Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers

Abstract

Historians such as William Cronon (Changes Land, 1983) and Wilbur R. Jacobs (Indians as Ecologists, 1980); ecologists such as Stewart L. Udall (The Quiet Crisis, 1963); and religion scholars such as Christopher Vecsey (American Indian Environmental Religions, 1980) and Vine Deloria, Jr. (God is Red, 1973) argue that Americans respect and revere land, environment, and human interrelatedness to that environment ways foreign to European immigrants. Since Pleistocene, ecological farming and hunting practices of many groups of Americans supported their millions of people for thousands of years without endangering land or land's animal and vegetable species.(1) What these historians and other scholars are discovering about ecologically-minded Americans seems not only to be evident religions, myths, and farming and hunting practices, but also seems to be reflected their literature. Indeed, Americans -- along with such European Americans as Thoreau, Muir, Krutch, Leopold, Abbey, and Dillard -- contribute to genre of American nature writing. Although he does not anthologize any American writers his collection of American nature writing, Thomas Lyon does acknowledge importance of such writers: in American mythic narrative there is a strong sense of power of nature, particularly dignity and respectability, literal sense, of animals (Lyon, This xv). In Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990), editors Robert Finch and John Elder also note importance of American voice, and their anthology includes pieces by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. With this exception, insofar as any such generalization is valid, Americans are land's unheralded nature writers. What is a nature writer, after all, if not one who sees environment as a scientist but who describes as a humanist? According to Lyon, best nature writing has [a basic rightness of gestalt], and has also rehability of science (Nature Essay 221). Joseph Wood Krutch suggests that nature writers keep an account of their with natural world; whether engineers, surveyors, naturalists, adventurers, or journalists, nature writers are concerned with 'knowledge about' only insofar as helps define or color that experience (xiii). Genre does not matter. Nature writing is writing about nature. For these writers, reality is quite as likely as fantasy to provide powerful aesthetic and emotional experiences (Krutch xiii). Besides scientific knowledge (astronomy and ecology, for example), a knowledge of nature is evident literature that transcends conventional Western scientific thought. In Native American Attitudes to Environment Momaday calls this knowledge or understanding of natural world reciprocal appropriation, by which he means that human beings invest themselves in landscape, and at same time incorporate landscape into [their] own most fundamental experience (80). Momaday's example is a story of an expectant father who refuses to hunt deer -- even though he and his family are hungry. As man explains, it is inappropriate that I should take just now when I am expecting gift of life (82). Comparison of American Indian literature with its contemporary Euro-American counterpart reveals startling contrast between two approaches to nonhuman world. The European attitude can be traced easily from domination motif of Old Testament to colonial writers such as Winthrop, Bradford, Gookin, Rowlandson, and Mather. As Cecelia Tichi points out, Puritans New England used biblical authority to justify land appropriation and development (1-36). Even among nature writers there exists a dramatic difference between American and Euro-American approaches. Thomas Lyon points out, for example, that for the Indian, as has often been noted, there was no wilderness here, sense of a dichotomous term opposed to 'civilization' (Lyon, This xv). …