Leslie Marmon Silko and the Artistic Expression of Indigenous Storytelling: Freedom and Sovereignty in Defiance of Settler Colonialism

“You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.” With this warning, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko begins her novel Ceremony. But Silko’s warning is also a message of hope: You have everything (or at least much) if you have the stories—powerful, vital resources for sovereignty and freedom, healing and resistance in times of setter violence and climate destruction. This presentation is offered in the mode of listening: of attending to Silko’s artistic expression and the stories she weaves from her life and her Indigenous traditions. In the act of listening, questions are posed to us: What does it mean to “have the stories”—to have them “taking form in bone and muscle”? Which stories? Whose bone and muscle? What is the connection between storytelling and having sources of sovereignty, freedom, and resistance, especially in times of oppression and despair? And what might it mean to forget or neglect the stories? These are some questions posed to us as we seek to listen to Silko’s liberatory Indigenous storytelling.

The presentation starts by exploring the liberating power of Indigenous storytelling. It then focuses on nuclear storied landscapes in Silko’s novels, Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. We discover artistic storytelling for achieving two kinds of freedom: Sovereignty to enable accountability to the land and its people; and freedom from environmental racism and other forms of settler oppression. The presentation concludes with the curative role of artistic storytelling, assisting humans to survive and even flourish as they seek freedom and justice in the face of the catastrophic.

In Yellow Women and a Beauty of the Spirit, Silko describes how she dropped out of law school due to the savagery of the U.S. settler legal system. Instead of law, she “decided the only way to seek justice was through the power of stories.” That claim may sound like hyperbole, but such judgment should be suspended until one learns what exactly the power of stories is. What if the artistic expression of stories refers to the matter and manner of dynamic, emerging traditions, beliefs, rituals, and practices—replete with stories of oppression and freedom, despair and hope, catastrophe and resilience, violence and love?

The artistic expression of storytelling, in Silko’s view, is not principally a form of entertainment but a survival skill and a practice; it is history and medicine, it is diagnostic and prognostic. Storytelling assists Indigenous populations in practical ways to cope with life’s challenges. What kinds of challenges? Certainly, the dispossession and oppression that has come from settler colonialism, and the challenge to achieve sovereignty for the sake of enabling people to honor their accountability to the land, to its people, and the ways of justice; as well as the challenge to achieve freedom from environmental racism and other forms of settler colonial oppression. In Silko’s storytelling, sovereignty is the capacity for a people to exercise its reciprocal commitments and duties to people and place, to fellow humans and to the more-than human. Freedom, in contrast, is to dwell free from those obstacles and forms of oppression that inhibit sovereignty.

In Silko’s novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, the work and concept of freedom and sovereignty are particularly evident in a powerful set of storied landscapes clustered around abandoned uranium mines. These nuclear storied landscapes vividly illustrate: the role of art seeking freedom, sovereignty, and justice; the awakening to everyday suffering and joy; the cultivation of praxis-oriented empathy; the healing that comes from connection to people and place; and the powerful otherness and agency of the more-than-human. These narratives of oppression, freedom, and sovereignty manifest Silko’s commitment to exposing the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the poisoning of their lands, but also to advancing Indigenous freedom and sovereignty and the flourishing and the protection of their lands.

In Silko’s artistic expression, the ruined uranium mine is the image of both nuclear colonialism and Indigenous resistance—the quest for sovereignty to live justly and for freedom from government and global energy companies that have subjected Indigenous communities to radioactive poisoning, covert medical experimentation, exploitive labor practices, and forcible removal. The art of Silko seeks to wake up her readers and facilitate their becoming witnesses to suffering and injustice, to work toward Indigenous sovereignty and freedom.

Silko’s storytelling describes numerous curative interconnections between humans, place, and the more-than-human. Such interconnections include practices and traditions that name, honor, and in some cases attempt to shape those interconnections. There are better and worse ways for humans to dwell in a place, and Silko’s Laguna traditions assist its people to experience health by being in proper relationship to “the land.” For some time now, a challenge for many Indigenous populations has been to establish appropriate relationships with the more-than-human after having experienced loss of sovereignty. Some Indigenous groups have been moved thousands of miles from their homeland, experiencing disconnection from their various more-than-human familiar relationships. Others have remained on their homelands but have lost their sovereignty within it, and they are thereby thwarted from exercising stewardship and other relational practices with the more-than-human. Silko’s storytelling depicts the profound struggle and resilience of Indigenous peoples as they work to establish home and belonging under conditions of loss of sovereignty and lack of freedom from settler oppression. And that struggle and resilience is supported by engagement with, and assistance from, the more-than-human. In the context of catastrophic displacement, erasure, and upheaval, Silko’s storytelling vividly depicts Indigenous peoples’ efforts to achieve sovereignty and freedom as they seek to reestablish home and belonging in conjunction with the more-than-human.