Vision, Voice, and Intertribal Metanarrative: The American Indian Visual-Rhetorical Tradition and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Those who can't learn to appreciate the world's differences won't make it. They'll die.

Calabazas, from Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 203

Anna Lee Walter's (Pawnee, Otoe-Missoura) Talking Indian: Reflections on Survival and Writing contains one story entitled "The Web." In this story, a character named Hilda suddenly has her life invaded one morning by numerous spiders. Hilda, a waitress, is pondering the significance of this phenomenon with another waitress, who like Hilda, is American Indian.

"'Do you know what your problem is, Hilda?' Lou asked with a tired raised eyebrow. 'You're always thinking like an Indian. Always noticing things like how many spiders there are all of the sudden. You have to stop doing that. There's no place for that kind of thinking in the world anymore.'"¹

Hilda, however, ignores Lou's advice, and at the end of her tiresome day, proclaims to herself in her spider-infested abode, "Time to think, Hilda, old girl. . . . Time to think. Even if it is 'like an Indian.'"²

But this "thinking" comes about in a fashion that might seem strange to mainstream readers. In order to "think," Hilda falls asleep, having abandoned logical analysis, which she concludes isn't "thinking like an Indian at all."³ The ghosts of elders circle her in her sleep. One particular spider, who has perched on her earlobe to rest, whispers to her, "Sleep, Grandchild . . . but listen as you sleep. . . . I've got a story to tell. . . . But do not listen with your ears and mind. Listen with your hands, listen with your feet, listen with your skin and hair."⁴

Hilda awakes fully knowing the implication of the spiders, which has nothing to do, it turns out, with the spiders themselves but with a problematic person in her life. What is important here, for our purposes, is how Hilda gained that knowledge. For American Indians, knowledge can be gained visually—as through "visions" and "dreams"—as visual thinking is part of the holistic thinking equation. Personal vision is always conjoined with the knowledge of the People, handed down by one's elders, and it is more than a "mental" phenomenon—things can be "known" not only with the mind but also with the heart, body, and spirit. Lying about a vision is taken to be a serious violation of protocol and has equally serious implications both for the individual and for those who believe the false vision. This can be seen both historically in regard to the false vision of Tecumseh's brother, Tenkswatawa, and literarily in regard to the false vision of Fast Horse in James Welch's novel Fools Crow.⁵

A. Irving Hallowell reported that among the Ojibwa (Anishinaabe/Chippewa), "the dream experience of . . . [is] interpreted as actual experiences of the self. . . . Social interaction in terms of the Ojibwa outlook involves no vital distinction between self-related experience when awake and experiences during sleep."⁶ Lee Irwin's "Cherokee Healing: Myth, Dreams, and Medicine" relates that "the spiritual dimensions of Cherokee religious identity [are] constantly informed by personal experience through dreams, visions, and healing rites that work . . . in conjunction with the sacred word [ritualized incantations] and sacred world."⁷ Irwin claims, and I would support, that amongst the Cherokee, dreams have multidimensional power manifesting itself in a variety of ways in the lives of humans; they can cause illness and death, they can be used in diagnosis and curing, they can be used to divine the right course of action for an individual or the People as a whole, they can be an indicator of the predestined life span of an individual, or they can be a conduit in general for "ulanigvgv," what might be loosely translated as "medicine power."⁸ Irwin also notes that early ethnographers David Bushnell (1909) and John R. Swanton (1925) recorded the importance of dreams among the Choctaw and Creek respectively, another observation that my personal experience with those with whom I share this ancestry supports.⁹

Two academic studies, both...