Leslie Marmon Silko

"I was really fortunate because I was surrounded by generations of women. I never thought that women weren't as strong as men, as able as men or as valid as men. I was pretty old before I really started running into mainstream culture's attitudes about women. And because I never internalized the oppressor's attitude, I never behaved in a passive, helpless way. Instead of being crushed by sexism, I was sort of amused or enraged, but never cowed."

"(Q: Why do you stay in Arizona?) A: Turn tail and run and go to some little Shangri-la? Ha! I am a part of this. You don't just run off and leave your land and your people and the animals and the trees. You stay here. Laguna has its problems-the reservation has unemployment, and they have suicides. But they have this wonderful culture and cohesion and history, and they have themselves. No matter how bad things are at Laguna, they're way better than here. But the truth is that somebody has to come over here and say, "Look, this is criminal. These policemen, these judges, these legislators in Arizona are criminals. The people shouldn't listen to them." I feel that way on a national level, too. When you find something like this, you have to tell about it. You just can't ignore it."

"the ease I have in writing?...It must come from being immersed in a community where every interaction reinforces a narrative vision of oneself and one's belonging. Narrative is the only way they keep track of all the rituals, all the hunting places, all the history, all of the chemistry. How you do this, how you make that, how you bend this. Nothing written down. All in the human memory and kept collectively. So that you'll go clear to the next village to ask some old woman how was it exactly that they used to do this. They used human brains for books. Because the information is stored in narrative, it's ordered completely differently than western European ordering of, like, technical botany or biology, by taking things apart. It puts things together and reinforces stories. So that one deer hunting story can contain valuable information in a number of different areas that you'd have to cross-catalogue."

"(Q: What's missing in contemporary writers?) A: They're disconnected. The sense of not being a part of anything. The anomie. It's the great malaise of the twentieth century. The autonomous, lonely little character-what Harold Brodkey wrote about. But language is so connected to other times and people. Words are so alive with other connections. It's almost as if some of the postmodern fiction, some of the experimental fiction, is trying to start a fire by dumping ice water on the wood. Something's a bit off because the medium, language, is connected historically. And yet the feeling of that poor individual, that disconnection. The only time you are connected is when you're writing and using language. (Q: So for you that connection is crucial-the connection with the external world and the connection with the whole history.) A: Absolutely. Otherwise you fall into this abyss where everything that's Other is completely irrelevant. It's almost a kind of death."

"(Q: When you saw that it was going to be an almanac, what difference did that make?) A: Then I started to think about the notion of time reckoned not with numerals and numbers, but what if you just talk about time as narratives, day by day. What happened that day is the identity of the day. More in the direction of what the Mayans thought. Once we did that, the editing went differently, and it became a whole different book. (Q: Your sense of time in the book is very non-Western.) A: The way time is computed in western European cultures is completely political. Colonialists always want time and history not to go back very far...Here [among Native American people], five hundred years is nothing. This is something that the Anglo-Americans, the invaders, the colonials, never want to face-in China or India or Africa-especially when there are native people who have an incredible spiritual connection to the very earth. Time is totally political-especially when they are on that mother ground and especially when it's such a short period of time, where somebody living today could have talked to somebody who had talked to somebody who actually was at the scene of some of these events. Then you completely miscalculate how well things are going."

"all young writers should understand that even those things that we throw in the trash can are necessary to get us to where we want to be. (1994)"

"I am never far away from oral narrative, storytelling and narration, and the use of narrative to order experience. The people at home believe that there is one big story going on and made up of many little stories, and the story goes on and on. The stories are alive and they outlive us, and storytellers are only caretakers of the story. Storytellers can be anonymous. Their names don't matter because the stories live on. I think that's what people mean when they say that there are no new stories under the sun. It's true - the old stories live on, but with new caretakers. (1994)"

"The most radical kinds of politics are not in harangues given at stupid rallies. I mean the most earth-shaking kinds of shifts occur when language is plain truth. (1987)"

"The attitude of the white shaman is that he knows more about Indians than the Indians know. (1976)"

"(How do you feel about the Bicentennial-do you have feelings about it?) LMS: Oh, I do, definitely, I have all kinds of things to say-I think it's one reason I'm very anxious to try to get the novel out during 1976. I just want to make sure that during this year when all of this sort of celebrating is going on, that Americans can be reminded that there are different ways to look at the past 200 years. I just want to make sure that beside all of the rhapsodizing about Paul Revere and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that Americans are reminded that this great land, this powerful nation they are celebrating was established on stolen land. It was the resources, the metals, the minerals, it was the water, it was the coal, that enabled those people who came to America to build this nation. In this Bicentennial year we should remember, we should remember that it was on this stolen land that this country was settled and begun. In Anglo-Saxon law, in common law, when something is stolen, no matter how many times the stolen property changes hands, in common law, that piece of property still belongs to the original owner. It doesn't matter whether the people take the stolen article in good faith. The property remains stolen. As long as this fact is acknowledged, then I'll be satisfied, and they can celebrate all they have done with this stolen land and the stolen resources and they can pat themselves on the back for the achievement. (1976)"

"Certainly for me the most effective political statement I could make is in my art work. I believe in subversion rather than straight-out confrontation. I believe in the sands of time, so to speak."

"as a writer and as a person, I like to think of myself in a more old-fashioned sense, the way the old folks felt, which was, first of all you're a human being; secondly you originate from somewhere, and from a family, and a culture. But first of all, human beings."

"my process is mostly, not totally, subconscious, not conscious. The reason I write is to find out what I mean. I know some of the things I mean. I couldn't tell you the best things I know. And I can't know the best things I know until I write."

"in order to realize the wonder and power of what we share, we must understand how different we are too, how different things are. I'm really intrigued with finding out similarities in conditions, and yet divergences in responses, of human beings. I'm really interested in that. Without forgetting that first of all, before we can ever appreciate what's the same, we have really to love and respect and be able to internalize freedom of expression."

"...the best thing you can have in life is to have someone tell you a story; they are physically with you, but in lieu of that, since at age five or six you get separated from all of those people who hold you and talk to you, I learned at an early age to find comfort in a book, that a book would talk to me when no one else would. Or a book would say things that would soothe in a way that no person could."

"with a good story there is no end to the possibilities"

"I think what writers, storytellers, and poets have to say necessarily goes beyond such trivial boundaries as origin."

"(Why did you entitle the novel Ceremony?) S: That's what it is. Writing a novel was a ceremony for me to stay sane."

"It's generally double-edged. It seems with humor, there's always something beyond just the laughing that when you're laughing, you have to think beyond to greater considerations."

"relationships. That's all there really is. There's your relationship with the dust that just blew in your face, or with the person who just kicked you end over end. ... You have to come to terms, to some kind of equilibrium, with those people around you, those people who care for you, your environment."

"Whatever just happened, it would be related to other things that had happened, and finally the function of the stories would be to keep you from feeling that God had just dropped a rock on your head had been singled out in some way, which is really dangerous, because the stories remind you that this isn't the first time."

"good literature has to be accessible. It's incredibly narcissistic to be otherwise. Artists can't work with a chip on their shoulders, and that's what has happened to a lot of feminists. Politics can ruin anything. It will ruin a picnic. Politics in the most crass sense - rally around the banner kind. I'm political, but I'm political in my stories. That's different. I think the work should be accessible, and that's always the challenge and task of the teller - to make accessible perceptions that the people need."

"(Do you think there are any contemporary myths emerging?) S: I don't see that there has ever been any end to the stories. They just keep going on and on. So far, I haven't seen that there are any new ones. There's a need to have a multiplicity of perspectives and tellers. I tell some stories. Simon Ortiz tells others. We need certain tellers to look after certain myths. The ones I'm looking after have always been around. It's part of a continuum. I see it more as a matter that certain people come along and work with the myths that have always been there."

"When I go to the Laguna Acoma High School to talk to Native American kids, I tell them that storytelling for Indians is like a natural resource. Some places have oil, some have a lot of water or timber or gold, but around here, it's the ear that has developed. You have it. In a sense, it's accidental just like uranium is accidental in a given region. But I want them to know that this potential exists. There's the possibility for telling stories. I think it has to do with community, with growing up in certain kinds of communities as opposed to others."

"(How do you relate to the women's movement?) S: I feel I've benefited by it just generally in the sense that anything that undermines the stereotypes perpetrated on all of us by white men is helpful. What it does is take some of the pressure off those of us who have never lived very close to the stereotypes. I've always been the way I was. Here at Laguna, a lot more is expected of women; women are expected to be strong, to manage the property. Children belong to women and to their families. Women do the plastering. It's a relief to have the stereotypes knocked down. It's just made it easier for me to do what I want to do."

"Leslie Marmon Silko writes in her collection of essays, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit, about "The Indian with a Camera." Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo, and tourists have been pointing cameras at her all of her life, in one case, taking Leslie, who is mixed blood, out of a photo because she didn't look Indian enough. As an adult, Silko, who wrote novels such as Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead," and most recently, Gardens in the Dunes, is also a photographer. She said that this makes the tourists really uncomfortable. Why? Because she, as an artist, is turning her gaze on them. Indians are supposed to be the passive receivers of their gaze. The implications of an Indian turning her gaze, her sensibilities, on them, capturing their images, is a subversion, a reversal of the given order."

"I read Almanac of the Dead, and here were these ideas, these stories, this understanding of the relationship of the people of the SW to the land, and the immateriality of the political border to traditional cultures. It was not written to flatter or beguile. She did not pull any punches. It was written to show these connections between the seen and the unseen, the past and the future. By talking about the Yaqui, who live on both sides of the border, she highlighted another culture, like the Opata, who have claims that supersede current boundaries. It was a great relief to find her work."

"The work of women of color arises out of the creative void in a multitude of voices, a complex of modes, and most of these women are quite aware of their connection to the dark grandmother of human wisdom...Leslie Marmon Silko reaches into unexplored realms, the gloom of what is long forgotten but that continues to nourish our love and our terror"

"True" representation is representation as best as possible. (Absolutely true representation is not possible because it is always only representation.) Then we can circumvent our own stereotype and, in a sense, not indulge in stereotyping. And I think that will produce better literature, and surprising literature, too. (To the Western mind this is the main thing in society.) And I think in a sense that Leslie Silko has done that; certainly, the stereotypes are not there."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is an extraordinary book, a work of immense creative power...a landmark in Native American literature-the Indian War and Peace."

"She was a discovery for me in a particular way I don't think any other writer will ever be. I'm very attached to her work."

"I've always liked her work, and especially admire Ceremony."

"There is no way you can say that realism is the only literature going. I mean, most of our best novelists are not even writing realism a writers like Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Leslie Silko. They are using realistic techniques to tell stories that are not realistic."

"I call Leslie Silko a storyteller, but she says she's not a storyteller either, not in the tribal sense of the term as one living within the heart of the culture weaving stories for food for the community. Yet, I see Leslie doing that, from the borders of cultures. She weaves them together. So she is a storyteller."

"it looks like Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison are doing what I'm doing too. When we've talked about our backgrounds in myth and storytelling, it sounds like we grew up in very similar ways. Toni was trying to figure out where we belong, and she kept using that term "magical realism"; she thought we were in that tradition...we went to China together. I do feel an affinity not only because I love them as people but because we seem to write alike. There is so much human emotion and richness and story and imagery and colors and things to eat. Nobody is alienated from life; everybody is warm. I feel that we write like that because we are warm, and even though we all-I hate to say master-we are all very good with words, words aren't the only thing that's important. We care about stories about people, and also that magical real place that we are all visiting. When I compare our work to some of the mainstream work, it seems as if many of them are only playing with words. The "language" people's world seems gray and black and white. Toni's and Leslie's and my aliveness must come from our senses of a connection with people who have a community and a tribe. We are living life in a more dangerous place. We do not live in new subdivisions without ceremony and memory; and if those other writers have to draw from that non-magical imagination, then of course, their writing will be gray and black and white."

"A brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas...If Karl Marx had chosen to make Das Kapital a novel set in the Americas, he might have come out with a book something like this."

"At her best, Leslie Silko is very good indeed. She has a sharp sense of the way in which the profound and the mundane often run together in our daily lives. And her sense of humor is acute…We must take such words as "storyteller" very seriously. And we must make distinctions. A camera is not a storyteller. Neither is a novelist or a poet, necessarily. In view of the title of this book, let us make a distinction here. Leslie Silko is a writer, one of high and recorded accomplishment. If she is not yet a storyteller, she promises to become one."

"Leslie Silko's Ceremony is an extraordinary novel, if indeed 'novel' is the right word. It is more precisely a telling, the celebration of a tradition and form that are older and more nearly universal than the novel as such...Her talent is real and remarkable."

"in the last five years, the works of Leslie Marmon Silko have had a great impact on me. I feel that there are connections that she is making in terms of a kind of writing that we have to do to counter the death dealings of a Euro-American monoculture. She is also a wonderful storyteller, so I find courage in that kind of writing and being able to have that kind of worldview that is based on her own indigenism. I feel that we Chicanas could be drawing from that source much more than we are. I find her very inspiring."

"It's simply splendid, and I can't stress too much how happy I am to have this book in the world."

"a brilliant novelist."

"Leslie Marmon Silko's writing takes us into old worlds of consciousness inside the present, and inside ourselves."

"From Leslie Silko we hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of contemporary Indian America rising above dull anthropological reports"

"The writer's life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There's that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions. Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it's like working underground. It's not easy to get down there and it's not easy to get back. You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time. (2015)"

"(There is an ongoing debate in the literary world regarding writers who attempt to write from a different cultural, racial perspective than their own. What are your thoughts on this?) LMS: That's been going on for hundreds of years. There are two thoughts I have on this. If this were the best of all possible worlds, which it isn't, then publishing wouldn't concern itself with pigeonholing and marketing to certain groups. There would be a level playing ground. Everyone would have the same chance of getting a novel published. If our education system would include education on different cultures and groups of people who are a part of the United States, you wouldn't have this. When people get excluded, that's when you have this sort of fragmentation and things being broken down into categories. It's a political problem. If there were many books by Pueblo people out there, for example, then we could say, "Let that guy publish that book on Pueblo culture or oral literature," because there's all these other books by Pueblo writers or people from that community that are out there so that there's an opportunity for people to see the difference between someone who's just pretending, someone who is trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of a culture, versus someone who is actually from there. The problem is in this country is that you have this political machine in the arts that suppresses Indian writers to take power away from the people. They have continued to publish books about Indians by non-Indians for political reasons. Non-Indians, generally, even if they've tried to be very sympathetic, can't help but replicate a worldview that is sympathetic to the political ends of the power structure. Yet you can't limit the freedom of the artist. We can't say, "You can't use your imagination." It's extremely difficult for a person to imagine themselves in the shoes, life and culture of someone else, but let's not put any limitations on what possibly could happen. We can't limit human beings and the human imagination. The reason there is so much strong feeling about, let's say, non-Indian writers writing about non-Indian subjects is because good Indian writers don't get published and bad white writers do. That's the problem. It's getting to the point, though, where there's enough good writing out there and there's gradually becoming more knowledge of Indian culture. Readers can now pick up a book by a non-Indian with a bad imagination and say, "This is crap." As long as certain communities are marginalized, it's a political act against them to allow a stranger to portray them. It's a part of suppression. Once there's an opening up and a political equality, a political power given to marginalized people, then it won't matter. I think we’re gradually getting enough good Indian writers out there that only the most brilliant imaginings by non-Indians of what it would be to be part of some other culture would get published. One example of such a work is a collection of poetry entitled Crazy Horse in Stillness by William Heyen. (2015)"

"the fact that people get twisted cuts across lines of skin color and culture. It has to do with who buys that authoritarianism."

"...humor is sacred. Laughing is sacred. The world would become sterile and cold and die if there wasn't the clowning and the joking and the laughter. And that in order to have a perfect balance or harmony you have to have humor."

"We are told we should love only the good and the beautiful, and these are defined for us so narrowly. Monday I will be 31. Maybe it has taken me this long to discover that we are liable to love anything-like characters in old Greek stories who set eyes on an oak tree or a bucket and fall in love hopelessly, there are no limits to our love."

"When you grow up and look around you every day and say, "Oh, there is stolen property. It was ours and it was stolen," you're not nearly as quick to swallow the kinds of rationales that everybody else accepts. That's one of the tragedies of the United States - a sort of collective amnesia about the past"

"What can you do when you're writing about five hundred years and it just happens to be five hundred years of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter? What do you do when that's your task, and all these other people before you have cleaned it up, and you're the one that has to come and say, "No, the priests didn't come for God, glory, and then gold. The Church came here for money"?"