Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

traditional ways of sustainably living on the land might therefore
function, as Silko’s stories of redeeming damaged places within Sacred
Water suggest, as a kind of “ritual of cultural renewal” (Norden 103).
Sacred Water thus suggests that human cultures can reverse the negative
environmental impacts that they have created, and that land restoration
is irrevocably tied to the complete wellbeing of the indigenous peoples.
Sacred Water clearly advocates for a hopeful perspective, the hope for
an ecological future that only obliquely comes across through the dark
violence depicted in Almanac. The hopeful thread throughout Almanac,
with its wide scheme of horror, is the continuing possibility of returning
to live by the rhythms of the land and awaiting the fulfillment of ancient
prophecies; Sacred Water is Silko’s personal representation of the rhythms
of the land through images and prose, a vision that she recreates on a
global scale in her later novel, Gardens in the Dunes. Sacred Water suggests
that hope for positive change most certainly exists in the recovery of
indigenous knowledge and understanding the land as sacred, particularly
because the close relationship Pueblo people have with the land is their
greatest asset in guaranteeing resiliency and survival. As Silko has stated,
“Regionalism is the hope. Regionalism—what human beings did with
plants and animals and rivers and one another before you had the nationstates
tramping in it—that’s where the hope is” (Arnold 24). In Sacred
Water, hope is manifested by the water hyacinth actively clearing away
the red algae, the night-blooming datura filtering out radiation, and
the resiliency of desert creatures. Hope for the future is not within the
text represented as a passive dream, but rather as the active processes of
environmental restoration and cultural renewal. The resiliency of the
land and indigenous people is a consistent thread within Silko’s work,
and serves a critical counterpoint to the disturbing cultural realities that
she frequently represents. As Sterling pensively observes at the end of
Almanac, one day, “The Great Plains would again host great herds of
146 | Ely
buffalo and those human beings who knew how to survive on the annual
rainfall” (759). In other words, the Earth will endure but the survival
of humans depends on redeveloping ethical ways of living on the land
alongside other species. Hope, therefore, emerges from the possibility
of actively relearning to closely and communally regard the limits of the
land, and to recover a non-anthropocentric ethics of reciprocity within
the places we inhabit.
Ely | 147