Storyteller : Leslie Marmon Silko's Reappropriation of Native American History and Identity

For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious. Albert EinsteinAnita Endrezze, the mixed-blood Yaqui author of Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon (2000), joins Leslie Marmon Silko (mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo) as an Indigenous revisionist of history concerned with communities of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. 1 Endrezze creates a "Yaqui revisionist history" that, much like Silko's narratives, reaches far beyond mere corrective changes to the western dominant record concerning not only history, but also what counts for knowledge in general (Throwing 25). Historical narrative, after all, follows semiotic rules that control the definition of history within a cultural framework. In a few terse comments at the beginning of her provocative, surprisingly neglected volume, Endrezze explains the dramatic impact on the universe when "two observers occupy different cultural space, mythically, intellectually, or spiritually, but the same material or physical space" (24). Such initial meetings between Western European invaders and American Indigenous people, she contends, distorted the realities of both, but most profoundly the latter's. The effects of this encounter on the Indigenous cosmovision are indelibly inscribed in Native stories and storytelling tactics, including Endrezze's and Silko's as present-day expressions of ongoing, cultural forces. 2 For Native people, Endrezze explains, "Time is not absolute but depends on the direction of the relative motion between two observers making the time measurements" (Throwing 24). Thus, the "encounter on

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Storyteller : Leslie Marmon Silko's Reappropriation of Native American History and Identity

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Relationality, Autobiographical Voice, and the Posthumanist Paradox: Decentering the Human in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Life Writing

Relationality, Autobiographical Voice, and the Posthumanist Paradox: Decentering the Human in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Life Writing

Annual Bibliography of Works About Life Writing, 2006-2007

“Maybe Einstein Was Part Yaqui”: Deposing Thought in Works by Endrezze and Silko

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