"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."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesPeople from Albuquerque
Original Language: English
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Kathleen Alcalá "Reading the Signs" in The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leslie_Marmon_Silko
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Leslie Marmon Silko
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