Native American Culture: The European Influence

One theme that rings throughout many of Leslie Marmon Silko’s writings in the book ‘Storyteller’ is the Pueblo relationship with the White Man, their ability/inability to comply with each other, and the destructiveness of contact between cultures. Throughout the book, it is made known that the European presence in American Indian culture is real.
The first thing one can notice when flipping through this book is that it is loaded with photographs. These photographs give visualizations of the influence the Europeans have had on the lifestyle of the native people. Unlike what one might picture, most people in these photographs are not covered in traditional Indian clothing. They wear bowties, blue jeans, shiny shoes, and button-down shirts tucked into their pants. Some of them wear glasses and some wear wide brimmed hats. They pose for family photos, they pose in front of automobiles, and they pose with complex gadgets like cameras and firearms.

In the introduction to this book, Silko is sure to make the reader aware of the white man’s system to force the assimilation of the Indians. She states that “in the early twentieth century the Pueblo men and boys who were caught participating in the religious activities of the Kiva were arrested and imprisoned by the authorities. (xxiii)” The lack of male presence caused severe hardship for families and many of the very young and the elderly died of starvation. This severely affected their ability to maintain their cultural traditions. As the suppression of Pueblo religious practices increased. Silko’s grandmother did not teach her the Laguna language with the intentions of sparing her the suffering of religious persecution-.
Storyteller, the article that this book is named for, gives the reader a look at the White Man’s attempt to distance the Indians from their native culture at a young age. The children attended a Government school where they were whipped for speaking in their native tongue. The girls who had attended the Government school adopted the American fashion, washing and curling their hair at night. After all those years away at school, some Eskimos even forgot how to live their old lives. They became so accustomed to the lifestyle and luxuries of the whites, such as running water and electric lights that they chose not to return to their village (Silko 19-21).

In many of the stories she tells, the use of alcohol among the Indians is a prevalent issue, such as in Tony’s Story, where a character named Leon receives a punch in the face from a white police officer that sends him to the emergency room. He was intoxicated at the time. There is a poem about Laguna Fiesta where the illegal possession of alcohol generates an outbreak of fights with the cops and leads to many arrests (Silko 232-233). Lullaby features an emotionally distant husband with a dreadful dependence on alcohol. American Indians suffer from alcoholism at rates far higher than those of other ethnic groups and this wasn’t a problem until they began trading furs and skins with the Europeans and colonists for large quantities of strong liquor and wine.
Silko mentions in Lullaby, the toll it took on Indian families when white settlers arrived in Oklahoma, driving Indians away to places like Arizona and New Mexico where they “might live without harassment” (49). An Indian’s homeland is vital to their narrative stories. Silko states in the Introduction of this book that “Stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing a specific geographical location where a story took place. Often the turning point in the story depended upon a peculiarity or special quality of a rock or tree, found only at that place (xx).
While most stories paint a negative connection between the two groups, Silko reveals in the short story The Man to Send Rainclouds (174) that their meetings were not always hostile, and that while they do not understand or agree upon certain things, they sometimes shared a mutual respect.
When Leon approached Father Paul, a Catholic Priest, he demonstrated his willingness to unite his own traditions with the funeral customs of the conflicting culture. In addition to the Indian’s readiness to embrace the belief system of the rival team, Father Paul is conflicted about what the “good Christian thing to do” is. Should he support the Indian’s belief even though it goes against his own, or it unethical to refuse? In the end, Father Paul grants the request of Leon and attends the funeral ceremony with his holy water. This particular story reveals a slightly different spin on the relationships between the Indian people and the White Christians.
Despite the White Man’s attempt to snuff out the language and traditions of the indigenous people, the Laguna Pueblos have successfully maintained much of their culture in the face of opposition and suppression. Perhaps this can be credited to the flexibility of the Pueblo people and their ability to adapt to the new order of things. Their relationship with the White Man was not all good and not all bad, but as Silko makes clear, it certainly caused a cultural shift.

Works Cited
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. Reprint Edition. New York: Penguin Books. 2012. Print.