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employed people in Acoma and Laguna, 376 were farmers (Vlasich 80).
In the post WWII-era, this number has eroded to single digits. As the
passage above suggests, the decline in farming that Ortiz describes is
related to the growth of mining and other industries in the Southwest.
For the Pueblos the erosion of farming practices has been an unavoidable
consequence of modernization processes that, though not all bad, has had
significant consequences for traditional life. For example, agriculture is
intimately tied to water management—there is no separating the two.
Thus, as Silko’s story about Felipe Riley suggests, the delicate methods
through which Pueblo people were able to irrigate their crops may be
a disappearing art as traditional water management slowly gives way to
the more heavy-handed scientific approach that does not value subtlety
or minimal impact. The loss of traditional practices to mining indicates
not just a changing economy, but also the fact that fewer Pueblo people
are around to teach the delicate skill of ak chin irrigation that Felipe Riley
exemplifies.
However, Sacred Water is also about recovery and renewal, not
simply decline. The story of renewal is told through the restoration of the
rainwater pool at Silko’s home in the Tucson Mountains. Silko describes
her pool as a source of abundant aesthetic pleasures: “For a long time I
had a great many Sonoran red-spotted toads behind my house. I also
had a few cattails and a yellow water lily. … [H]undreds of toads used
to sing all night in a magnificent chorus with complex harmonies” (63).
This passage hearkens back to an earlier moment in the text when Silko
describes how, as a child, “We were given stern warnings about killing
toads or frogs. Harm to frogs could bring disastrous cloudbursts and
floods because the frogs and toads are the beloved children of the rain
clouds” (6). If one considers amphibians to be the beloved children of
rain clouds, then Silko’s rainwater pond in the desert seems to be a blessed
place for the children of the rain to gather and celebrate fresh water
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in a “magnificent chorus.” Historically, as the story of the sandstone
pools suggests, such a pool also might have sustained the Native peoples
through dry months. After the pond becomes overwhelmed by red algae,
Silko is forced to drain it.
Silko aligns the restoration of the rainwater pond with the potential
restoration of waters polluted by nuclear radiation in and around Laguna
and Acoma. To this end, she tells the story of neighborhood dogs chasing
a mule deer into her pond, which led to a nuclear fallout of sorts for the
species that inhabited it: “The water lily was trampled to pieces, and the
cattail was torn apart …. [S]oon after the deer’s ambush, a strange red
algae with the texture of mucous began to float on the pool’s surface.
This red algae smothered the yellow water lily, and even the cattail died”
(68). After this incident, the pool seems to be destroyed. Nothing that
she tries is able to remediate the red algae in the least. She tries dumping
crushed rock into the pond, skimming algae off the surface, and planting
a number of restorative water plants, but the algae only seemed to grow
stronger (70). Finally, she plants in the pool a host of water hyacinths,
“hardy and pestiferous” plants that are considered an invasive species in
most of the world, and, at last, the algae recedes and the water becomes
clear once more. Silko asserts, “I write in appreciation of the lowly
water hyacinth, purifyer of defiled water” (72). The success of the water
hyacinth seems to counteract discourses that would identify the hyacinth
as invasive, and in using the water hyacinth, Silko plays the role of the
gardener/trickster that uses unorthodox means to rehabilitate damaged
spaces.
Sacred Water seems to suggest that the remedies needed to heal
desecrated places already exist within traditional knowledge and need
only to be recovered and put to use. Following the story of her triumph
over the red algae, Silko broadens the scope of the story beyond her
backyard in Tucson and returns to Laguna:
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