In Ceremony Native American, Leslie Marmon Silko writes of white groups seeking to decimate Pueblo culture and the importance of stories to her people:I will tell you something about stories, [he said]
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.
You don’t have anything
if you don’t have stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can’t stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten.
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
Source: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Viking, 1977) 2.
Image: Leslie Marmon Silko