“Movement Must Be Emulated by the People”: Rootedness, Migration, and Indigenous Internationalism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

A journey to Paguate from Laguna . . . retraces the original journey from the Emergence Place. . . . The eight miles, marked with boulders, mesas, springs, and river crossings, are actually a ritual circuit, or path, that marks the interior journey the Laguna people made: a journey of awareness and imagination in which they emerged from being within the earth and all-included in the earth to be the culture and people they became, differentiating themselves for the first time from all that had surrounded them, always aware that interior distances cannot be reckoned in physical miles or calendar years.

Leslie Marmon Silko, “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories”

In the front matter of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead readers discover a map of the Americas with several boxes that contain keys not for interpreting the map but for understanding the book. The boxed text includes the following: “When Europeans arrived, the Maya, Azteca, Inca cultures had already built great cities and vast networks of roads. Ancient prophecies foretold the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas. The ancient prophecies also foretell the disappearance of all things European” (14). In this text the European presence in the Americas, though destructive, is not permanent. Further, what Silko is suggesting with “the disappearance of all things European” is not that people and things with European roots will disappear but instead that their Europeanness will cease to exist. The Indigenous nature of the Americas is powerful enough to absorb new technologies and new people without losing any of its Indigenousness. America is not hybrid; it is, will be, and always has been Indigenous. Almanac of the Dead thus describes an Indigeneity that is at once both firmly rooted in the local land and also mobile, moving internationally and across both new and traditional boundaries.

The characters in Almanac of the Dead reflect the importance of movement. Everyone is in motion, and even the map on the endpapers is composed as much of vectors as of fixed locations, the connections between places being as important as the places themselves. The map’s locations are connected with lines tracing the journeys of characters or materials with labels like, “Sterling accidentally goes to Tucson” or “cocaine to finance arms” (14–15). Tucson, the locale of much of the book’s action, is at the center, but the map extends as far as Haiti (marked as “The First Black Indians”) and Cuba; Alaska is indicated as well. These connections establish the book’s intertribal and international orientation, and the examples of Haiti and Cuba in particular detail both the possibilities and the problems that Indigenous peoples face in an international struggle. The map is not made to geographic scale; instead, the distances correspond to an interior scale—a “journey of awareness and imagination” (37) much like the migration story Silko describes in her essay “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories,” which provides the epigraph to this article.

Silko’s map also suggests the importance of travel and mobility in maintaining Indigenous communities. Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor considers maps an important element of Indigenous stories: “Maps are pictures, and some native pictures are stories, visual memories, the source of directions, and a virtual sense of presence” (170). The map in Almanac of the Dead provides precisely what Vizenor describes: a map of directions, memories, and stories. The Indigenous communities on the map are firmly rooted in place, connected to the land and their ancestors. This rootedness exists alongside the mobility of Indigenous individuals who are fighting for their own or their communities’ survival. Those people who physically move away from their community—whether by choice, coercion, or some combination of the two—are still members of the community; physical absence does not necessarily translate into isolation and is in fact sometimes necessary to ensure the survival of the rooted community.

The novel sprawls; at 763 pages and containing more than fifty characters, it eschews linear structures and often flows into what appear to be tangential...