Digital Tribalography

There there is so notable partly because it validates and documents the urban indian experience and complicates the back-to-the-land narratives of such classics as Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee): “Being Indian,” the narrator says, “has never been about returning to the land” (Orange 11). In place of this conventional narrative, There There embraces and authenticates the experience of Natives who have grown up in the city and are more at home there than in the countryside. Two key terms here need clarification already. First, we write “countryside” rather than “community” because Orange challenges the conventional opposition between urban Indians and those from “community,” as though community were the sole privilege of rural existence. In fact, Orange's novel locates community—all Native community—in the contemporary interpenetration of the urban and the technological. Second, for Orange the term urban doesn't just refer to those living in the city. Instead, the urban is a function of the contemporary world, in which access to the Internet effaces the place-based spatial logics that have long aligned authenticity with location in traditional—inevitably rural—settings: “Plenty of us are urban now. If not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet” (9). The urban is connectedness in the midst of displacement, of the placelessness of online existence. Those who live in cities are ipso facto urban; those who do not are virtually urban, regardless of locale.

St. Joseph Mission Church, Laguna Pueblo

The chapter opens with a detailed presentation of the church and altar, as described by Laguna informants. Also discussed in this context are the dipping of St. Joseph images in the San José River to bring rain, and Laguna’s request for a Franciscan mission around 1700. The experience of visiting the midnight mass and native dances on Christmas Eve is then described, with supporting observations from historical sources, and is followed by similar, detailed exposition of the annual September 19 feast-day events. Canes of power and the loss of one of these at Laguna are also discussed. The bulk of the chapter treats parallel religions—the simultaneity but (usually) separateness of native religion and Catholicism at Laguna. The chapter concludes with presentation of the factionalism and emigration that resulted when Laguna was divided by competition between Catholics and Presbyterians. A visiting guide is included.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Photo-Narratives

This chapter explores Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s less discussed works: the photo-texts Storyteller and Sacred Water. The chapter shows how rather than using images to illustrate or explain the text, Silko uses uncaptioned, floating images to create a “field of vision for the reading of the text,” thus emphasizing structurally a Pueblo sense of cyclical time. Pueblo identity, Silko insists, is defined by a long historical connection to place. She reveals how human relationships with land, plants, and animals link past, present, and future into a web of interdependence, highlighting her notion of an ecocentric, rather than homocentric, subjectivity.

Uranium mobility and accumulation along the Rio Paguate, Jackpile Mine in Laguna Pueblo, NM

The dissolution of U-bearing minerals such as coffinite (USiO4) detected in mine wastes (300 to 9000 mg kg−1U) exposed to surface oxidizing conditions can cause the release of U to the Rio Paguate, NM during hydrologic events.