Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Ia și Abstract: The paper traces the history of “conquered landscape” back to the original European colonists and… [601517]

LINGUACULTURE , 2, 2011
CONQUERED LANDSCAPE IN THE
AMERICAN WEST
IRINA CHIRICA
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Ia și
Abstract:
The paper traces the history of “conquered landscape” back to the original European
colonists and the Puritans. We discuss the contribution of Thomas Jefferson as an
architect of Western expansion through the purchase of the Louisiana territory and the
mapping of future policy regarding the settling of Western territory. We cover the major
moments in the settling of the West and their historic significance. We discuss Frederick
Jackson Turner’s concept of the West as “a succession of frontiers” versus revisionist
historian Patricia Nelson Limerick’s concept of conquest and conquered territory . The
second part of the paper deals with the Native American view of the land, with reference
to Paula Gunn Allen’s ideas and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novels Ceremony and Almanac
of the Dead . Silko juxtaposes two different kinds of space, Native American versus
federal space. The Native American and Anglo-American views of nature are contrasted
and explained, with the discussion of aspects of native removal, reterritorialization and
misrepresentation.
Keywords: Western expansion, environment despoliation, reinscribed borders,
reterritorialization
E
arly in American history, before the creation of the United States, nature was
an ambiguous reality. The Virginia cavaliers rejoiced in the promise of a New
World of abundance, a sort of Garden of Eden where people could live “without
toil and labor”. On the other hand, the Puritans feared the sinister natural world
whose evil eye glared at them from the shores of New England, a “wilderness”
inhabited by demons, wild beasts and Indians. The Puritan colonies survived,
while the Roanoke Island colonists (1587-1590) mysteriously disappeared.
The Roanoke “story” and the New England “story” demonstrate that the
natural landscape of America simultaneously contained the possibility of both
danger and profit, and set a pattern for the future colonizing experience in the DOI: 10.2478/v10318-012-0013-7
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

Irina CHIRICA

76
American environment – a landscape to be conquered and then profited from
through Yankee ingenuity, industrial advancement an d hard work.
The colonists liked to regard American landscape as a tabula rasa on
which man could write, as if for the first time, th e story he wanted to live. It was
full of promise, the vacuum domicilium the Puritans had imagined, waiting to be
peopled. The apparent emptiness made the land desir able not only as a space to
be filled, but also as a stage on which to perform and as a territory to master.
Land was to be conquered, controlled, subdivided, w ater-righted and exploited.
This European attitude that can be traced from the domination motif of the Old
Testament to colonial writers such as John Winthrop , Mary Rowlandson and
Cotton Mather.
The westward migration gradually pushed the offspri ng of the founders
further from the principles outlined in the Mayflow er Compact. Western
expansion grew as the population multiplied. The ne ed for land began to move
from spiritual to secular goals of nation-building in the new world. Deforestation
occurred early on as the colonists pushed the colon ized boundaries further and
further away from the sea coast.
Thomas Jefferson took delight in the growing number s of the population
of Virginia, noting: “In Europe the object is to ma ke the most of their land, labor
being abundant. Here it is to make the most of our labor, land being abundant.”
Thus began the independent, landowning tradition th at underpins American
identity – the tradition of the yeoman agriculturis t (today a gardener in a
suburban backyard) ready to advance and conquer a l imitless continent of
natural resources.
Westward movement started on the premise that there was an abundance
of free land into which the settlers came, winning the wilderness. If the land was
“free”, it was also “vacant” and “virgin” to the wh ite settlers, with strong
connotations of the promised land, imbued with the mystical sense of manifest
destiny. In the mind of the settlers, the new land was linked with biblical stories
of a New Canaan, suggesting the fecundity and promi se of a new world of
unexplored riches.
Thomas Jefferson acquired an interest in western ex ploration early in life.
His father was a surveyor, map maker, and land spec ulator on the Virginia
frontier. Jefferson had a life-long commitment to s upporting western exploration
and asserting American claims to western lands. Jef ferson was clearly the
intellectual father of the American advance to the Pacific. In his quality as
President of the United States, Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory from
France in 1803 and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedit ion (1803–1806) on a
mapping and scientific exploration on the Missouri River up to the Pacific.
In 1787, Congress asked Jefferson to come up with a political way of
dealing with the West. What was going to be the pol itical and government status
of the West? Would the West remain a colonial regio n of lesser political
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

CONQUERED LANDSCAPE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

77
significance, on a lower level than the East Coast, or would western regions
eventually become states with an equal status with eastern states? Jefferson
replied that eventually, three up to five western s tates with equal power with
eastern states will be constituted: Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and
Wisconsin.
Should the new land be opened in a wild, uncontroll ed manner, to
everybody who wants to come, or should the governme nt control the whole
process by meting out lots of land for which it wil l collect a tax? Jefferson chose
the second alternative. Jefferson worked out a plan in which territories were
created at first – a governor and at least one judg e were appointed per territory.
3000 free white adult males were required for a ter ritory to have its own
legislature and a non-voting delegate in Congress. 60,000 people (of all types)
were required so that the territory could apply to be a state (a request that would
probably be granted). Jefferson’s plan of developme nt was reinforced by The
Northwest Ordinance of 1787 . Jefferson’s plan became a model for the future
development of the West.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade black slave ry in the area of the
Northwest. Although a large slave-owner himself, Je fferson was an
Enlightenment figure. He believed that slavery was morally wrong. He used the
opportunity to prevent slavery from spreading west. But the issue of slavery in
the American West was never solved permanently unti l the Civil War – in fact it
was one of the causes of the Civil War. Political c ompromises temporarily dealt
with the matter of slavery (the 1820 Missouri compr omise, the 1850
Compromise and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act).
In seeking to establish, what he called “an empire for liberty”, Jefferson
also influenced the country’s policies toward Nativ e Americans. Despite a life-
long interest in Native American culture, President Jefferson advocated policies
that would dislocate Native Americans and their way of life. In 1784, Jefferson
opposed the extension of slavery into the northwest territory, but he later
supported its westward extension because he feared that any restriction of
slavery could lead to a civil war and an end to the nation.
The Westward push was imperialistic. As John L. O’S ullivan showed, it
was the duty of white settlers to move West and occ upy and possess the lands
there, following the Manifest Destiny ordained by G od, “to overspread the
continent allotted by Providence”. The journalist W illiam Gilpin wrote in 1846
that “the untransacted destiny of the American peop le is to subdue the continent,
to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean, … to teach old nations a new
civilization – to confirm the destiny of the human race” (Smith 37).
The West was interpreted as “natural wealth” to be consumed and used.
The Homestead Act of 1862 parceled the land into 16 0-acre lots to be sold for
the nominal amount of $10, and meanwhile the railro ad companies were being
awarded huge land grants to enable the continued ex pansion of the railroad
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

Irina CHIRICA

78
across the Plains. Native American lands were being divided, buffalo ranges
bisected and the once-uncharted wilderness was bein g surveyed by large
corporate interests: railroads, mining and timber c ompanies, driven by profit and
loss.
Western land was opened to the settlers through lan d rushes and the
Dawes Act. The Dawes Act of 1887 (or General Allotment Act ) was a subterfuge
which opened Indian land for the land rushes. A lot of Indian land that used to
belong to the reservation was now transferred from Indian into white hands. The
General Allotment Act broke up and allotted triball y held lands to individual
Indians in small parcels, opening up the surplus to whites. Land which had been
commonly owned by the tribal reservation was now su bdivided into lots. Each
Indian head of a family was given 160 acres of land . The problem was that the
Indians did not know how to run farms and according to their religion, they
could not “own” land. Land did not belong to people . It was people who
belonged to the land. Some of the Indians who accep ted the 160 acres rented or
sold it to the whites for next to nothing, because they did not understand what
the land was worth in money. Many eager speculators induced Indians
inexperienced in commercial dealings to sell their newly acquired property.
The federal allotment policy continued with the Okl ahoma Land Rush of
1889. The Oklahoma Land Rush was another imperialis tic design which opened
Indian land to white settlement. With settlers lini ng up for a race to the best
property ex-Indian property and with “sooners” alre ady illegally having staked
their claims, it can be viewed as symbolic of the w hite hunger for land at the
expense of Indian people. Then on March 2, 1889 Con gress passed the Indian
Appropriations Bill, proclaiming that unassigned la nds were part of the public
domain. This was followed by the Curtis Act of 1898 and various inheritance
laws. Finally, the Indian land base shrunk from abo ut 150 million acres to 60
million acres.
Additional Indian displacement occurred during the 20th century, through
the building of dams and other public works by the Army Corps of Engineers
and private contractors, under the concept of emine nt domain, as well as various
methods of extortion – such as the invalidation of wills, the appropriation of land
in exchange for social services, the declaration of landowners as incompetent,
and the manipulation and intimidation of Indians, f orcing sales. Even today,
some Indian lands and resources are still threatene d.
The most prominent voice on the importance of abund ant western land
and the frontier is Frederick Jackson Turner. Turne r formulated the American
psyche in terms of its identification with a vast n atural world. For him, the
frontier was “the meeting point between savagery an d civilization”. The outer
limit of agricultural settlement (as in the vision of Thomas Jefferson) was the
boundary of civilization. The emphasis on agricultu ral settlement places the
frontier thesis within the stream of agrarian theor y flowing from Thomas
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

CONQUERED LANDSCAPE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

79
Jefferson to the men who elaborated the ideal socie ty of yeomen farmers in the
West. Turner’s concept of the frontier (1893) encompassed notions of conquest,
progress and individual achievement. Turner’s rheto ric resonates as the key
definition of what it is to be an American even tod ay. Turner believed that the
advancement of American settlement westwards and th e conquest of landscape
explained American development.
For Turner and for Americans even today, westward e xpansion and the
conquest of western land is inextricably embedded i n the national myth.
Turner’s frontier, the “meeting point between savag ery and civilization”, defined
the American relationship with a natural world disc overed and exploited in the
name of progress. The West provided the “free” land on which equality and
democracy could flourish. The presence of an ever-e xpanding frontier was to
account for uniquely American qualities: “the exist ence of an area of free land,
its continuous recession, and the advance of Americ an settlement westward
explain American development.” The border of the fr ontier is not fixed, it is
advancing constantly westwards. The result of the w estering process is “a
succession of frontiers” from the Appalachians to t he Pacific, as new land was
conquered and controlled.
In her book The Legacy of Conquest (1987), the revisionist historian
Patricia Nelson Limerick encourages the use of the word conquest rather than
frontier , to describe the process that shaped the West. Legacy of Conquest
contains discussions about federally-held lands and grazing rights; the scarcity
of water and over-grazing of Western lands; environ mental conflicts; timber and
mining conflicts; religious freedom issues; Western dependency on federal
support; and boom-bust economies. Her synthesis of these issues of Western
American history suggests the continuity of past is sues that still appear in the
present day, and remain a part of the West’s “legac y of conquest”.
Limerick takes issue with the commonly accepted not ion that the year
1890 marked the closing of the American frontier. “ Frontiers involve mules,
horses and oxen, but not jeeps; pickaxes and pans b ut not air drills and draglines;
provisions in sacks and tins but not in freeze-drie d packets; horse-drawn plows
but not mechanized combines with air conditioned dr ivers’ cabins; amateurs but
not engineers; bows and arrows but certainly not nu clear tests in Nevada. Are
Geiger counters and airplanes less frontier-like th an picks and shovels?”
(Limerick 24).
The American West is a preeminent case study in con quest and its
consequences. Patricia Nelson Limerick shows that t he conquest of western land
basically involved the drawing of lines on a map, a nd the definition and
allocation of ownership – personal, tribal, corpora te, state and federal. It
involved the setting of new borders – the writer sh ows how Western history is a
story structured by the drawing of lines and the ma king of borders. From
imperial struggles for territory to the parceling o ut of town site claims, western
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

Irina CHIRICA

80
American history was an effort first to draw lines dividing the West into
manageable units of property and then to persuade p eople to treat those lines
with respect, shows Patricia Nelson Limerick.
For nearly a century before, Patricia Nelson Limeri ck argues, federal
ownership of the land was a temporary expedient on the way to private property
in the West. Territories were transitional, even if the transition came in all
lengths – no time at all in California, four years in Nevada, and sixty-three in
Arizona and New Mexico. Before statehood, even thou gh they had elected
representatives, residents in territories were unde r the authority of federally
appointed governors and judges.
Patricia Nelson Limerick also addresses the issue o f environment
despoliation. The diversion of rivers, the mindless use of technology to change
the natural ecology of the West, whether by water d iversion or destruction of
wildlife and their habitats, boded ill for the West . It would result in eventual
exhaustion of scarce waters, the silting and saltin g of the soil, the destruction of
valuable species of animals, and such a serious dis ruption of ecological balance
that it might take centuries to repair, if ever. Ar eas of the West – especially the
Colorado Plateau in the Four Corners area, and the Black Hills in South Dakota
– proved to be rich in uranium ore, and the late 19 40s saw a rush and boom in
domestic uranium production. Throughout the 1950s, nuclear tests went on over
Nevada, and winds carried the fallout around the pl anet. After 1963, the test
went underground, but they still had occasional lea ks and accidents.
In New Mexico the Rio Puerco is polluted with radio active uranium
tailings which have a half-life of thousands of yea rs. New Mexico is already a
center for nuclear activity, and there are dozens m ore nuclear installations
planned for this state. Nevada today houses America ’s nuclear testing grounds.
Utah is the testing ground for nerve gas. A nerve g as test accidentally killed a
large herd of sheep which were grazing in an unfort unate proximity at the time.
Utah also houses biological warfare equipment and w ill be the new center for the
world’s largest power plants – one of which, at thr ee thousand megawatts, will
be the largest in the world. Power plants have alre ady begun to spoil the air of
American national parks. Eyes sting at Arches Natio nal Park. There is smog in
the desert. And dozens more power plants are propos ed for the Four Corners
area. To the north, in Montana, strip mining and co al-fired plants are competing
with cows for resources of the High Plains. Industr y contemplates cutting up
large portions of the states of Wyoming, Colorado a nd Utah to mine coal and
build gasification plants. The landscape of the Int ermountain West has been
classified as a “sacrifice area” and is being destr oyed “to provide most good for
the most people”. However the fact that a region is arid hardly implies that it is
barren and therefore should be exploited. Rather, i t may mean that its landscape
should be better protected.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

CONQUERED LANDSCAPE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

81
The capitalist ideology of ownership found a perfec t manifestation in
western landscape. It was a cultural imperative to see the land as something to
divide, distribute and register. Anglo-Americans ca me to the land as possessive
individuals pursuing private dreams, trying to fenc e in their portion of the whole
and thought about the land in fragmenting terms.
In contrast, for Native Americans who already inhab ited Western
landscape when the Euro-American settlers came, the land was sacred, bound up
in an intricate web of meaning with all living thin gs. For the Native Americans,
the land could not become property since “We are th e land, and the land is
mother to us all” shows the writer Paula Gunn Allen in The Sacred Hoop . The
Native Americans have adopted an attitude of enviro nmental protection and
treated the land with respect. For the Native Ameri can, the land is alive and man
interacts with the environment, which reciprocates. For the Euro-American, the
land is outside himself, separate, objectified, and ultimately dead.
Native Americans view themselves as an integral par t of the landscape,
deeply connected with each and every component of n ature. Cooperation, non-
aggression, interrelatedness among all things are a t the core of the communal
code of life of Native Americans. From times immemo rial, the ecological
farming and hunting practices of many groups of Nat ive Americans supported
their millions of people for thousands of years wit hout endangering the land or
the land’s animal and vegetable species. In the mid dle Rio Grande, perhaps the
oldest continuous area of human habitation in Ameri ca, the Indians worked their
corn and other food plants so as to preserve their environment. They prevented
flooding; they kept grass in the arid climate; they did not deplete wood supplies,
whereas white innovations in the same area produced flooding, erosion and other
natural disasters which seriously damaged the ecolo gical balance of the land.
Awareness of the interrelatedness of man and nature permeates Native
American literature. Writers such as Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich and James
Welch would serve as examples of nature writing. Ho wever in the following
pages we choose to focus our research on the way in which the Laguna Pueblo
writer Leslie Marmon Silko approaches the theme of conquered landscape in her
most representative novel, Ceremony (1977).
In the context of nature writing, Silko’s novel has been cited as one of the
finest pieces of literature that places the Native American landscape at the core
of human experience. The protagonist of Ceremony attempts to rediscover his
responsibility towards the natural environment, by reconnecting with his
heritage. Tayo’s healing ceremony involves various aspects, among which the
central one implies reassessment of the land. The o nly effective cure for the
hero’s war trauma is to readjust his relation to th e land. Gradually, he comes to
realize that his identity is bound up with Laguna’s identity, these people’s
stories, myths, legends; their sacred places help h im to overcome his identity
crisis and rediscover himself.
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

Irina CHIRICA

82
The novel Ceremony juxtaposes two different types of space: the federa l
space of the United States and the Native American space. The Native American
space has been buried under the Euro-American one. Everything that once
defined the Indian landscape has been reshaped acco rding to the dominant
culture’s code of life. Silko represents Euro-Ameri can space as written or
superimposed over Indian lands. The process of land dispossession can be
described by the term reterritorialization . This term also refers to the process of
reinscription of the land by the white colonizers.
Silko describes the way in which western landscape has been separated by
borders and zones imposed by the dominant culture. For example, even though
they used to own the whole territory, the Indians a re now pushed to the outskirts
of a town called Gallup. The slum is separated by t rain tracks from the area
where the white community lives. The train tracks a re a sort of border. Betonie,
a medicine man, lives in a hogan on a hill above sh antytown, and is often
bewildered by the response people have to his choic e of residence: “It strikes me
funny, the medicine man said, shaking his head, peo ple wondering why I live so
close to the filthy town. But see, this Hogan was h ere first. Built long before the
white people ever came. It is that town down there which is out of place. Not
this old medicine man.”
The city of Gallup has been superimposed or rewritt en on the land that
used to belong to the Indians. And it is ironical t hat, once this reinscription
process has been completed, the Indians have been a llotted a site at the outskirts
of the territory, beside the garbage dump. The iron y of Gallup’s treatment of the
Indians is that they are literally stored in the Re servation and shown off only
during the Gallup Ceremonial. It is an annual event that mostly involves the city
of Gallup where merchants make “a lot of money off tourists” by selling Indian
artifacts. The seasonally marketable Indians are tr eated like vermin off-season.
They are burned, sprayed and pushed out of sight. S ilko describes this in graphic
detail: “The men in dark green coveralls came with steel canisters on their backs,
and sprayed the places where the shelters had been. ” The tragedy, of course, is
that the displaced shantytown Indians have nowhere to go. Burning down the
shantytown is a manifestation of white rejection, a s well as an attempt to erase
“different” living beings and their territorial cla im.
The Laguna Reservation is another example of this t ype of Euro-
American violation. It is a territory situated outs ide the national grid system, in a
separate kind of space. The interesting thing about reservation territories is that
when the attempted per capita allotment failed afte r the Civil War was
abandoned, reservations were left in a state of par tial and residual allotment.
This land may be owned by whites or held tribally o r in allotments by the
Indians. This creates a great deal of dispute over land tenure in reservations.
Although reservations are traditionally understood as Indian territory, their status
is often ambiguous. The actual ownership of reserva tion land is often tenuous
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

CONQUERED LANDSCAPE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

83
and complicated. Significantly, the Indians of shan tytown in Ceremony cannot
find a place to live within the accepted zones. In the town of Gallup, they are
designated as waste and disruption. There is no zon e for the homeless.
Dispossession of home is a primary feature of all N ative American
experience, in the sense that all Indians, whatever their tribal differences, have
lost their lands to the dominant society. The land that once meant “home” no
longer belongs to them. The Indians experience what could be called a crisis of
habitare . The deeds and papers, shows medicine man Betonie, do not mean
anything. It is the people who belong to the mounta in. However belonging to
one’s land does not imply documents of ownership. I t implies respect and
consideration for the land that feeds and shapes yo ur identity as a human being.
Reinscribed borders are viewed as artificial constr ucts. A relevant
example of this kind of artificial borders is the e nclosing of the sacred mountain
(renamed Mount Taylor) by a barbed wire fence which marks the territory of a
forest company. The fence blocks off the Indians fr om what they consider to be
their point of origin (their legends say that they originated from that mountain).
The fence is supposed to keep Indians and Mexicans out. Silko shows the
relationship between western civilization’s hostili ty towards the environment
(wolves, mountain lions) and the dominant attitude of the Anglo-American
culture towards the Native Americans and other mino rities. The economic
ideology of private property (fences) and racial di vision are exposed. The irony
that the fence enables the whites to steal Tayo’s c attle in addition to protecting
their own cattle emphasize the way in which legal a nd political delimitations
enable the stealing of native lands.
When home no longer exists, the human self is fragm ented and
incomplete. In his journey to find a cure for his i nner fragmentation, Tayo breaks
open the boundaries of abstract territoriality. He makes a hole in the barbed wire
fence and gains access to the mountain. He crosses the borders of reservation
(Laguna), national forest (Mount Taylor) and munici pality (Gallup). His
trajectory is necessarily a violation of legal deno minators which strips
governmental designations and reinscribes the patte rns and perceptions of an
older territorial map belonging to the old people. Fragmented territories are thus
pieced together as the text appropriates symbolic l andscape in an effort to
recreate former unity and meaning. Though Native Am ericans cannot take back
America as it existed before the conquest, they can appropriate the space of the
novel, in an effort to symbolically reconstruct and reinhabit their home.
Silko’s Laguna community was seriously affected by the decision in the
early 1950s to begin open pit mining of the huge ur anium deposits north of
Laguna. 1977, the year that Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony was published,
was the year the Laguna Pueblo tribe received a war ning that Rio Paguate, the
main river that runs through the reservation, was c ontaminated with radium. It
later became public knowledge that not only were al l of the Laguna’s wells
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

Irina CHIRICA

84
highly irradiated, but that the tribal council buil ding, community center and
reservation road system had been constructed with r adioactive mining waste as
well.
The uranium mine in Ceremony is an example of the devastation and
destruction wrought on the land by industrialism. S ilko calls into question
western civilization’s economic and legal interpret ations of the land. America’s
claim to western land is revealed as a hypocritical mark for colonial conquest,
just as raping the environment through mining is re vealed to be a part of a larger
industrial-military complex.
Almanac of the Dead (1991) is a sprawling, nontraditional novel with s ix
distinct narrative lines. The novel covers five hun dred years of history and
incorporates multiple themes, motifs, ideas, ideolo gies and discourses into a vast
panorama of revisionist history, told from the view point of the world’s
marginalized groups, from the indigenous peoples to the handicapped. The
novel’s numerous characters are often separated by both time and space, and at
first many have little to do with one another. A ma jority of the characters are
involved in criminal or revolutionary organizations – the extended cast includes
arms dealers, drug kingpins, an elite assassin, com munist revolutionaries,
corrupt politicians, pedophiles and perverts, and a black market organ dealer.
These unsavory, un-American characters that people the book, the bitter
portrayal of American society, and the complexity o f the novel’s multiple
settings, which may appear disorganized and haphaza rd, explain why Almanac
of the Dead has never enjoyed the success of the novel Ceremony (1977), which
is reader friendly and struggles to build a bridge of understanding between the
Anglo-American and Native American cultures. Ceremony’ s message of healing
and reconciliation between races and people made it both an immediate and a
long-term success. Unlike Ceremony , Almanac of the Dead is driven by anger
and a yearning for revenge and comes close to advoc ating violent revolution. If
we consider all these elements, it is easy to under stand why Almanac of the
Dead has gathered negative or mixed reviews.
A few more words about the book are necessary. The almanac of the title
was compiled long ago by Mayans who were watching t heir culture slowly
disappear through Spanish colonization. The almanac s were trying to preserve
for the future the Native American cultural inherit ance. As the Indians are being
driven from their land by “the invaders”, they entr ust the manual to four children
who sew its pages into their clothing as they escap e to the North. The children
grow hungry on the voyage and the youngest girl eat s one of the pages. It
sustains her. The children then meet an old hunchba cked woman who has been
left behind by her people. She is cooking a stew of roots and berries. The
children are nearly dead from hunger, but the cripp led woman gives them some
stew and it sustains them. The youngest girl puts a page from the ancient
almanac in the stew and the children and the old wo man are able to live on it for
Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM

CONQUERED LANDSCAPE IN THE AMERICAN WEST

85
days and days, a symbolic action signifying the imp ortance of tradition for the
future generations.
Driving many of the individual storylines of the no vel is a general theme
of total reclamation of Native American lands. The writer shows that the
criminal characters in the book are forced to inhab it the underworld because a
respectable, successful life is practically denied to Native Americans by white
culture, in American society. These criminals frequ ently travel across the border
with Mexico, totally disregarding the U.S. border. For them this border is an
abusive, imperialistic construct, arbitrarily built in the middle of lands which had
been theirs from times immemorial. Like Tayo’s brea king across the barbed wire
fence to gain access to the Indian sacred mountain (in Ceremony ), the criminal
characters in Almanac of the Dead vacillate between the U.S. and Mexico in a
symbolic act of territorial repossession.
In conclusion, Silko’s novels Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead revisit
the American mythos of the conquest of the American land from a Native
American point of view, exposing the violence done to conquered land and
conquered people. From the Puritans to Jefferson’s Agrarian dream, to Turner’s
successive frontiers and Patricia Nelson Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest , this
research paper covers the major currents of ideas r eferring to conquered
landscape in the American West. Finally, we see how the literary approach of
Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko from t he perspective of
revisionist history deals with the Indian attempt t o reclaim and symbolically
repossess sacrosanct areas and territories in the c ontext of centuries of native
removal and misrepresentation, presenting another s ide of history and dealing
with the ecological and human repercussions of disp ossession.

Works Cited

Gunn Allen Patricia, The Sacred Hoop . Boston Ș Beacon Press, 1986.
Jacobs, Wilbur. Dispossessing the American Indian: Indians and Whit es on the Colonial
Frontier . New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972. Print.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest . New York: Norton, 1988. Print.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden . New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Print.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American
Frontier . Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. P rint.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land . New York: Vintage Books, 1957. Print.
Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness and the Making of Nati onal Parks .
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History . New York: Holt
Publishing House, 1947. Print.

Unauthenticated
Download Date | 12/11/15 11:45 AM