SOURCE: “The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller,” in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor, University of New Mexico Press, 1989, pp. 55–68.

[In the essay below, Krupat applies Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theories to Silko's Storyteller as he discusses the roles of authority and voice.]

Autobiography as commonly understood in western European and Euro-American culture did not exist as a traditional type of literary expression among the aboriginal peoples of North America. Indeed, none of the conditions of production for autobiography—here I would isolate post-Napoleonic historicism, egocentric individualism and writing as foremost—was typical of Native American cultures.¹ To the extent that the life stories, personal histories, memoirs or recollections of Indians did finally come into textual form (traditional Indian literatures were not written but oral), it was as a result of contact with and pressure from Euro-Americans. Until the twentieth century the most common form of Native American autobiography was the Indian autobiography, a genre of American writing constituted by the principle of original, bicultural, composite composition, in which there is a distinct if not always clear division of labor between the subject of the autobiography (the Indian to whom the first-person pronoun ostensibly makes reference) and the Euro-American editor responsible for fixing the text in writing, yet whose presence the first-person pronoun ostensibly masks. Indian autobiography may thus be distinguished from autobiography by Indians, the life stories of those Christianized and/or “civilized” natives who, having internalized Western culture and scription, committed their lives to writing on their own without the mediation of the Euro-American. In autobiographies by Indians, although there is inevitably an element of biculturalism, there is not the element of compositeness that precisely marks Indian autobiographies.

The earliest examples of Native American autobiography are two by Indians dating from the decades surrounding the American Revolution. These did not attract much attention; indeed, the more extensive of the two by Hendrick Aupaumut was not even published until 1827 and then in a journal of rather limited circulation.² It was only six years later, however that the first Indian autobiography, J. B. Patterson's Life of Black Hawk, appeared. This book did gain widespread notice, coming as it did at a time of increased American interest in Indians (the book was occasioned by the last Indian war to be fought east of the Mississippi) and in the type of writing then only recently named autobiography (in 1809 by the poet Southey). Both of these interests are developed in this earliest type of Indian autobiography, which presents the acts of the world-historical chief or (of particular concern in the first half of the nineteenth century) the Indian hero. The historical orientation of Indian autobiography persisted in some form into the 1930s and 1940s after which none of the warriors was left alive to tell his tale. By that time there had already occurred a shift of interest on the part of Euro-American editors from history to science. In the twentieth century professional anthropologists rather than amateur historians would most commonly edit Indian autobiographies.

In our time Indian autobiographies continue to be co-produced by historians and social scientists working with traditional native people, but their labors have very nearly been overshadowed by the autobiographical writing of a new generation of Indians, educated in Western literate forms yet by no means acculturated to the point of abandoning respect for the old ways. These autobiographies are not only contributions to historical and scientific record, but also works of art (particularly the autobiographies of N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose claim to national attention came not from their relation to American religion, history or anthropology, but from their relation to American literature as previously established in their fiction and poetry).

The history of Native American autobiography could be charted thematically as a movement from history and science to art on a line parallel to the history of European and Euro-American autobiography.³ To chart it thus would demonstrate that Native Americans have had to make a variety of accommodations to the dominant culture's forms, capitulating to them, assimilating them, sometimes dramatically transforming them, but never able to proceed independent of them. However, Native American autobiography differs materially from western European and Euro-American (though not strictly western American) autobiography through its existence in specifically individual and composite forms, or, both monologic and dialogic forms.⁴

To introduce the terms monologue and dialogue is to invoke an important recent development in literary theory: recent interest in the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin.

So much has been written on Bakhtin of late that any attempt to summarize his thought is bound to be incomplete.⁵ In this country, at least, what is generally understood by reference to “Bakhtin,” is very far from settled. To be sure “Freud” and “Marx” mean different things to different people as well; but there seems to be for Bakhtin, more than for these other major thinkers (and it is by no means generally agreed that comparison of Bakhtin to major thinkers is justified), a pronounced ambiguity. This openness may be functional, a practical illustration of what has been theoretically proposed. Perhaps it is not so much “openness,” that Bakhtin's writing exhibits, but such inconsistency and ambiguity that it is difficult or pointless to specify the particulars of his thought. Hence, any attempt at an approximately neutral summary automatically becomes partial, a choice not between nuances but real differences. Nevertheless, the following briefly outlines what is at issue in Bakhtin and therefore at issue in any Bakhtinian reading of Native American autobiography.

Bakhtin calls human language “heteroglossic, polyvocal,” the speech of each individual enabled and circumscribed not so much by language as a system as by the actual speech of other individuals. (In this he differs from Saussurian structural linguistics and its fascination with langue.) Speech is social and meaning is open and in flux, inevitably a dialogue among speakers, not the property or in the power of any single speaker. “… All there is to know about the world is not exhausted by a particular discourse about it … ”⁶ Bakhtin notes in a typical statement. Still some forms of written discourse and social practice seek to impose a single authoritative voice as the norm, thus subordinating or entirely suppressing other voices. It is the genre Bakhtin calls the “epic” that provides models of this monologic tendency in literature, while the totalitarianism of Stalinism under which Bakhtin lived provides the socio-political model of monologism. In opposition to the totalizing thrust of the epic, the novel testifies to its own (inevitable) incompleteness, its ongoing indebtedness to the discourse of others. The novel is the prime literary instance of dialogized speech.

Bakhtin seems to be committed to dialogue on empirical grounds, inasmuch as the term claims to name human communication correctly, pointing to the way speech and social life “really” are. But Bakhtin seems also to be committed to dialogue on moral and esthetic grounds; he approves of and is pleased by that which he finds bi-, hetero-, poly-, and so on. For him, truth and beauty are one, but what this equivalence is to mean ultimately in a dialogic theory of language and of social life remains to be determined.

Does Bakhtinian dialogic envision a strong form of pluralism in which all have legitimate voice: truth having its particular authority, beauty having its, and both having equal (cognitive) force over other voices, which, although worthy of being heard, can be judged decidably less forceful? Or does Bakhtinian dialogic envision a kind of post-modernist free play of voices with no normative means for deciding their relative worth or authority? We do not know whether Bakhtin's dislike of what he calls monologue permits some forms of relatively stable assertion, in particular truth and beauty. Such statements as “the last word is never said,”—and there are innumerable such statements in Bakhtin's writing—may intend a radically ironic, a schizophrenic refusal (in Jameson's very particular sense)⁷ of any form, however relativized, of grounded meaning. Or they may insist only that no single language act has the capacity to encompass the entire range of humanly possible meaning, as no single mode of political organization can give full latitude to human potential.

In this latter regard the issue is particularly complicated because, while we do know from Bakhtin that the novel is supposed to provide the fullest literary illustration of relativized, dialogic discourse, we do not know whether the nearest thing he gives us to a socio-political equivalent of the novel, rabelaisian “carnival,” represents an actual model for social organization or an escape from too rigid social organization. In either case, we do not know what Bakhtinian carnival might actually entail for current or future social formations. To examine Native American autobiography from a Bakhtinian perspective, then, is not only to consider it as a discursive type—a kind of literature, generically closer to the epic or the novel as Bakhtin understands these Western forms—but as a social model which allows for the projection of a particular image of human community.

Let me now offer a reading of Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller in relation to these issues.

Merely to consider Storyteller among Native American autobiographies might require some explanation, since the book is a collection of stories, poems and photographs as much as it is a narrative of its author's life. Of course a variety of claims have been made in the recent past for the fictionality of autobiographies in general, the autobiography being recognized as the West's most obviously dialogic genre in which a conversation between historia and poesis, documentation and creation, is always in progress. And some of these claims might easily be used to justify classifying Storyteller as an autobiography.

Indeed, to justify the book's classification as an autobiography in this way, would not be mistaken; it would, however, be to treat it exclusively from a Western perspective, failing to acknowledge that traditional Native American literary forms were not—and, in their contemporary manifestations usually are not—as concerned about keeping fiction and fact or poetry and prose distinct from one another. It is the distinction between truth and error rather than that between fact and fiction that seems more interesting to native expression; and indeed, this distinction was also central to Western thought prior to the seventeenth century. Thus the present “blurring of genres,” in Clifford Geertz's phrase,⁸ in both the social sciences and in the arts, is actually only a return to that time when the line between history and myth was not very clearly marked. But that is the way things have always been for Native American literatures.

From the Western point of view, Silko's book would seem to announce by its title, Storyteller, the familiar pattern of discovering who one is by discovering what one does, the pattern of identity in vocation. This is useful enough as a way to view Silko's text. In the West it has been a very long time since the vocational storyteller has had a clear and conventional social role. In Pueblo culture, however, to be known as a storyteller is to be known as one who participates, in a communally sanctioned manner, in sustaining the group; for a Native American writer to identify herself as a storyteller today is to express a desire to perform such a function. In the classic terms of Marcel Mauss, person, self and role are here joined.⁹

Silko dedicates her book “to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them.” Having called herself a storyteller, she thus places herself in a tradition of tellings, suggesting that her stories cannot strictly be her own nor will we find in them what one typically looks for in post-Rousseauan, Western autobiography or (as Bakhtin would add, in poetry) a uniquely personal voice. There is no single, distinctive or authoritative voice in Silko's book nor any striving for such a voice; to the contrary, Silko will take pains to indicate how even her own individual speech is the product of many voices. Storyteller is presented as a strongly polyphonic text in which the author defines herself—finds her voice, tells her life, illustrates the capacities of her vocation—in relation to the voices of other native and nonnative storytellers, tale tellers and book writers, and even to the voices of those who serve as the (by-no-means silent) audience for these stories.

It is Silko's biographical voice that commences the book, but not by speaking of her birth or the earliest recollections of childhood as Western autobiography usually dictates. Rather, she begins by establishing the relation of “hundreds of photographs taken since the 1890s around Laguna” that she finds in “a tall Hopi basket” to “the stories as [she] remembers them.”¹⁰ Visual stories, speaking pictures, here as in the familiar Western understanding will also provide a voice; and Silko's developing relation to every kind of story becomes the story of her life.

Dennis Tedlock has made the important point that Zuni stories are fashioned in such a way as to include in their telling not just the story itself but a critique of or commentary on those stories, and Silko's autobiographical story will also permit a critical dimension, voices that comment on stories and storytellers—storytellers like her Aunt Susie, who, when she told stories had “certain phrases, certain distinctive words/she used in her telling” (7). Both Aunt Susie and Aunt Alice “would tell me stories they had told me before but with changes in details or descriptions.… There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined these differing versions came to be” (227). Silko's own versions of stories she has heard from Simon Ortiz, the Acoma writer whom Silko acknowledges as the source of her prose tale, “Uncle Tony's Goat,” and her verse tale, “Skeleton Fixer,” also introduce certain phrases and distinctive words that make them identifiably her own. Yet these and all the other stories are never presented as the final or definitive version; although they are intensely associated with their different tellers, they remain available for other tellings.¹¹ “What is realized in the novel,” Bakhtin has written, “is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language… ” (365) and so, too, to know one's own language as bound up with “someone else's language.” Any story Silko herself tells, then, is always bound up with someone else's language; it is always a version and the story as version stands in relation to the story as officially sanctioned myth, as the novel stands to the national epic. Silko's stories are always consistent with—to return to Bakhtin—attempts to liberate “… cultural-semantic and emotional intentions from the hegemony of a single and unitary language,” consistent with a “… loss of feeling for language as myth, that is, as an absolute form of thought” (367).

Stories are transmitted by other storytellers, as Silko wrote early in her book:

by word of mouth
an entire history
an entire vision of the world
which depended upon memory
and retelling by subsequent generations.
.....… the oral tradition depends upon each person
listening and remembering a portion.…

(6-7)

But the awareness of and respect for the oral tradition, here, is not a kind of sentimental privileging of the old ways. Indeed, this first reference to the importance of cultural transmission by oral means comes in a lovely memorial to Aunt Susie who, Silko writes:

From the time that I can remember her
… worked on her kitchen table
with her books and papers spread over the oil cloth.
She wrote beautiful long hand script
but her eyesight was not good
and so she wrote very slowly.
.....She had come to believer very much in books

It is Aunt Susie, the believer in books and in writing, who was of “the last generation here at Laguna, that passed an entire culture by word of mouth.… ” Silko's own writing is compared to oral telling by a neighbor, who, finding her “Laguna Coyote” poem in a library book, remarks:

“We all enjoyed it so much,
but I was telling the children
the way my grandpa used to tell it
is longer.”

To this critical voice, Silko responds:

“Yes, that's the trouble with writing…
You can't go on and on the way we do
when we tell stories around here.
People who aren't used to it get tired”

(110).

This awareness of the audience is entirely typical for a native storyteller who cannot go forward with a tale without the audience's response. As Silko writes:

The Laguna people
always begin their stories
with “humma-hah”:
that means “long ago.”
And the ones who are listening
say “aaaa-eh”

(38)

These are the stories, of course, of the oral tradition. Silko invokes the feel of “long ago” both in the verse format she frequently uses and in the prose pieces, although perhaps only those sections of the book set in verse attempt to evoke something of the actual feel of an oral telling.

It is interesting to note that there are two pieces in the book that echo the title, one in prose and the other set in loose verse. The first, “Storyteller,” is an intense and powerful short story which takes place in Alaska. The storyteller of the title is the protagonist's grandfather, a rather less benign figure than the old storytellers of Silko's biographical experience; nonetheless, the stories he tells are of the traditional, mythic type. The second, “Storytelling,” is a kind of mini-anthology of several short tales of women and their (quite historical, if fictional!) sexual adventures. The “humma-hah” (in effect) of the first section goes:

You should understand
the way it was
back then,
because it is the same
even now

(94).

[aaaa-eh]

The final section has its unnamed speaker conclude:

My husband
left
after he heard the story
and moved back in with his mother.
It was my fault and
I don't blame him either.
I could have told
the story
better than I did

(98).

In both these pieces (“Storyteller” and “Storytelling”) we find a very different sense of verbal art from that expressed in the West in something like Auden's lines (in the poem on the death of Yeats), where he writes that “poetry makes nothing happen.… ” In deadly serious prose and in witty verse, Silko dramatizes her belief that stories—both the mythic-traditional tales passed down among the people and the day-to-day narrations of events—do make things happen. The two pieces refer to very different kinds of stories which, in their capacity to produce material effects, are nonetheless the same.

Among other identifiable voices in Silko's texts are her own epistolary voice in letters she has written to Lawson F. Inada and James A. Wright, the voices of Coyote and Buffalo, and those of traditional figures like Kochininako, Whirlwind Man, Arrowboy, Spider Woman and Yellow Woman—some of whom appear in modern day incarnations. In stories or letters or poems, in monologues or dialogues, the diction may vary—now more colloquial and/or regional, now more formal—or the tone—lyrical, humorous, meditative. Yet always, the effort is to make us hear the various languages that constitute Silko's world and so herself. If we agree with Bakhtin that, “The primary stylistic project of the novel as a genre is to create images of languages” (366), Storyteller is a clear instance of novelized discourse, Native American autobiography of the dialogic type. It remains to say what the implications of this particular dialogic discourse may be.

I have tried to read Storyteller as an example of Native American autobiography in the dialogic mode, that is, against the backdrop of Bakhtin's meditations on language and society. By way of conclusion, it seems useful to see what Silko's book has to say about these important subjects, or more accurately, what projections about language and society might be made from the book. To interrogate the text in this way is not to treat it foremost as ethnic or hyphenated literature (although it cannot be understood in ignorance of its informing context), but as a candidate for inclusion in the canon of American literature conceived of as a selection of the most important work from among national texts (American literature) and texts (for all the blurring of genres) of a certain kind (American literature).

Let me review the possibilities. In regard to its understanding of language and the nature of communication, on one hand a commitment to dialogism may be seen as a recognition of the necessity of an infinite semantic openness. Here the inescapable possibility of yet some further voice is crucial inasmuch as that voice may decisively alter or ambiguate any relatively stable meaning one might claim to understand. On the other hand, a commitment to dialogism may be seen as a type of radical pluralism, a more relativized openness, concerned with stating meanings provisionally in recognition of the legitimate claims of otherness and difference. In regard to its implied model of the social, a commitment to dialogism may be seen as envisioning, “a carnivalesque arena of diversity,” as James Clifford has described it, “a utopian… space,”¹² where the utopian exists as a category of pure abstraction, an image out of time and oblivious to the conditions of historical possibility: diversity as limitless freeplay. Or a commitment to dialogism may envision—but here one encounters difficulties, for it is hard to name or describe the sort of democratic and egalitarian community that would be the political equivalent of a radical pluralism as distinct from an infinite openness. No doubt, traditional Native American models of communal organization need further study in this regard, although it is not at all clear how the present-day Pueblo or the nineteenth-century Plains camp circle might be incorporated into models of some harmonious world-community to come.

Let me, then, name the alternative to dialogism as carnival and polymorphous diversity, what Paul Rabinow has called cosmopolitanism. “Let us define cosmopolitanism,” Rabinow writes, “as an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness (often forced upon people) of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories, and fates.”¹³ The trick is to avoid “reify[ing] local identities or construct[ing] universal ones,” a trick, as Rabinow notes, that requires a rather delicate balancing act, one that the West has had a difficult time managing. For all the seeming irony of proposing that the highly place-oriented and more or less homogenous cultures of indigenous Americans might best teach us how to be cosmopolitans, that is exactly what I mean to say. But here let me return to Storyteller.

Storyteller is open to a plurality of voices. What keeps it from entering the poststructuralist, postmodernist or schizophrenic heteroglossic domain is its commitment to the equivalent of a normative voice. For all the polyvocal openness of Silko's work, there is always the unabashed commitment to Pueblo ways as a reference point. This may be modified, updated, playfully construed: but its authority is always to be reckoned with. Whatever one understands from any speaker is to be understood in reference to that. Here we find dialogic as dialectic (not, it seems, the case in Bakhtin!), meaning as the interaction of any voiced value whatever and the centered voice of the Pueblo.¹⁴

If this account of Storyteller's semantics, or theory of meaning, is at all accurate, it would follow that its political unconscious is more easil conformable to Rabinow's cosmopolitanism than to a utopianized carnival. The social implications of Storyteller's dialogism might be a vision of an American cosmopolitanism to come that permits racial and cultural voices at home (in both “residual” and “emerging” forms¹⁵) to speak fully and that opens its ears to other voices abroad. This is an image, to be sure, not a political program; and to imagine the “polyvocal polity” in this way is also utopian, but perhaps only in the sense that it is not yet imminent.

Silko's book says nothing of this, offering neither a theory of communication nor of politics. To take it seriously, however, is to see it as more than merely evocative, amusing, expressive or informative (to the mainstream reader curious about the exotic ways of marginalized communities). It is to see its art as a matter of values that are most certainly not only aesthetic.

Notes

1. For a fuller account see Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California, 1985).

2. See Samson Occom, “A Short Narrative of My Life,” The Elders Wrote: An Anthology of Early Prose by North American Indians, ed. Bernd Peyer (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982). Occom wrote in 1768; his manuscript reposed in the Dartmouth College Library until its publication by Peyer. Also see Hendrick Aupaumut, “Journal of a Mission to the Western Tribes of Indians,” which was written in 1791 and published by B. H. Coates in 1827 in the Pennsylvania Historical Society Memoirs, II, part 1, 61–131.

3. This is William Spengemann's trajectory for Western autobiography which he sees as presenting “historical, philosophical, and poetic” forms, and a “movement of autobiography from the biographical to the fictive mode,” in his The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) xiv.

4. An earlier and very different version of this paper was summarized as a presentation to the European Association on American Studies Convention (Budapest, Mar. 1986). It will appear in a publication of the selected proceedings of that Convention edited by Steve Ickringill, University of Ulster.

5. I hesitate to offer even a selected bibliography of recent work on Bakhtin, so voluminous are the possibilities. For what use it may be let me mention only two book-length studies. Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist's biography, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), is both indispensable and too-good-to-be-true in its shaping of Bakhtin's life and thought into a coherent, but largely anti-communist, whole. Tzvetan Todorov's Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) is a particularly subtle reading. Denis Donoghue's “Reading Bakhtin,” Raritan 2 (Fall 1985): 107–19, offers a more sceptical account. The primary volumes in English of Bakhtin's work are Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The interested reader will find many special issues of journals devoted to Bakhtin, several with extensive bibliographies.

6. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 45. All further quotations from Bakhtin are from this volume and page references will be documented in the text.

7. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-82.

8. See Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought,” Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), originally published 1980.

9. See Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self.” In M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

10. Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York: Viking Press, 1981) 1. All further page references will be given in the text.

11. In fact there are other tellings because many of the stories in Storyteller have appeared elsewhere, some of them in several places. (Pieces of Silko's novel, Ceremony, also appear elsewhere.) What to make of this? On the one hand it may be that Silko is just trying to get as much mileage as she can out of what she's done, a practice not unknown to both fiction and essay writers, native and non-native. On the other hand, in the context of Native American storytelling, repetition of the “same” story on several different occasions is standard procedure, “originality” or noticeable innovation having no particular value. It should also be noted that the retellings of Silko's stories are not exact reprintings. For example, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds”, as it appears in Kenneth Rosen's anthology of the same name (New York: Viking, 1974), and in Storyteller, have slight differences. In Rosen's anthology there are numbered sections of the story (one to four), while there are only space breaks in Storyteller (no numbers). In the first paragraph of the Rosen version, Levis are “light-blue” while in Storyteller they are “light blue”; “blue mountains were still deep in snow” (3) in Rosen while in Storyteller “blue mountains were still in snow” (182). If we turn to the story called “Uncle Tony's Goat”, in both books, we find differences in the endings. In Rosen the story ends this way:

    … Tony finished the cup of coffee. “He's probably in Quemado by now.”

    I thought his voice sounded strong and happy when he said this, and I looked at him again, standing there by the door, ready to go milk the nanny goats. He smiled at me.

    “There wasn't ever a goat like that one,” he said, “but if that's the way he's going to act, O.K. then. That damn goat got pissed off too easy anyway” (99-100).

    The ending in Storyteller goes:

    … “He's probably in Quemado by now.”

    I looked at him again, standing there by the door, ready to go milk the nanny goats.

    “There wasn't ever a goat like that one,” he said, “but if that's the way he's going to act, O.K. then. That damn goat got pissed off too easy anyway.”

    He smiled at me and his voice was strong and happy when he said this (18).

    The differences in the first example may not amount to much, while those in the second might suggest a slight change in emphasis; a systematic study of the differences in Silko's retellings (something I have not attempted to do) might tell us something about her development as a writer—or might not be all that substantial. My point here is that Silko's retellings in writing, whether she is aware of this or not (and it is always possible that different versions come into existence as a result of the demands of different editors rather than as a result of Silko's own determinations), tend to parallel what we know of the oral retellings of traditional narrators.

12. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 1 (Spring 1983): 137.

13. Paul Rabinow, “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 258.

14. This would not accord very well with what Silko said of herself in Rosen's 1974 volume, Voices of the Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1974) where she emphasized that “ … the way we live is like Marmons… somewhere on the fringes … our origin is unlike any other. My poetry, my storytelling rise out of this source.” As glossed by Alan Velie, from whom I take this quotation, this means like “mixed-blood[s] from a ruling family” (in Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982) 107). It goes rather better with what Silko put in her contributor's note to Rosen's 1975 The Man to Send Rain Clouds. She wrote, “I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna. This place I am from is everything I am as a writer and human being.” (176)

15. These are values in relation to “dominant” values as defined by Raymond Williams in “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in his Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980) 40ff.