• The author I chose to research for our final presentation is Leslie Marmon Silko.  I read two articles that touched upon her work and life: one being an article written by K. Wesley Berry from the University of Mississippi, published in 2000 and another called “There are Balances and Harmonies Always Shifting; Always Necessary to Maintain” published in 2005.
• Silko’s nationality is quite mixed, being Laguna, Mexican, and White. Growing up in her New Mexican childhood, religion was very diverse as she grew up worshipping both traditional Pueblo mythology and Christianity. Silko’s grandmother taught her about the Mother Creators who brought the universe into being, while also hearing Bible stories as well. The spirituality expressed in Silko’s writings is of an “earth-centered bent.” In her essay, “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” she discusses animism in Pueblo religion, especially when she states in the essay, “The ancient Pueblo people called the earth the Mother Creator of all things in this world. . . . Rocks and clay are part of the Mother. . . . A rock has being or spirit, although we may not understand it. The spirit may differ from the spirit we know in animals or plants or in our selves. In the end we all originate from the depths of the earth.”
• Silko expresses her vision of environmental justice in a very traditional co-creative storytelling way. She does this through all of her written pieces, like “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination” and other pieces of hers, like “Ceremony” and “Storyteller.”
• Silko and her Pueblo family suffered from numerous flooding and droughts throughout her childhood, expressing the frustration through her work and emphasizing that natural terrors of human life are very much the result of human action.
• In many of Silko’s stories, her dad is the one actually taking the photographs that are placed within the story, showing the ancient Laguna culture. What is fascinating is Silko and her father have no relationship to these people, as they are just strangers in the world. They do this to leave it completely open to their viewers’ and readers’ to create and interpretive their own thoughts and ideas.

Articles

Berry, K. Wesley. “Leslie Marmon Silkoand Wendell Berry: Regionalisms for Ecological Work and Worship.” Organization & Environment, vol. 13, no. 3, Sept. 2000, pp. 338–353, doi:10.1177/1086026600133007.

De Ramírez, Susan Berry Brill, and Edith M. Baker. “‘There Are Balances and Harmonies Always Shifting; Always Necessary to Maintain’: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Vision of Global Environmental Justice for the People and the Land.” Organization & Environment, vol. 18, no. 2, June 2005, pp. 213–228, doi:10.1177/1086026604271941.

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