western culture for the last two hundred years. I also argue that Almanac illustrates a way to realize ecological justice as an alternative to destructive Eurocentric culture.