Cultural Endurance in Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Silko is the storyteller who emphasizes how old stories and traditions are reserved through transformation and recreation. The notion tradition carries with it the sense of age; traditions are “old” and generally viewed as being handed down through the generations in some kind of “natural” way. Traditions, moreover, belong to a community rather than an individual in contrast to the way that we often think of a novel as belonging to an individual author. Almanac stands as an epic and eloquent statement of justice denied and reclaimed for the dispossessed of three continents and half a millennium. Despite the depravity of its characters, Almanac is not a gratuitous display of perversion and decadence; on the contrary, the novel elicits moral judgment form its readers. Almanac judges Euro-American culture by its own standards, and that culture falls tragically short. At the same time, Native American values gradually emerge from their entanglement with colonial culture to offer some sense of hope for anyone who loves and respects the earth. It is a moral statement as much as anything else, and it calls us to judge the society that we all have made through greed and ecological apathy.