Trans-Historical Trauma and Healing via Mapping of History/(-ies) in Leslie Silko’s 'Almanac of the Dead'

Abstract

Almanac of the Dead is concerned with Native American identity politic s as an act of “survivance” (Vizenor). Based on a fourth (and fictional) ancient Indian prophecy, the novel opens with a “five hundred year map” showing how space shapes and is shaped by subjects. The novel, like the map prefacing it, is a critique of Euro-American colonialist/capitalist view of space (as disconnected from people) and time (as linear, with a mandate to achieve progress). Maps are “ideological statements” (Anderson) in that they are representations of reality. Colonial maps and politics represent Indian land as terra incognita, to be discovered and brought into existence, with the “natural” sequence of the attempted cultural, as well as physical, erasure of Indians. The post- encounter experience of the first nations in the Americas is a traumatic one. Rather than an occurrence outside the norm, for the American Indian the norm itself is a “site of multiple traumas” (N. Van Styvendale). The identity quest in Almanac of the Dead unfolds along with reclaiming land in textual space, by rewriting history as (hi)story(-ies).