“Leslie Silko: Nuclear Landscapes, Environmental Catastrophe, and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling" (original) (raw)

"You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories” (Silko, 1986, p. 2). With this warning, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko begins her novel, Ceremony. But Silko’s warning is also a message of hope: You have everything (or at least much) if you have the stories—powerful, vital resources for healing, resilience, resistance, and social transformation in times of setter violence and climate destruction. This article is largely written in the mode of listening: of attending to Silko and the stories she weaves from her life and her Indigenous traditions. In the act of listening, questions are posed: What is the connection between having the stories and having sources of life and resilience, especially in times of oppression and despair? In the following pages, I start by exploring the power of Indigenous storytelling as sources of healing, resistance, and transformation. I then focus on nuclear storied landscape, first as found in Silko’s novel Ceremony and then in Almanac of the Dead. Finally, I conclude by the reflecting on the role of curative of storytelling and the more-than-human in assisting humans survive and even flourish as we seek to make a just home in the face of such catastrophes as climate change and nuclearism.