Studies in American Indian Literatures

winters and its discontents

Winters v. United States is named after a white settler, Henry Winter—the s was a typo (McCool 12). In 1905 the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation experienced its first water shortage. On behalf of the reservation, the Department of Justice sued Winter and another settler named Mose Anderson for irrigating the Milk River upstream of the reservation and contributing to the shortage (United States v. Mose Anderson et al., 1905). The department also named sixteen other irrigators and three irrigation companies (Shurts 69). Once Anderson lost he dropped out and left Winter to appeal, first to the Ninth Circuit and then to the U.S. Supreme Court. The final decision maintained the water rights of the A’aninin (Gros Ventre) and Nakota (Assiniboine) peoples on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. The Court decided that though the white settlers upriver were entitled to the water on their legally owned property, they were not the priority water users: the people of Fort Belknap had priority, a decision that appeared to be a victory for Indigenous users. Though Winters is today sometimes viewed as anomalously favorable to the interests of Indigenous peoples, John Shurts in fact argues that Indian Affairs officials, as well as Justice Department attorneys, often [End Page 28] attempted to protect Indigenous water rights—it was states, settler water users, and their congressional advocates who tried to oppose them (102).

Yet because of the ambiguities in Winters, Indigenous peoples have been fighting for water using the case with limited reprieve, leading to years, money, and water wasted. One of the case’s obscurities stems from the two different codes of U.S. water law. In the eastern states water law is riparian, which is a code borrowed from England that means if a landowner’s property is next to water, the landowner can use the water unless it interferes with a neighbor’s use (Burton 19). Under riparian law, a water right remains regardless of whether it is exercised. Western states, though, borrow Spanish and North African water law, called prior appropriation, known colloquially as “first in time, first in right” (DuMars, O’Leary, and Utton 3). With prior appropriation, senior users have water rights over junior users, who may enjoy any surplus left from senior users (Weaver 85). Unlike riparian law, if a water right under prior appropriation goes unused, the right can be extinguished (Hundley 18; Burton 4): use it or lose it.

But with Winters, the win for Indigenous water rights is unclear, resulting in a “jurisprudential puzzle” (Tarlock 477) that contributes to its narrative qualities. Some of the lack of clarity stems from the fact that the Winters doctrine borrows from both riparian and prior appropriation codes. The right could have been awarded at Fort Belknap under riparian law, as the land belonged to the A’aninin and Nakota peoples along the river. It was never clear whether the Court understood the land along the river as belonging to Indigenous peoples because it has always been their land or whether the Court understood ownership of their land only by way of a reservation owned through title in fee by the government. But water rights through Winters may have instead been issued through prior appropriation: the Court may have been recognizing that A’aninin and Nakota peoples were the senior users of the water in relation to the non-Indigenous users upriver. The Court did not acknowledge other Indigenous peoples who used the water even earlier. Winters never clarified whether Indigenous users at Fort Belknap were considered senior users because their reservation was created in 1888, before the non-Indigenous people upstream began irrigating, or because Indigenous users’ seniority stretched to “time immemorial”—a critical distinction for Indigenous nations whose reservations were created [End Page 29] after non-Indigenous people began using their water. However, unlike prior appropriation, the water rights issued by Winters would not be extinguished if unused (Weaver 86). This unusual mix of riparian and prior appropriation did not matter at Fort Belknap, but most water rights cases require these clarifications. Therefore, future cases concerning Indigenous water rights could be argued in many ways because of this lack of clarity (DuMars, O’Leary, and Utton 16).

Another ambiguity of Winters and ensuing water law in the United States includes bureaucratic tensions. Though the Bureau of Indian Affairs should protect Indigenous water rights, it has a conflict of interest, since it is part of the Department of the Interior. This department is also responsible for the Bureau of Reclamation, whose role is to promote rapid development and water use. Traditionally, the Department of the Interior has privileged its role of promoting western water development projects instead of protecting Indigenous rights (Burton 23). This conflict of interest is reminiscent of Silko’s discovery that Pima County’s environmental protection and development are the same entity (Silko, Turquoise Ledge 202). The Department of the Interior’s duality is not coincidental: it stems from the Newlands Reclamation Act (1902), which, among many other sweeping changes, dictated that a percentage of money made when public land was sold would be set aside for irrigation works that were required by the government to grow large-scale crops and generally “settle” the land (DuMars, O’Leary, and Utton 9).

Ambiguities also exist between federal and state levels of government. The trend in Indigenous water rights is for the federal courts to uphold reserved water rights stemming from Winters but for Congress and state legislatures to ignore or circumvent the law. Because of these cases of loggerheads, Indigenous peoples are often unable to convert their water rights into actual use of water (Burton 23). Since Winters, the government has been paying Indigenous peoples to relinquish their “theoretical” right to water for “real” water (also known as “wet water”) and money (63)—Congress and the Executive Branch consistently claim that non-Indigenous users hold prior appropriation rights, tending “either to ignore the Indian right or to subvert it indirectly” (33). Winters clearly outlined that the doctrine was relevant even if it meant a loss of water for white settlers; however, a “no-injury-to-whites rule was imposed via funding restrictions” (McCool 22). Phyllis Young views this wresting of water rights as genocidal (90). Consequently, as Shurts argues, Winters [End Page 30] was not viewed as a threat by downstream settlers at Fort Belknap: they and others learned ways that Winters could in fact benefit them (34). Winters was an interruption to the otherwise strict application of the prior appropriation rules, and it also reified the power of the federal government to reserve water for federal purposes; settlers used this to their advantage in various ways (166). Shurts notes an absence of Indigenous perspectives on Winters in the early twentieth-century archival record despite the profound effect it had and would have on later generations (10). Because of such dynamics, “effective control over and use of significant amounts of water by western Indians did not follow in the wake of the Winters decision” (7) despite its promise to do so.

Pueblo water presents an even further complication: if Winters is interpreted as a treaty or reserved right, the invocation of the Winters doctrine is tenuous, because the only treaty Pueblo peoples have is between the United States and Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which does not explicitly name Pueblo people or their reserved rights (DuMars, O’Leary, and Utton 27). Almost all other treaties are directly with the United States; Pueblo people, in contrast, hold fee simple title and can make the argument that because Congress issued them a land patent they preserved water rights under previous agreements with Mexico (Britton 64). Every time Pueblo water rights are asserted, how they were first defined by Spain and then by Mexico must be established, because the treaty stated that the United States would maintain whatever was originally promised.⁴ The amount of water in Pueblo territory is also contentious. Pueblo people argue that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo means the amount of water should expand as needs and populations change; a non-Indigenous perspective is that the amount of Pueblo water is inflexibly based on historical use (Colby, Thorson, and Britton 13).

Finally, Winters is a difficult legal narrative upon which to build water rights because its expressed purpose is to support assimilation through agriculture—the original text discusses neither the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples nor their own definitions of water. In Winters, Milk River—which cuts across the colonial border between the United States and Canada—is figured as a life-giving body of water that feeds cattle, crops, and Indian agents and officers (Winters 566). Lewis and Clark named the river Milk after its white silt, which for them was “the color of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonful of milk.” James [End Page 31] Welch’s Winter in the Blood, which is set on the Fort Belknap Reservation, paints the Milk River as instead milky because of factory pollution (6). Winters states that water at Fort Belknap was necessary because its lands, “without irrigation, were practically valueless” (576). The assimilationist thrust of the legal doctrine continues: “The reservation was a part of a very much larger tract which the Indians had the right to occupy and use, and which was adequate for the habits and wants of a nomadic and uncivilized people. It was the policy of the government, it was the desire of the Indians, to change those habits and to become a pastoral and civilized people” (576). The judge’s opinion recognizes an extinguished Indigenous ownership of land that was too big, aligning government policy with Indigenous choice and “desire.”

Winters attempts to dictate what Indigenous peoples’ relationship is to water through legal narrative. The case states that the reservation is “well fitted and adapted for pasturage and the feeding and grazing of stock” (566), as well as “farming and cultivation and the pursuit of agriculture, and [is] productive in the raising thereon of grass, grain, and vegetables” (566); however, Fort Belknap lands are “of dry and arid character, and, in order to make them productive”—the terms of production here dictated by the government—they require water (566). According to Winters, the reservation was conceived as able to “advanc[e] the civilization and improvement of the Indians, and to encourage habits of industry and thrift among them” (567). This could only be accomplished if “all of the waters of the river flow down the channel uninterruptedly and undiminished in quantity and undeteriorated in quality.” The impetus behind this forceful push toward farming is assimilation.

A. Dan Tarlock argues that these ambiguities have played to Indigenous peoples’ favor. For much of the twentieth century, Winters did little to assist Indigenous peoples. This is not to say the doctrine lay dormant: many incorrectly argue that Winters went largely unused until 1963, when in Arizona v. California the promise of water rights in Winters first became quantified (Nuñez and Wallace 36–37). But as Shurts points out, Winters was indeed invoked throughout the first half of the twentieth century (8, 165). However, Winters limited water use to on-reservation, agricultural purposes only (Tarlock 483–86). These restrictions changed in the 1970s for several reasons. For one, tribes were newly able to hire their own lawyers. As well, 1973 saw the publication of the report of the National Water Commission. The five-year commission was an attempt [End Page 32] at a comprehensive federal water strategy with a focus on water quality, finances, and water challenges. Instead of framing Winters as only a right, Tarlock argues that the 1973 commission in some ways saw Winters as an opportunity to right wrongs. Which wrongs are limited: rather than addressing a longer history of settler colonialism, the commission narrowly focused on the failure of Winters to protect Indigenous water rights before 1973.

Tarlock argues that these changes—access to lawyers and the commission’s view of Winters as redress—allowed Indigenous peoples in the 1980s to negotiate for “wet reservation water, green money, and a broad range of water uses better suited to the culture and actual needs of individual reservations” (497). Tarlock attributes the ability of Winters to be of benefit to Indigenous peoples because it was a property, not a human, right (485). He states that despite non-Indigenous attempts at diminishing the power of Winters, “tribes used the threat of enforcement of their Winters rights to broker deals with the western water establishment,” pushing beyond the need of water only for agricultural purposes (475–76). Tarlock’s main argument is that “the creation of ‘hard’ or full property rights can sometimes do more to redress a historical injustice than the creation of constitutional rights” (476). Shurts, too, views Winters as more complicated than the other more overt land grabs of its time, especially considering that Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, which declared that Congress could force allotment, was decided only five years before Winters (5, 123). Silko’s perspective on water—haunted by Winters without directly citing it—complicates views of the case as being either simply beneficial or harmful to Indigenous interests.

silko and the limits of winters

While Winters is lauded as a beneficial right by some legal scholars, the literature of Silko provides an alternative perspective. First, her literature goes far beyond the wrongs of Winters beginning in 1908; much of her work takes a far longer view of settler colonialism. As well, Silko indirectly mentions the failed protection of Winters, despite the high regard with which the case has been viewed. In The Turquoise Ledge Silko describes her shock at the destruction of an arroyo because it stands so close to a national park, which she knows federal water law should protect. But Silko writes of “how easily the wealthy in Pima County can [End Page 33] flout laws intended to protect the desert terrain and groundwater” (170). Rather than working through the law, Silko seeks justice for the destruction of the arroyo through narrative. She tells a story in which she imagines the perpetrators “squashed into the humble desert earth” (171). Silko also demonstrates the failure of Winters in Sacred Water with her description of a neighbor who prevents flooding: “He diverted the water with an intricate network of small stone check dams which he carefully engineered so that the rain water fed small ditches. . . . Later, the U.S. Government engineers spent months, and many thousands of dollars to install giant storm drains which dump the run-off into the river” (42–46). Silko uses the word “engineer” in the context of both the neighbor’s work and the government’s. Silko takes further aim at the Bureau of Reclamation in her critique of the “hundreds of miles of concrete canals costing billions of tax dollars [that] carry salty Colorado River water uphill to Phoenix and most years, to Tucson” (52). Silko, unlike the Bureau of Reclamation’s largely nationalist and utopian rhetoric of water management, explains coolly that “the river must be shared.” As Silko lists major cities in the United States and their lack of water, she states in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit that “maybe the newcomers need another five hundred or even a thousand years to learn how to live with the earth here, but when the water has run out, their time will have run out too” (185). Throughout her work, Silko points to how federal water law will never be able to protect Indigenous water.

Silko more fully develops her critique of federal water law in her fiction. The backstory of Gardens in the Dunes includes the building of a dam, which changes the land but provides jobs for Sister Salt and company. The narrator explains how most of the land on the reservation of Mojave and Chemehuevi peoples “was above the fertile river bottom, on old floodplains impossible to irrigate” because “white farmers claimed the best river bottom land” (206). Sister Salt describes the effect the new dam has on her land:

After the river’s course was diverted, she was saddened to find silver-green carp belly-up, trapped in water holes in the empty river-bed. . . . She felt sad but resentful too, at the workers who channeled the river away from its bed. . . . [T]he Mojave people were terribly upset because their beloved ancestors and dead relatives dwelled down there under the river. . . . Angry tears filled her eyes.

(214) [End Page 34]

This pain is contrasted with a white settler named Edward, who becomes excited by the prospects of cheap water (282). Gardens does not mention Winters and is set nearly contemporaneously with the case’s creation in the early twentieth century. Yet Edward’s profit and Sister Salt’s devastation reveal the failure of federal law to protect Indigenous water.

Silko elaborates on the limits of Winters most strongly in Almanac of the Dead. The villain, Leah Blue, circumvents (or uses?) the law to build a housing development—Venice, Arizona—in the desert, with artificial lakes, fountains, and canals. She builds her development around water, even though it is not naturally occurring, because Leah believed that around water “people felt more confident and carefree” (374). Leah does not actually believe her own rhetoric, referring to her realty plans as “the water gimmick” (374). But Leah’s designs require a way of convincing investors to forget Arizona’s previous water crisis (660). In Leah’s mind, Arizona’s “water problem” is in the past, exaggerated by the media and avoidable if “federal water-management officials had not allowed too much of the Colorado River to escape to Mexico” (660). Besides the humor of Leah protesting water “escaping” past a colonial border, her words reveal what she believes federal water law should protect. Leah purchases the land for the subdivision cheaply because “it had been worthless without water” (750)—language similar to Winters.

Rather than the protection Winters is supposed to offer, Almanac reveals how any barriers that characters may face in commodifying water are in fact smoothed away by the law. Leah refuses to accept reclaimed sewage or Colorado River water and instead opts for water from deep wells (375) and imported glacier water for drinking (660). Leah is in denial that her deep wells will harm existing wells and springs, incredulous as to why “the Indians or the environmentalists had bothered to sue,” because for her, the desert was repulsive and ugly (750). Indeed, Leah’s entire vision for Venice, Arizona, is for people to forget they are in the desert. To build these deep wells, Leah requires the law to work for her, as she knows her critics have identified that her wells may ruin what remains of Arizona’s potable water (660). As her lover, Trigg, points out, Leah faces the resistance of Indigenous peoples and also environmentalists, who could appeal to federal water rights. Leah believes that “Indian tribes or ecologists might try to sue to stop her deep wells later, but by then the deep wells would be flowing” (376). [End Page 35]

Recognizing federal water law’s potential to block her plans, Leah goes to work: she instructs her gangster husband to play golf with Judge Arne to convince him to stop an injunction prohibiting the deep wells. Leah cannot approach Judge Arne directly but requires the formal relationship between her husband and the judge on the golf course—the maintenance of which, not unironically, exacerbates Arizona’s very real water problems. Silko’s inclusion of the golf course as the backdrop for the collusion between Leah’s interests and the law exists amidst a larger history, too. The golf course proposal that precipitated resistance at Kanehsatake (Oka) and Sherman Alexie’s “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” in which the main character seeks justice for those who died protecting land slated for a golf course, are but two examples.⁵ Golf courses are also found on many Indigenous sacred sites and have a long history in the United States of exclusion based on race. Judge Arne is already sympathetic to Leah’s claims, because for him “water for golf courses was top priority because tourism was all the industry Arizona had left” (650).

For Leah’s company to press on, she requires that Judge Arne throw out a cross-suit issued by an Indigenous group in Nevada against a subdivider in Bullhead City. Though Silko provides scant details, it seems the Bullhead City subdivider’s goals are similar to Leah’s, and if the Indigenous suit against the subdivider is thrown out, Leah may begin her wells. She feels safe in her request of her husband, as “no link would ever be made between the outcome of an obscure water-rights suit brought by some Nevada Indians against a subdivider in Bullhead City, and Blue Water Land Development’s applications for deep-water wells in Tucson” (376). The injunction against Leah’s well is denied, thanks to Judge Arne and Leah’s attorneys, who argue that her “deep wells were Arizona’s last hope for precious water. Leah Blue was a visionary, her attorneys said, because her deep wells would pump water even during drought” (660). Her lawyers argue that “since the US banking collapse and the crash of Arizona land prices, Arizona had been losing population,” and Leah’s wells therefore were safe, because water in Arizona was now “plentiful” (749). Though “the environmentalists and the Indians had brought in their own experts” who claimed that “Leah Blue’s deep wells would destroy shallow wells throughout the valley,” her connections to Judge Arne still ensure the injunction’s denial. Leah gets “a kick out of watching Judge Arne pretend to weigh both arguments” (749), [End Page 36] knowing that his careful consideration of Indigenous claims to water and land is contrived. Importantly, Silko writes that Judge Arne has read “a hydrologists’ report in court and knows Arizona’s groundwater is finite” (651) but still permits Leah’s wells. Judge Arne, Leah, her lawyers, and to a lesser extent her husband view water as commodifiable, and they directly profit from its sale, whether through subdivisions, golf courses, or just by continuing to live in Arizona.

Though Silko shows how U.S. water law does not benefit Indigenous peoples, she occasionally includes scenes where those who commodify water are punished. In Gardens in the Dunes, Edward (who stands to profit from the dam) eventually dies, his character vilified for most of the text. Big Candy, who foolishly chases the money earned from the dam’s construction, nearly dies of dehydration (422), not unlike the scene in Almanac in which Alegría almost dies in a desert. In Ceremony, water is not treated as a commodity save for a scene in which Tayo is drinking a beer. Tayo admits a thirst “deep down, somewhere behind his belly, near his heart” that he needs to quench:

[Tayo] looked at the picture of the cascading spring on the bottle. He didn’t know of any springs that big. Did they ever have droughts in Colorado? Maybe Emo was wrong: maybe white people didn’t have everything. Only Indians had droughts. . . . He drank the beer as if it were the tumbling ice-cold stream in the mountain canyon on the beer label.

(56)

Although Tayo is aware that what he is drinking is not what the label purports, he valorizes northern systems of water.⁶ Though Tayo consumes a signifier for water, leading him to associate Indianness with drought and whiteness with water, the text ultimately refutes water’s commodification through both the destroyers’ drought-related compunction and the spiritual water ceremonies in which Tayo partakes, discussed below. The narrator of Ocean Story, too, considers buying oceanfront property in Mexico but abandons the idea, because “someday all the beach front real estate, all the land, would be reclaimed by the ocean,” and even before that, “the tall wave of the indigenous people would reclaim all the land” (74). So throughout much of Silko’s texts, Winters figures in unusual ways wherein Indigenous peoples seldom gain anything from the commodification of water. If they do (like Sister Salt’s profiting from dam workers), the benefit is temporary. [End Page 37]

silko’s narratives of water

This final section argues that Silko not only reveals the limits of federal law but does so by privileging the power of narrative when it comes to representations of water. Silko often writes of law versus literature, revealing the more powerful role of the latter. Many of the failings of law she learned firsthand. Silko’s Auntie taught her about the limits of Marshall’s rulings and the Supreme Court on her porch (Yellow Woman 83). In The Turquoise Ledge, Silko recounts her father’s role as the Laguna tribal treasurer in the 1950s. She remembers her father carrying “piles of manila envelopes” to a hearing in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to defend Laguna claims to millions of acres of land that the federal government had labeled national forest and public land at the turn of the century (25–26). At this trial, elders told stories in the Laguna language, and “together they stood the test in a high court of an alien culture.” Silko remarks that although the case included evidence of “Laguna’s ancient, continuous occupancy” in the form of archaeologists, anthropologists, and manila envelopes, proof also included “the stories and accounts of the old folks.” But as Silko explains, the end result was that “Laguna Pueblo got back none of their precious land” and instead were paid out meagerly. She writes about the same lawsuit in Yellow Woman, naming the elders “expert witnesses” alongside the lawyers and archaeologists. For Silko, “the old folks were going up against the State of New Mexico with only the stories” (18). Despite the failure of the law to protect Pueblo land, what survives are the narratives and testimony of the elders in their own language. Silko ascribes this experience to her “notion that if I could tell the story clearly enough then all that was taken, including the land, might be returned.”

After these early experiences, Silko has continued to encounter the law’s limits and to underscore the power of literature. In her non-fiction, she writes that in university she became an English major but later entered law school because she decided it was “the place to seek justice.” Once there, though, she realized she should have heeded the Laguna Pueblo lessons passed down to her, understanding that “injustice is built into the Anglo-American legal system” (Yellow Woman 19)—words not unlike Weasel Tail’s. Silko left law school, wanting nothing to do “with a barbaric legal system” (20)—a sentiment similar to that espoused by the character Zeta in Almanac of the Dead: “There was not, [End Page 38] and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had clear title” (133). Similarly, in Yellow Woman Silko concludes that because of the corruption and hollowness of U.S. law, “the only way to seek justice was through the power of the stories” (20). Silko sets up law and literature as mutually exclusive in places, stating that in law she “could feel the curriculum suck the life out of [her] imagination and out of [her] writing,” but once she quit law school and resumed writing, the power returned (193). Her encounters continued as Silko grew up: in her collection of letters to and from James Wright, Silko describes how she subsidized her income from writing with “readings and technical writing work I do for some Indian lawyers” (91), and in her latest novella, Ocean Story, the narrator translates legal documents. Silko explains that early in her career she had rented writing space from a lawyer, where she encountered parts of the United States that “no one wants to talk about” (Yellow Woman 141). Silko also recognizes the barbarism of law through story: in law school, Silko’s professor assigned Dickens’s Bleak House, which details a family estate whose settlement becomes so protracted through law that by the end no money remains (19). Law and literature scholars frequently cite Bleak House as a central text of the field (Posner; Dolin, “Bleak House”; Dolin, “Continuing”). But for Silko, Dickens’s novel led her away from law and toward stories.

This push away from law and toward stories appears in Silko’s oeuvre through her Indigenous and nonlegal representations of water. Rather than working from within Winters, she writes of water and its cyclical connections to drought, its beauty, spirituality, genders, and generative properties. Many of Silko’s texts focus on rivers that sustain communities (Gardens 215; Yellow Woman 31). Occasionally, Silko features oceans. In Storyteller Silko offers a prayer to the Pacific—“big as the myth of origin” (179–80). Indigo in Gardens also encounters an ocean that takes her away from her family; for her, “all water was alive, she knew, but this dark salt water was bigger and more powerful than any freshwater” (225). Ocean Story focuses entirely on the ocean of Mexico.

Rather than the ownership of water described in Winters, Silko insists on her characters’ and her own dependence on it, reversing the power inscribed in the legal doctrine. Silko’s own house still depends on [End Page 39] wells “for all its water”—the first sentence of Yellow Woman (13). Silko continues, explaining that “natural springs are crucial sources of water for all life in the high desert and plateau country” (36). Silko describes one water spring as “literally the source and continuance of life for the people in the area” (36). Plainly put, for Silko, “without water there can be no life as we know it, and no turquoise” (Turquoise 229). For Silko, “rain water pools are cherished even now, because long ago in times of drought, the survival of the people depended on the rain water stored in the sandstone pools” (18). Water signals both dependence and interdependence. In Rain Silko states, “The behaviour of one being affects the welfare of all creatures; misbehaviour leads to imbalances and disharmonies, manifested by too little rain or too much.” Interdependence and water also figure into those who came before: throughout many pieces, Silko writes of respecting frogs and toads because they are the children of rain clouds; disrespecting them could trigger floods (Yellow Woman 69). In Rain Silko makes repeated references to ancestors who reemerge in the form of rainclouds. As she explains, “They love us and they bless us when they return as rain clouds.” For Silko, “rainfall is a double blessing: precious moisture and a visit from beloved departed ones” (n.p.). Winters presents water as a substance harnessed by law and its representatives—available to some and not to others; for Silko, everyone and everything instead depends on water.

Unlike Winters, Silko represents water from multiple cultural perspectives. Gardens describes Italian hot springs from the perspective of their current iteration, from a preceding Celtic history, from a capitalist vantage, and from Indigenous dancers (257–58). Indigo also learns the symbolism of Italian water: “[T]he wavy lines symbolized rain; Vs and zigzags and chevrons symbolized river meanders as well as snakes and flocks of waterbirds; goddesses of the rivers transformed themselves to snakes and then waterbirds” (293). Indigo also learns of British understandings of water as she lingers “over books with pictures of gardens with water splashing from fountains and statues and even a long stone wall covered with spouts of gushing water” (180). In Silko’s texts, water is many things to many people. Though Ceremony and countless disasters around the world connect death with uranium and water, Silko offers a preceding history: Sacred Water recounts how the uranium-bearing minerals in Pueblo water were a source of healing for the patients of medicine people (76). She further explains that the Spanish interpreted [End Page 40] petroglyphic snakes as a sign of buried treasure. The snakes were actually created by Pueblo hands to signal the existence of water below—the real treasure (29). Rather than Winters’s monolithic, unicultural declaration of what water is, Silko embeds several cross-cultural understandings of water.

Silko also presents the spirituality of water beyond the Christianizing effects promised in Winters. In Yellow Woman Silko cites a small Paguate spring as operating “on a spiritual level, recalling the original Emergence Place” (36). Through her verse and images in Sacred Water, Silko describes how Pueblo water—the natural springs and lakes—“possess great power,” and “beneath their surfaces lie the entrances to the four worlds below this world” (20). Silko’s handmade prose–poetry–photo essay Rain also considers how a Paguate spring both sustains the people there and “functions on a spiritual level.” In Almanac of the Dead, among competing narratives of water for profit, the fragments from ancient notebooks describe the spirituality and history of water. They detail a twenty-year drought, prompting priests to come and “sprinkle corn pollen and meal and bits of coral and turquoise” (576). In Gardens black rocks simultaneously represent fresh water as well as the Messiah’s visit for Indigo (267). In the Sand Lizard origin story the Messiah and his family escape into a river: “His wife and children stepped into the river first, then the Holy Mother and he followed them; the fierce river currents of muddy water closed around them but they were not swept away. Their shoulders and heads remained above the muddy water, and they moved across the river effortlessly” (35). In Winters water is a colonial tool that, like Christianity and agriculture, is used to civilize; for Silko, water instead holds multiple spiritual purposes.

Spirituality in Ceremony uses the framing narrative of the fifth world and Tayo and T’seh’s participation in water ceremonies. The seemingly extradiegetic poems interwoven throughout Ceremony recount creation narratives that center on drought and water, with one story prophesying that white people will one day cause a drought (136). The story of the Gambler also shows a past in which “the land was drying up” (172). Within the diegesis of Ceremony, characters must also confront dialectical water: drought. Tayo’s friend Emo proclaims that “the Indians’ mother earth” is an “old dried up thing” (25), a “dried-up country” that is “blowing away, every day” (55). Emo’s anger contrasts with the cyclicality of water and drought that the creation stories promise. Drought also [End Page 41] figures into the plot, as Tayo and his uncle Josiah are able to purchase water-hunting cattle cheaply because of a dry spell (74). Tayo explains that Indigenous people “were left with barren land and dry rivers” (204) by destroyers (249). For Tayo, such drought demands a spiritual resolution: “[H]oly men had their ways during the dry spells. People said they climbed the trails to the mountaintops to look west and southwest and to call the clouds and thunder” (93). Rather than a permanent lack of water, drought and thirst are portrayed in Ceremony as parts of a cycle that also includes water. Josiah explains that frogs (“the rain’s children”) are able to hibernate in dry sand for years until rain returns (95). As well, there is a reliance by Pueblo people on the springs that come “from deep within the earth . . . even when the sky was barren and the winds were hot and dusty” (94). Indeed, “even in the driest years nobody could ever remember a time when the spring had dried up” (45). The return of rain, initiated by Tayo’s imitation of the holy men, attracts Spider Woman, frogs, Hummingbird, and dragonflies—the spiritual worlds of Ceremony. Ceremony emphasizes how “wind and dust . . . are part of life too” (46). Water also frames the fifth world in Ceremony, as well as Tayo and T’seh’s healing ceremonies.

But Silko’s scenes of spiritual water are not always mutually exclusive with Christianity. This point is made most forcefully in the short story “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” In it, the family of an elderly sheep farmer prepares for his funeral. At first, two characters uninvolve the local Catholic priest as the community stealthily prepares the farmer’s funeral with candles and medicine bags, cornmeal and pollen. But one community member decides to contact the priest eventually, asking for holy water. Rather than a scene in which Pueblo traditions are eventually written over by Christian ones (which Winters forecasts), the community invites the priest’s participation on their own terms. They require the holy water for Teofilo to ensure “he won’t be thirsty” (5). They also desire the holy water because “the old man could send [the community] big thunderclouds” (4). At first, the priest refuses:

“Why didn’t you tell me he was dead? I could have brought the Last Rites anyway.”

Leon smiled. “It wasn’t necessary, Father.” . . .

“For a Christian burial it was necessary.” [End Page 42]

His voice was distant, and Leon thought that his blue eyes looked tired.

“It’s O.K. Father, we just want him to have plenty of water.”

(6–7)

In this dialogue, Leon and the priest have different understandings of the holy water. For the priest, the holy water and the Christian burial go hand-in-hand; for Leon and the community, the holy water provides water for both Teofilo and themselves. When Leon smilingly tells the priest “it wasn’t necessary,” he is telling the priest that the Last Rites are not necessary for the funeral and that the Last Rites are not necessary for the community to require the holy water. In Silko’s story, water’s competing narratives erupt in this exchange, ending with the negotiation of water’s spirituality on Pueblo terms.

Silko continued this thread thirty-six years later in The Turquoise Ledge. Silko states that San Juan Day, at the end of June, is during the rainy season and is likely a Christian celebration, which she attributes to the fact that “John the Baptist sprinkled water on people” (240). But like Teofilo’s funeral, Silko explains that “long before San Juan, traditional Pueblo and Nahua peoples used to attract the rain by sprinkling precious water on everyone” (241). Silko complicates the history of San Juan Day with Pueblo presence and spiritual connections to water that are not a wholesale rejection of Christian implications but a carefully historicized negotiation. Silko’s nuanced approach is more helpful than the line of argument presented in Winters, which decided that the creation of the Fort Belknap reservation implied the use of the water, because just allotting the land would be nonsensical: “It would be extreme to believe that within a year Congress destroyed the reservation and took from the Indians the consideration of their grant, leaving them a barren waste, took from them the means of continuing their old habits, yet did not leave them the power to change to new ones” (n.p.). Winters in this sense advocates for Indigenous access to water, arguing that the United States would never have created a reservation without also implying access to water; yet it presents “old habits” and “new ones” as mutually exclusive. Silko instead presents methods of adaptation, survivance, and resistance in terms of perspectives on water.

How do Silko and her characters know about water? Many texts feature examples of water knowledge through narrative. Instances include [End Page 43] Silko clipping articles “about rain, about the El Niño weather systems that cause floods in some areas and droughts in others” (Yellow Woman 13). She also describes in both Sacred Water and The Turquoise Ledge water knowledge recorded in rain journals. The practice stems from the San Pablito people, who in times of drought would bring “a small handmade foldout book of amate paper to ask for rain” (Turquoise 246).⁷ Silko describes the history of the rain book, originally written in Nahuatl. When the rain book is written in Spanish, Silko figures that accoutrements are required to “compensate,” as “the Nahuatl words are much more powerful for rainmaking than the Spanish” (246–47). Silko also offers water knowledge in her fiction. Sterling in Almanac reflects on stories passed down to him of his ancestors’ migrations based on water (759). In Gardens water knowledge is imparted by Grandma Fleet, who instructs her granddaughters clearly: “[F]irst thing, go to the spring” (37). Grandma Fleet’s water knowledge continues, offering didactic lessons on “which floodplain terraces were well drained enough to grow sweet black corn and speckled beans. The squashes and melons were water lovers, so they had to be planted in the bowl-shaped area below the big dune where the runoff soaked deep into the sand” (49). Grandma Fleet also explains to her granddaughters that a water spring belongs to its resident snake, who must be respected lest “the precious water disappeared” (38). In Winters the ability to know water begins and ends with the law. It argues that law took away “old” Indigenous relationships to land and water, and it is the law’s responsibility to offer the means by which to convert to “new ones”; for Silko, teaching and learning water are narrative based.

conclusion

As Weasel Tail sees it, “[T]he people didn’t need more lawyers.” Instead, “poetry would set the people free; poetry would speak to the dreams and to the spirits, and the people would understand what they must do” (Almanac 713). Throughout her oeuvre so far, Silko brings her readers to think about water in ways that actively push against Winters, despite how all-encompassing the legal narrative may claim to be. Rather than recentering Winters, my focus here is to show Silko’s life-long challenges to its supremacy and power. While this article focuses on water, Indigenous water rights are more largely related to land and minerals as well. [End Page 44] Today, Indigenous nations are fighting with non-Indigenous private and governmental representatives for water in administrative hearings and courtrooms across Turtle Island. As Indigenous peoples fight against boil advisories and water contamination and debate golf courses and fracking, pipelines, and dams, the zoomed-out scope of water narratives continues. Currently, settlement among users of a particular water source has been offered as a stronger solution to acquiring “wet water” than litigation (Nuñez and Wallace 35), particularly in Pueblo territories: the Zuni Indian Tribe Water Rights Settlement (2003) and the Taos Pueblo Water Rights Settlement (2008) are two recent examples. But as Austin Nuñez and Mary G. Wallace argue, settlements might not always encompass all dimensions of a water right, which may also include quantity, management, economic aspects, and spiritual qualities (36). Winters hinges upon distinctions of riparian law, prior appropriation, and Indigenous rights, all the while commodifying water; Silko’s texts view drought as cyclically connected to water, which is spiritual and uncommodifiable, resisting and rewriting the legal narrative. While the legal narratives may be held up as avenues offering “real” change concerning water, Silko’s writing reveals otherwise in promoting the power of stories to create deeper understandings of the possibilities of justice.