Almanac of the Dead

"Even though native people do not recognise national borders, their lives have been impacted by nation states. National borders have made it harder for indigenous people in the United States to link their struggles to those of native people in other parts of the Americas or the world. Awareness of similarities has been emerging, and Leslie Silko is taking part in the movement towards the development of a consciousness of the global nature of indigenous struggles, and in her case in the hemispheric nature of those struggles. She’s one of the first ones to do this in fiction. Silko is creating a fictionalised almanac that alludes to a pre-colonial artifact which was very important to Mayan tribes, the descendants of which live in present-day Mexico . Several of those almanacs have survived, and she is creating a fictionalised Mayan almanac that is actually the novel. Here she’s drawing on the idea of performative power that’s very central to native thought, where words are not just words but actually have power to create realities. Silko’s modern-day almanac takes into account the long history of indigenous colonisation. She’s creating a vision of indigenous unity by describing a movement of landless refugees and indigenous peoples from the south that finds supporters in the United States. The main goal of the movement is the reclamation of lost indigenous land. But the movement is very inclusive. It’s not limited to indigenous peoples in the hemisphere. At the beginning of the book she gives you a map without national borders. On the map she locates the protagonists of her novel that are spread out all through the Americas. These characters move around a lot as well. The tricky thing is that Silko wants to present an indigenous world view that discounts national borders, but also show that borders matter and that they impact on the lives of indigenous peoples, mainly in a negative way. Silko is drawing on myths that are central to the way indigenous people look at their history, the present and future – the way these times intermingle and transcend borders. So, for example, she develops a new view of Geronimo, a figure who symbolises resistance to the attempts of the US government and the army to put native people – Apache, in this case – on to reservations. She presents multiple versions of what may have happened to Geronimo. So she rewrites history in such a way that there is not just one version of Geronimo’s eventual surrender to the US army. Silko gives you multiple ways of interpreting what may have happened. She depicts Geronimo as a border-crossing trickster-like figure. He was trying to escape from the US army by going to Mexico, getting into skirmishes there and interacting with border tribes as well. By putting the myth of a shape-shifting border-crossing figure in the place of the official version of what happened to Geronimo, Silko presents a different way of thinking about milestones in the interactions between indigenous people and colonial forces or, in this case, agents of the US nation state that were trying to delimit native people by putting them on reservations. Mainly because these characters are able to transcend national borders. In our supposedly globalised world borders are no longer important obstacles for goods and ideas, but they are very important in preventing the free movement of people. And that’s the biggest contradiction in our global world. So to develop fictional characters that have the ability to play with these borders and that are not delimited by borders, that’s where the trickster figure is really attractive to several writers."