The Return to Mexico
The Return to Mexico
Gerald Vizenor and Leslie Marmon Silko at the Quincentennial
This chapter examines the works of first-generation renaissance writers Gerald Vizenor and Leslie Marmon Silko to address how their shared visions of indigenous Mexico constitute a point of convergence. The publication of Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead enabled the Greater Indian Territory to make a dramatic return to American Indian literature in 1991 and to expand into Canada, the Carribbean, and Central and South America. Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus is a narrative of migration and the creation of a new, sovereign Anishinabe tribal nation with significant Mayan origins; while in Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, the Mayans play a central role in the emergent pan-North American indigenous rather than tribal nation-specific revolutionary movement.
Keywords: Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, indigenous Mexico, The Heirs of Columbus, Almanac of the Dead, Greater Indian Territory, American Indian literature, Mayan origins
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