Selvey 1 Charissa Selvey October 20, 2013 Sustainability Professor Ben Perkins Essay #2 Marmon Silko: The landscape

Throughout various cultures and communities in our history, people of these areas have created an elaborate relationship with their landscape. Humans and animals are connected with the surrounding environment, both depending on each other to survive. The landscape shapes their history and lifestyle, providing nourishment and life for their community. The Pueblo Indians connection to their clan and their surroundings, helping them to learn and keep their clan together. They embraced an idea of community, respecting and embracing each others differences, and working together to utilize and pay homage to the lands that looked after them. Marmon Silkos essay goes into her and her families relationship with their landscape, describing the importance of our connection with our land. She defines the landscape as a place of home and fertility, its presence to the people of the area and how it is used by the people to sustain themselves. The landscape is vastly important to the culture of the pueblo Indians, a sentiment that is shared across the world, with many others experiences with the strange sense of connection with nature around us. The nature of the landscape is seen in Silkos essay as a nurturing one, providing food and resources for humans and being the center for development in their communities. The ties a person or group has with its landscape can shape who they are. Interrelationships in the Pueblo landscape are complex and fragile. The unpredictability of the weather, the aridity and harshness of much of the terrain in the high plateau country explain in large part the relentless attention the ancient Pueblo

Selvey 2 people gave to the sky and the earth around them (Silko 1996 pg 2). The pueblo care about their landscape and what it does to provide and affect them. They are affected by the changing climate, the terrain around them, and create legends and myths centered on the natural beauty and mystery of life around them. Many other cultures react the same way to what they perceive as their landscape, a place that surrounds and provides for them, a place that they interact with for better or worse. With this idea of our interacting with not only the environment or natural world around us, but with all people and ideas that may up said area, our future and life is built into this landscape. The balance of our connection with the landscape is a close and dangerous one. With what it does to help us develop as people, we also affect with what we do to our surroundings and environment. An example in Silkos essay was how the Pueblo Indians attempt to preserve their land and area, and preventing it from being abused. According to Silko (1996). Already a large body of stories has grown up around the subject of what happens to people who disturb or destroy the earth. I was a child when the mining began and the apocalyptic warning stories were being told. And I have lived long enough to begin hearing the stories that verify the earlier warnings (pg 8). The landscape is mined turning a beautiful meadow into an ugly open pit, reflecting the destruction of the peoples land. The negative influences on the landscape can be mourned but are also preserved in memory as a part of the history of their surroundings, just as the meadows are ingrained in memory as well. This is also used in, Flores, a sense of the American west (1998), perhaps what distinguishes, Euro-Americans thought about nature most have the two thousand perception in western Europe of nature as a storehouse of natural resources, a storehouse that stands separate from humans, and which was specifically created for our use (pg 35). As an idea of how we define our landscape, and how our views of it can lead to growth and destruction.

Selvey 3 The landscape consists of a balance of our natural environment and the cultural perspective we take from it. Many have looked farther into this cultural perspective into how we perceive this landscape and embellish from it connections, stories and experiences that every place can experience and interpreted The importance of cliff formations and water holes does not end with hunting stories. As offspring of the Mother Earth, the ancient Pueblo people could not conceive of themselves within a Specific landscape, but location, or place, nearly always plays a central role in the Pueblo oral Narratives (Silko 1996 pg 4). In Silkos essay she adds descriptions of her life growing up torn between the racial divide of her background and her own heritage, and discovers from her family and their stories to try and move on from these differences. Growing up forced to go to a school separate from her home and ostracized from her generation for her mixed-race, Marmon relied on her connection to her environment and the community of her family and friends to guide her. According to Silko (1996) But as soon as I started kindergarten at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school, I began to learn more about the differences between the Laguna Pueblo world and the outside world. It was at school that I learned just how different I looked from my classmates (pg 10). The landscape takes on this form as a center of understanding and preservation. The landscape we live in can also be a great comfort in many ways to us. Not only in the community that we have lived in, providing resources and protection, but as a spiritual guide. Emersons nature essay, goes into detail the connection with nature that can be achieved and the simplicity of the wilds and the inner peace from feeling Intune with your surroundings. This among many other writings points to the landscape being a part of a religious ideology, that we take from the beauty and simplicity of nature to calm and guide us. For the pueblo Indians they celebrate and submerge themselves into the presence of nature and their landscape. The respect of nature reflects on their connection with one another, and in order to preserve their community the generations of Pueblos work to accept everyone

Selvey 4 under the presence of their landscape. In everyday Pueblo life, not much attention was paid to ones physical appearance or clothing. Ceremonial clothing was quite elaborate but was used only for the sacred dances. The traditional Pueblo societies were communal and strictly egalitarian, which means that no matter how well or how poorly one might have dressed, there was no social ladder to fall from(silko 1996 pg 11). Taking from the feeling of harmony and strength that the environment provided them, the people of the Laguna learned from their environment and developed this spiritual connection that contained to be passed down their generations. The landscape can shape and alter the culture and relationships of people. The close connections humans and their environment hold inspires them to greater things and places a sense of kinship within their communities. To Marmon the landscape means an understanding of your natural environment and a give and take relationship that your community reflects. The plants, water, animals and tundra are all vital to humans, and also rely on our own reflection on them. The stories and myths created out of peoples view on nature and their own sense of familiarity have guided Marmon and many others to take a close look at their landscape. People instinctively look towards nature to help them and give them a sense of peace and closeness. The understanding of your place in your landscape can help you find your place in life, an ideology deeply appreciated by the Pueblo Indians

Citations Flores, D. (1998). A sense of the American west. Spirit of place and the value of nature in the American west (pp.31-40) J.S. Sherow (Ed.).University of New Mexico Press. Marmon Silko, L. (1996). Yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit: Essays on Native American life

Today. Interior and exterior landscapes: The Pueblo migration stories (pp. 25-47). New York: Simon and Schuster. Emerson (1844), Nature (pp. 25-26)