Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

Sacred Water is a short chapbook of stories and photographs that
Leslie Marmon Silko self-published in 1993, shortly after the publication
of Almanac of the Dead. In 1993, Silko explained to scholar Laura
Coltelli how a work like Sacred Water emerged from the traumatic visions
of Almanac of the Dead: “Sacred Water was meant as a soothing, healing
antidote to the relentless horror let loose in this world. It was meant as
a gift to readers who wrestled with Almanac of the Dead. Some of the
readers were wrenched by Almanac and I wanted to give them something
generous, yet truthful” (Coltelli 26). Indeed, there is something generous
and comforting about the form and content of Sacred Water—hand-drawn
and pasted glyphs; black-and-white photos of desert skies, waters, and
rocks; Silko’s concise, deeply personal prose style; and even her ballpoint
signature on the frontispiece. This book is, in a sense, the bioregional
counterpart to Almanac and the localized forerunner to the transnational
visions of Gardens in the Dunes. Where Almanac of the Dead traverses
the Americas and Gardens in the Dunes traverses the globe, Sacred Water
clearly demonstrates a highly localized ethic of environmental restoration
through Silko’s personal recollections of and conjectures about the role of
water in the lifeways of the Pueblo peoples.
Sacred Water is fundamentally a set of stories about how cultures
and places interact. Silko’s stories touch on the various elements of the
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