Imaginary Boundaries

"These most precious sacred figures had been stolen. The museum of the Laboratory of Anthropology had received and was in the possession of stolen property. The white man's own laws said this. Not even an innocent buyer got title of ownership to stolen property" (Silko 33).

In Almanac of the Dead, Silko plays on the theme of people of European descent being nationalist thieves, stealing the land of the Americas from its native people and struggling (and failing) to live in harmony with the earth: "From their flimsy attachments to one another and their children to their abandonment of the land where they had been born... The ancestors had had called Europeans "the orphan people"... They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them" (258). White characters in Almanac have a propensity for insane drug addiction, murder, theft, and kidnapping. Seese's narrative is tainted and confused by her often-drug-induced state, as the reader is swept through her emotional responses without clear explanation or even a rational thought.

So what is Silko trying to say? It seems pretty clear that she is pointing out that through Europeans' attempt to create nations and draw up borders, dividing the earth that in fact belongs to all, they have lost any semblance of spiritual connection to the earth, and in turn, have fragmented the indigenous identity and forfeited anyone's chance of finding inner-peace. The fact of the matter is, as Silko and the Native American people see it, there are no national boundaries, only those that we create ourselves. Indeed, as Anderson points out with a quote by Hugh Seton-Waton, "Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no 'scientific definition' of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists" (Anderson 3).

Why does this phenomenon exist, though? Anderson goes on to cite Tom Nairn in order to explain that nationalistic inclinations are built, though pathologically so, into the societal-developmental mentality of humans, "as inescapable as neurosis in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world and largely incurable" (5). As humans flounder in the sea of doubt and ambiguity of locating ourselves, cognitively mapping our location in the universe, we naturally fall back on these somewhat primal habits of dividing and separating, creating borders and grouping into "nations."