Indigenous Radical Resurgence and Multispecies Landscapes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge

Desert landscapes have played an extraordinary role in the project of settler colonialism in the United States. As Traci Brynne Voyles argues in Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country, deserts are sites where settler colonialism has superseded its logical extremes. If this colonial violence aims to destroy and replace Indigenous peoples and environments with colonial modes of inhabitance by stealing land, settler colonialism has gone a step further in the deserts of the US Southwest by rendering these landscapes barren “wastelands.” Voyles calls the socioecological project of converting lively and productive Indigenous lands into undesirable and dead places “wastelanding.” Viewed as desolate, lifeless, and worthless places, desert wastelands extend the settler-colonial project by obscuring present Indigenous inhabitance, justifying state-sanctioned extractivist practices, and naturalizing the presence of the settler state. Voyles explains that the desert has become the sine qua non of US settler colonialism: “[T]he settler state has grounded itself in the desert Southwest, making the desert central to how we understand our history and ourselves” (18). Dian Million (Tanana Athabascan) observes that Indigenous places, in particular, are conceptualized by the settler state as barren, deserted regions: “Indigenous places are often imagined as isolated empty places, disposable, or usable places subordinate to national need. Indigenous peoples are not isolated, in a past, outside of capital, or without capitalist relations: we are central to them” (25).¹ Acknowledging their centrality to the capitalist settler-colonial project and directly opposing the colonial denigration of the Southwest, Indigenous desert dwellers have long resisted their erasure. Leslie Marmon Silko, in particular, has used literature to defy, critique, and dismantle historical and ongoing forms of settler colonialism, especially in Storyteller, Ceremony, and Almanac of the Dead. By exposing the structures and operations of colonization, globalization, militarization, and technology throughout her oeuvre, Silko replaces dominant claims to power with Indigenous, decolonial claims to place.

Silko, a Laguna Pueblo woman from New Mexico and Arizona, has recently used the memoir genre to resist the settler-colonial practices of wastelanding, possession, and resource extraction. Participating in the rich and expansive literary traditions of the Native memoir, Silko rejects the historical convention that sees human individuals as bounded subjects singularly shaped by their own determination and instead describes, in the words of Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis), “a communal, collective sense of self ” (“Writing” 156). However, rather than restrict the possibilities of a collective self to a homogeneous community of human peers, Silko depicts herself as just one inhabitant among many more-than-human beings and things that cocreate and belong within the Sonoran Desert.² In The Turquoise Ledge (2010) she opposes the settler-colonial view of her desert home outside of Tucson, Arizona, as a vacant wasteland and instead writes herself into a multispecies landscape that teems with rattlesnakes, pack rats, skunks, mice, pigeons, dogs, macaws, and even lively turquoise. Moreover, Silko describes how these more-than-human creatures are threatened by the settler-colonial logics of possession and displacement, which continue to harm beings indigenous to this place.³ If Native memoirs stress “the sense of a relational self connected to a specific landscape” (Beard, “Teaching” 113), Silko explicates this connection to place by demonstrating how ongoing forms of possession and displacement threaten both her existence as a Native woman and the well-being of local creatures. Contributing to the history of Indigenous life writing that uses personal narratives to resist the violence of colonization, Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge anticipates a form of what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) terms “radical resurgence” in order to disrupt the physical and ideological tools of settler colonialism that attempt to claim, control, and eventually eradicate certain human and more-than-human bodies.⁴ Radical resurgence “refuses dispossession of both Indigenous bodies and land as the focal point of resurgent thinking and action” (Simpson 34). To persist as Indigenous in the settler state is to refuse colonial logics. Or, as Simpson puts it, “I simply cannot see how Indigenous peoples can continue to exist as Indigenous if we are willing to replicate the logics...