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Only the night-blooming datura, jimson weed, sacred plant
of the Pueblo priests, mighty hallucinogen and deadly
poison, only the datura has the plutonium contamination.
… [T]he datura metabolizes “heavy water,” contaminated with
plutonium, because, for the datura, all water is sacred. Across the
West, uranium mine wastes and contamination from underground
nuclear tests ruin the dwindling supplies of fresh water.
… [W]hatever may become of us human beings, the Earth
will bloom with hyacinth purple and the white blossoms of the
datura” (76).
Silko’s prayer for the world to be overrun with purifying plants suggests
that the Earth will be able to heal all that has been done to it, while
further troubling the negative connotations associated with invasive
species. What has been damaged by the onslaught of ecologically
harmful technologies and wasteful land ethics will be remedied in time,
and natural processes will hasten the breakdown of substances as noxious
as plutonium. The datura plant, for example, will take even the most
seemingly irredeemably damaged water, polluted with plutonium, and
absorb the radiation into itself to restore it for the people and animals
need for survival.
The issue of radiation contamination is a major problem in Laguna
and Acoma to this day because of the enormous Jackpile-Paguate uranium
mine that operated there for decades. Silko has dealt with the Jackpile-
Paguate mine in much of her work, including Ceremony, Almanac of
the Dead, and Sacred Water. As Laguna Pueblo governor John Antonio
Sr. related in his 2010 testimony before the House Subcommittee on
Energy & Mineral Resources, “Two surface water tributaries near the
mine, the Rio Moquino, and the Rio San Jose have since tested positive
for radiation contamination. Groundwater is also at risk for radiation
contamination. Because water is scarce in our arid part of New Mexico,
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the contamination of our water resources is devastating to our people
and the entire region” (1). The contamination of local water is clearly
devastating to the Pueblos, whose sovereignty and cultural practices are
clearly threatened by water contamination. As Ortiz has observed, “The
uranium industry has affected the water table and quality irreparably on
Indian Peoples’ land. Not too long ago, the People used the creek for
drinking water but now even fish refuse to survive in it” (284). Silko
suggests through Sacred Water that, ultimately, by participating in the
harmful industries that are polluting the land the people “desecrate only
themselves; the Mother Earth is inviolable” (SW 76). Her stories about
plants healing the Earth’s damaged soils and waterways suggest that
the Earth will always be able to recover and will survive. Silko would,
perhaps, disagree with Ortiz’s particular word choice in the quote above,
and gently note that the harm done to the land is not “irreparable” and
that it may be healed.
Land restoration is critically important to cultural preservation in
the Pueblos. Within the brief space of Sacred Water, Silko draws a broad
web of connections between the spirits of ancestors, the subsistence
of the people, and the reliance of humans and animals on water that
binds together all desert beings. As anthropologist and archaeologist
Kurt Anschuetz concisely states, “Ethnographic observations show that,
despite wide cross-cultural diversity in form, Pueblo people understand
the substance of corn, the souls of humans, and the life force of the
supernatural beings who inhabit the underworld and their cosmos as
being composed of the same essence: water” (Anschuetz 58). Because
of this far-reaching spiritual understanding of water, the radiation
contamination of water clearly poses a threat to Pueblo culture that is
spiritual as well as physical. Furthermore, Silko avoids the pitfalls of
the “ecological Indian” stereotype because her work is anchored in the
specifics of practice and cosmology rather than generalities. Restoring
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