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“Flooding Waters Were a Cautious Gift”: Indigenous Knowledge and Environmental Memory in Leslie Marmon Silko’s and Ofelia Zepeda’s Storied Landscapes

Anna M. Brígido-Corachán

Abstract

The historical, agri/cultural, and spiritual relevance of water in the U.S. Southwest has been well-documented through pictographs, oral narratives, photographs, literary works, and scientific studies crafted by Indigenous and settler cultures. This article focuses on human/water relations, as recorded by Native American writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Ofelia Zepeda. Their stories and poems often center around rivers, irrigation ditches, arroyos, clouds, or the ocean, and nurture respectful connections to place. I specifically examine Leslie Marmon Silko’s non-fiction books Sacred Water (1993) and The Turquoise Ledge (2010) in conversation with Ofelia Zepeda’s biographical and ceremonial poems in Ocean Power. Poems from the Desert (1995), arguing that these deeply relational books activate Indigenous environmental memories and place-based consciousness. They are poetic examples of Native Science that contribute valuable knowledge about water in the era of climate change. They also encourage us to renew broken pacts with water and to honor traditional systems of interdependence with the earth through caring and sustainable bonds. Building on ideas from Native/First Nations intellectuals Simon Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Gregory Cajete, Glen Coulthard, and LeAnne Simpson on place-based thought, relationality, and Native Science, I discuss some of the tenets of Pueblo and Tohono O’odham water practices, where water is understood as a gift—a key resource for survival—but also as kin and as sacred responsibility. As a European scholar living in a water-centered landscape, I hope to identify ways in which the memorial, ceremonial, and scientific knowledge embedded in these literary works can help us confront our current planetary crisis.

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1. Introduction

In the inclusive view of natural democracy, humans are related and interdependent with plants, animals, stories, water, clouds, and everything else. Thus, it becomes in every sense abnormal to view the world as dead matter, private property, commodities, or commercial resources.
(Gregory Cajete, Native Science)

1This article delves into human/water relations in the U.S. Southwest, as recorded by Indigenous writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Ofelia Zepeda. I examine their ecopoetic narratives as literary pieces, as poignant examples of Native Science, and as forms of memorial writing that offer place-based reflections and historically-grounded advice on water in the era of climate change. But first, let me begin with a disclaimer: I am no geographer, water engineer, or historian, and my knowledge of water irrigation and management systems in the American Southwest is, at best, limited. As a European scholar who has been reading and studying Native American literature and history for over twenty years, I can relate to some of these writers’ preoccupations. I also come from a region where water is becoming scarce and precious, where cyclical droughts have urged us to develop practical ways to gather water from rain and from underground springs for at least two millennia. Torrential rain and flash floods often follow these dry periods, and their effects can be destructive for both human and other-than-human beings. This is a particularly pressing matter in landscapes that have been industrialized and overpopulated—like the flooded areas around the city of Tucson, in Arizona, or the city of Valencia, Spain, where I live, and where 229 people lost their lives in October 2024, taken by water.

2Water often shows its mighty power taking the lives of human and other-than-human beings in an instant. Countless areas and communities around the world are seriously threatened by climate vulnerability today. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 9.8 million people were displaced in 2023 because of floods (UNHCR). Understanding water’s behavior in these regions is crucial to the survival of human and other-than-human communities, and this is an issue that should not only concern geographers, weather forecasters, urban planners, or engineers. Traditional environmental knowledge has also been recorded and passed down orally within the community of water users and citizens—embedded in stories and practices in areas like Valencia and the U.S. Southwest, where animal, plant, or wind behavior is also carefully appraised as evidence of water’s potential actions.

  • 1 Acequia comes from the Arab word “as-s­āqiya”; it describes an irrigation channel built to grow tre (...)

3Ancient cisterns, rain-sparked arroyos, and mountain springs that pour their water into our millenary acequias are multipurposed sites in the area where I grew up, a rural town south of Valencia. As kids we bathed in these wide and shallow irrigation ditches with pleasure; we witnessed the heavy lifting of metal doors that temporarily release the water into the family orchards, when the drying earth demanded it. We also walked into and out of the forest through torrenteras or gullies—mountain trails created by rain water, marking its natural habitat. The acequias are still widely used in the area. They divert water from springs and rivers, but also function as paths through private lands, enabled by very old laws that grant everyone a right of way. Cistern, arroyo, and acequia are words that have a Latin or Arab origin and were most likely brought to the American Southwest by the Spanish invaders in the colonial period.1 Produced by the erosion of summer storms and flashfloods, intermittent arroyos are very common in the Southwest and precede human settlements in the area.

  • 2 Ann Marshall claims that elites from the larger villages may have managed these canals through “cen (...)
  • 3 In the city of Valencia, the Tribunal de las Aguas or Water Court still meets every Thursday mornin (...)
  • 4 Surrounding the city of Valencia, we can still find eight acequias madre or larger “mother canals,” (...)

4Because of the particular aridity of the landscape, Indigenous communities in the Southwest had already developed complex irrigation systems of their own before the Spanish colonizers arrived. During the Classic Pueblo Period (around 1000 AD to 1300 AD), the Anasazi implemented systems of water management such as “check dams and an irrigation ditch more than four miles in length,” while the Hohokam dug irrigation channels stretching 125 miles in the Salt River Valley in the 8th century (Meyer 12). These ditches were “up to thirty feet wide and ten feet deep” and were aimed to reduce water loss (12).2 In the 1400s, Pueblo engineers built reservoirs and terraces where they grew maize, squash, beans, and cotton. Spaniards added metal gates to these existing irrigation structures to control and better preserve running water, and introduced land-based “water rights” so that each family could distribute and use the water in a fair manner (La Farge 18). They also appointed water judges to intervene in local water distribution conflicts: these were known as comisionados, alcaldes or jueces de agua, and remained active until the 19th century (Meyer 64).3 Through the compuertas or small gates, water from underground wells and rain water can be contained and slowed down to facilitate its use for the irrigation of small family plots of land. If the land changes hands, so does the right to the water. The water is intrinsically connected to the land. As Oliver La Farge points out in his book The Mother Ditch, which recounts the history of the Acequia Madre in Santa Fe, “The ditch belongs to all the people and feeds all their crops” (18).4 This is, of course, in theory. In practice, water conflicts soon erupted between the Spanish colonizers and the Indigenous communities in the area.

5According to Michael C. Meyer in his informative volume Water in the Hispanic Southwest, “some of the Hispanic (water) legacy was compatible with the native traditions, some of it was not” (52); these clashing cultures upheld “competing human values” (167). The privatization of land and water was probably non-existent or a “rare exception” in Indigenous territories (49). For the Native communities, water was a “medium of life” which stood up against the colonizers’ obsession with wealth, power, and control (167). Water conflicts were common during the Spanish colonization of the area, where Native communities often found themselves excluded from or underprivileged in water distribution quotas. Water unfairly distributed was probably one of the reasons behind the 1680 Pueblo revolt.

6The historical inequities in water management during the Spanish and Anglo colonization of North America clearly inform the new water wars in the Southwest. Many Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko (in Almanac of the Dead) or Linda Hogan (in Solar Storms), have fictionally examined these conflicts over water in the U.S./Mexico or the U.S./Canadian borderlands (Griffith; Brígido-Corachán “Native Waterscapes”). In this article I aim to contribute further insights on human/water relations and conflicts by examining specific examples of environmental memory and water practice, embedded in Indigenous poetic memoirs. I specifically focus on Leslie Marmon Silko’s non-fiction books Sacred Water (1993) and The Turquoise Ledge (2010), in conversation with Ofelia Zepeda’s biographical and ceremonial poems in her volume Ocean Power. Poems from the Desert (1995). These works offer historically-grounded advice on water as an other-than-human being and are, therefore, a form of memorial and scientific writing. Aiming to renew ancient pacts with water in the era of climate disaster, they ultimately argue that humans must honor traditional systems of interdependence with the earth establishing more caring and respectful bonds. This is one of the key tenets of Native Science.

7Pueblo intellectual Gregory Cajete defines Native Science as a wide spectrum of Indigenous methods deployed to learn about and comprehend the nature of life and our relations and responsibilities within it (2):

Native science is based on the perception gained from using the entire body of our senses in direct participation with the natural world .… [It] can include metaphysics and philosophy; art and architecture, practical technologies and agriculture; and ritual and ceremony practiced by Indigenous peoples past and present .… Native science extends to include spirituality, community, creativity, and technologies that sustain environments and support essential aspects of human life. (2-3)

8For Cajete, these relationships vary across Native cultures but always have a participative and creative quality that cannot be overlooked. Living in such intimate and inseparable relationship with the world also entails that these bonds must be nurtured and honored.

9Leslie Marmon Silko’s and Ofelia Zepeda’s writings attest to the intimate human/water relations developed within their communities of origin—Laguna Pueblo and Tohono O’odham respectively—through vivid depictions of their relatives’ and neighbors’ agricultural practices and water memories. These authors’ rich ecopoetics often center around acequias, natural cisterns, arroyos, or the ocean, and such places become a lieu de mémoire or realm of memory in their stories—an active repository of traditional environmental practice.

10In the well-known essay “Between Memory and History,” Pierre Nora describes the lieux de mémoire often inscribed in the landscape, as “moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” (12). For Nora, “memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects” (9), and it can be stirred up through the place-based poetry that conjures these environmental realms and gives them new life and significance. Native American intellectuals like Gregory Cajete and N. Scott Momaday have long argued that the Indigenous ecological ethics is expressed through continuous contact with the physical world around us and with the land itself (Momaday 47; Cajete 6). In all his non-fiction works from The Way to Rainy Mountain to his collection of essays The Man Made of Words, Momaday builds on this key idea:

None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. We have sooner or later come to terms with the world around us—and I mean especially the physical world, not only as it is revealed to us immediately, through our senses, but also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and of years. (Man Made of Words 47)

11For Cajete, Indigenous relationships with natural entities have been established throughout history “with regard to certain places and to the earth as a whole” (4). Native stories are repositories of these ongoing gestures, images, and environmental practices; they are memory sites that need to be preserved and actively listened to.

12Providing detailed accounts of the family routines that taught them how to meaningfully see and engage land, rain, rock, or cloud, Leslie Marmon Silko and Ofelia Zepeda become practitioners of Native science. Their writing is not just a form of poetry or memoir—it is a memorial site that preserves and amplifies their communities’ traditional knowledge on water, their relational consciousness. Indigenous narratives and poems provide alternative ways to engage water that are more respectful and reciprocal—where water stands as an other-than-human agent rather than a commodity to be used or traded, a being that can be helpful and protective but also whimsical, angry, and destructive.

13A common feature in Silko’s and Zepeda’s ecopoetic writing is that water, like all other-than-human beings, has a voice and lessons to impart. We must listen to this voice and turn these lessons into responsible actions. Because we are all dependent on water as a life source, we must be grateful. In a large part of Indigenous North America, water is “a living entity with agency or spirit”—one towards whom we have a “sacred responsibility” (Wilson and Inkster 1-2). Indigenous understandings of water force us to “think through water as more than a commodity in a capitalist system,” to consider the “multiplicity of values that surround water” and to regard water as one of our relations or relatives (Neville and Coulthard 1-2). This idea lies at the core of the Standing Rock Sioux’s globally recognized phrase “Mni wiconi” or “water is life.” First Nations scholars Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson refer to this relational web as grounded normativity: an ethical framework that “reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. [It] teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitative manner” (254). In her most recent work, Theory of Water, Simpson argues that nisi, water, “asks us to embrace uncertainty, multiplicity, adaptation, iteration and decentralization, as forces that create the conditions for life to emerge and continue” (13). In her view, reframing our relationship with water can become a valuable methodology to practice love and solidarity with the earth.

14In the following sections I look at Silko’s and Zepeda’s place-based narratives and poems as repositories of memory, water praxis, and Native science. For these authors, writing becomes a memorial act, a way to activate personal reminiscences and traditional environmental practices, a ceremonial method to engage climate vulnerability and our own vulnerabilities in the web of interdependence. Pueblo and Tohono O’odham communities believe that water is a gift—a key resource for survival. It is also our kin and shared responsibility. We must therefore recognize and value the practical knowledge embedded in Indigenous literary works, for these stories and intimate experiences of water can intersect with and transform water relations in other parts of the world, inviting us to reconsider our relationship to water, and inspiring us to rediscover or build our own sustainable traditions.

2. The Language of Water in the Indigenous Southwest

15According to Leanne Simpson, “Indigenist thinkers have advocated for the recovery and promotion of traditional Indigenous Knowledge (IK) systems as an important process in decolonizing Indigenous nations and their relationships with settler governments, whether those strategies are applied to political and legal systems, governance, health and wellness, education or the environment” (“Anticolonial” 373). Recovering, actualizing, and invigorating traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) is a key drive of many Native American texts. TEK is often discussed in the field of global environmental politics and in the United Nations’ forums on biodiversity, environmental justice, sustainability, and others since the turn of the century (Simpson “Anticolonial” 373). But the spiritual dimension of this knowledge challenges core Western beliefs that associate sacred rocks or talking animals with animism, superstition, or folklore. Conversely, in Native science, human/water relations are examined at the crossroads of fields like environmentalism, technology, spirituality, and artistic creativity—realms of knowledge that, in the West, are seen as separate (Cajete 2-3). Indigenous communities do not always approve of Western-led discussions on the environment, which often lead to skewed applications and appropriations of TEK. As Simpson explains, appropriating traditional Indigenous knowledge without taking into account Indigenous territorial management and sovereignty is yet another form of “intellectual colonialism” (“Anticolonial” 374).

  • 5 See also Lawson’s, Round’s, and Černý’s linguistic analyses of rain and ceremony in Zepeda’s poetry

16Discussing settler colonialist strategies that favor extractive industries, mass-agriculture, and the commodification of water as a resource, Neville and Coulthard remind us that Indigenous epistemologies see water as a sacred, living being challenging human control: “Water flows through across aquatic and terrestrial systems, within and through bodies, and occupies transitional and liminal zones at multiple edges” (4-5). Native cultures have also used water to grow crops and feed their people but they respected its power. In Native Science, Gregory Cajete describes the skilled Hohokam technicians who built canals, pipelines, dams, and aqueducts, carefully valving the flow of the water through “closely-woven mats” (191). This knowledge was passed down orally from generation to generation and their practices are viewed today as examples of sustainability preserved through agricultural and ceremonial practice (189). These traditions are more vivid in Native languages which—with their “active verb-based process of ‘talking the land,’ that is, naming its places, singing its virtues, and telling its stories”—are better equipped to express the interconnections of a “living world in perpetual creative motion” (184). Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power includes several poems on clouds written in the Tohono O’odham language. They echo the movements, sounds, and rhetorical constructions of the traditional songs in cloud-pulling ceremonies to bring rain (Zepeda, “Autobiography” 414).5 Zepeda explains that there are various ways to refer to clouds in O’odham. These names identify them with remarkable precision, recognizing their agency and will. Some clouds are called “the ones that just ruined themselves” because they failed to bring rain, while others are known as those who “just lied to us,” because they tricked humans through their own language of colors and shapes (Ocean Power 2).

17In other poems such as the bilingual composition “Cewagĭ,” clouds are represented as willful other-than-human beings whose actions are shaped by the wind and have resonance over both humans and the earth itself (Ocean Power 26). Through repetition and alliteration, Zepeda incorporates the nurturing, “place-based language of intimacy and respect” that articulates traditional Tohono O’odham rain ceremonies (Brígido-Corachán, “Relational Bodies” 156).

18In the opening poem, “Pulling Down the Clouds,” inspired by an O’odham traditional basket weaver and singer, the poet

dreams of distant noise disturbing his sleep,
the smell of dirt, wet, for the first time in what seems like months.
The change in the molecules is sudden,
They enter the nasal cavity. (Ocean Power 9)

19Zepeda highlights the physical and spiritual bond that is established between the human body and the water molecules as they connect and transform one another. These intimate forms of relatedness lay at the center of O’odham water practices, which draw attention to water’s material, spiritual, sensorial, and creative expression. Zepeda renders this relation through images of smell, sound, and touch triggered by her own memory and those of other O’odham who still perform these ceremonies, where the harvesting of the saguaro fruit aims to bring summer rain and fix the earth (“Autobiography” 410).

20Water is central to the Indigenous historical experience and mapping of the land in Arizona. We can see the relevance of water in many Indigenous place-names like Bacum (from the Yaqui expression “Bachum” or “where the water comes out”), Pima Pitiquim (from Pima’s Pitic or “where the rivers come together”), or Bac (Wa:k), which designates water in several Uto-Aztecan languages (Meyer 75). In “Proclamation,” published in her poetry collection Where Clouds are Formed, Zepeda refers to the embodied history contained in Indigenous languages when she describes the Catholic Mission of San Xavier del Bac as “the stories of water memories of this desert” (43). For her, “Cuk Ṣon is a story” while “Tucson is a linguistic alternative” that fails to honor the forgotten languages, footsteps, rocks, the “sediment older than life itself,” the “real desert people who lift their faces / upward with the first signs of moisture” (43-44). Native science seeks to awaken “the inner sensibilities of humans, or the inner ear, which has the subtle voice of nature” (Cajete 73). Translating this experience from Tohono O’odham into the English language is certainly a challenge, a limited linguistic alternative, as Zepeda points out.

21Another language challenge is the sentence that appears singled out in Chapter 39 of Leslie Marmon Silko’s memoir, The Turquoise Ledge: “Oh here comes the light gray foggy rain shimmering across the hilltops in the breeze” (217). Framed by drawings of a snake and a spider, and presented as a single line of verse within a predominantly narrative text, water emerges as an active being with transformative power over the land. Its movement relies on an other-than human being or earthly kin: the wind. In the English language, this relational perspective on water is conveyed through a joyful anticipation of rainclouds, the use of adjectival accumulation, sound effects, and an uninterrupted flow of words. While the intimacy and intricate connections present in Zepeda’s language are necessarily absent in Silko’s line of verse, the conception of water as sacred gift and its sensorial power resonates in both languages.

22Silko explicitly mentions Zepeda’s Where Clouds are Formed, and includes some verses from Zepeda’s poem “Music Mountains” in The Turquoise Ledge. Although originally from Laguna Pueblo, Leslie Marmon Silko has lived in the Tucson Mountains for over thirty years and fully appreciates the O’odham language, its relational epistemology and traditions, the familiar names it bestows to each of the peaks surrounding Tucson. These mountains only listen to us “if we come with melody, rhythm/ pitch and harmony,” “in songs, rhythmic speeches, orations, and prayers” (Zepeda, Where Clouds 30). In her memoir, Silko also recalls Zepeda’s poem “The Place Where Clouds Are Formed” and, inspired by Zepeda’s relational descriptions, she listens to the sounds of the mountains calling and observes the gathering of rain clouds with the approaching storm; she “feel[s] the rush of the cool air from deep in the Earth and hear[s] the hum,” while “tendrils of newborn clouds rise into the sky” (The Turquoise Ledge 272-273). Silko’s environmental observations and engaged walks in The Turquoise Ledge are a form of Native Science (Brígido-Corachán, “Movement” 14). Her stories record and amplify “the ethical frameworks provided by Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge relating to the sustainable governance of people, lands, and water” (Neville and Coulthard 4).

3. Historical Memory and Water Praxis in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Non-Fiction Works

23In his poem “I tell You Know” published in A Good Journey, Simon Ortiz describes the ditches in Acoma Pueblo that were built by the Anasazi, in the following manner:

You can see that canal that runs
from that gathering of cottonwoods
and then turns to the south
by Faustin’s field, that canal
was dug by the first people
who came down from the Old Place.
It was dug then. (148)

24The grandfather directs our sight to the canal and traces its movement through the territory. He highlights the material and cultural purpose of the irrigation ditch: it waters the cottonwoods and Faustin’s field, it helps trees and vegetables grow, but it also serves a fundamental function: it maps the Acoma territory. The canal becomes a powerful manifestation of living history, it precedes colonization, intimately connecting Acoma communities to the land. It preserves sustainable water traditions and reinforces territorial sovereignty.

  • 6 Earth and text are, in fact, intimately intertwined in Sacred Water, since the first hand-made edit (...)
  • 7 Water also played a central part in the foundation and naming of Laguna village. Laguna is a Spanis (...)

25In Leslie Marmon Silko’s photo-poetic narrative Sacred Water, Laguna Pueblo irrigation ditches are also prominently featured. Published in 1993, Sacred Water combines tribal and personal stories with Silko’s own “odd and minimalistic” photographs of the landscape (80).6 Water is the central running theme of the book and it perfectly embodies Gregory Cajete’s definition of Native science in its combination of environmental observation, creative participation, and revitalization of traditional knowledge. The narrative pieces, like all of Silko’s fiction and non-fiction works, “present methods of adaptation, survivance, and resistance in terms of perspectives on water” that she gathers from oral stories, newspaper articles, science books, and from her rain journals (Griffith 43-44). The stories and reminiscences in the book are often paired with images of clouds and water lilies because, in the Keresan tradition, water roots are connected to the four worlds that lay beneath our own. Water is considered a sacred element in Pueblo cosmology. As Silko contends, “natural springs and fresh-water lakes possess great power” (Sacred Water 20). They are entryways to the underworld and the dead are believed to return in the form of rainclouds to protect the people (17).7 Petroglyphs of snakes laid out as visual maps are also used to indicate the location of water springs or rain pools: “The head of the snake glyph points in the direction of the water” (29). Inscribed in the rocks, they stand as lieux de mémoire in the storied landscape—they trigger historical, geographical, and environmental memory.

26Silko’s water knowledge and appreciation is deeply engrained in her family history. Her great grandmother, Marie Anaya, was part of the Water Clan (Sacred Water 15). But Silko’s cross-cultural heritage (Laguna Pueblo, German, and Mexican) also informs some of the practices that she herself identifies as non-sustainable and colonialist. As she reckons in the book: “Laguna village is located on a sandstone hill above the San José River. I grew up in an old house at the foot of the village where the people put Presbyterians and mixed bloods like the Marmons” (37). The house lacked a strong foundation because her great grandfather, a German settler from Ohio, insisted on building a cellar under the adobe structure. This soon brought structural problems that endangered their home in moments of climatic tension. The “walls of sandstone and adobe mortar were unprotected from the flood water” (37) but the irrigation ditches built by one of their neighbors, Felipe Riley, offered a practical solution:

Felipe Riley used to dry farm with the run-
off water from the hillside. 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 leading to
his pumpkin and squash plants, his peach and
apricot trees, and his bid corn field .…
Felipe’s arrangement of stone check dams
was so subtle, and conformed to the natural
contours so well that we never realized how
Felipe had saved our old houses from the
flood water until after Felipe had passed on. (44-45)

27Silko argues that this humble system of canals worked more effectively than the costly drains installed by U.S. Government engineers much later, once Felipe was gone.

Without Felipe’s care, the rocks which formed
the check dams gradually scattered. The run-off
from the village above began to increase until finally,
when I was in college, the cellar at Grandma A’mooh’s
house was flooded as were tribal warehouses located
nearby. (46)

28Felipe’s handmade irrigation ditches evoke childhood memories that activate place-based, relational values and responsibility. These ditches embody traditional ecological knowledge, standing in a stark contrast to the folly of capitalist overdevelopment and greed. Additionally, they trace paths in an unfolding map that bridges the past with Indigenous futurity. The ditches are a form of resurgence—they show us a “way out of colonial thinking by confirming Indigenous lifeways or alternative ways of being in the world” (Simpson, As We Have Always Done 279).

29Later in the book, Silko criticizes the depletion of underground aquifers due to the urban and agricultural overdevelopment in the area around Tucson, Arizona, where she now lives. These concrete canals that bring “salty Colorado River water up-hill to Phoenix, and most years, to Tucson” are worth “billions of tax dollars” (Sacred Water 52). Forcing water far out of its natural course also has negative consequences for urban residents, for a large percentage of water-related infant deaths in overdeveloped Tucson take place in people’s private swimming pools (54). Building new condominiums, power plants, and bridges along rivers which traditionally rise in periods of heavy rain also brings unnecessary damage to human communities that have been lured to the area by fake promises, foolishness, or greed (The Turquoise Ledge 272-273). These aggressive interventions on the territory and its natural water dynamics break the delicate balance that had been historically established by Indigenous dwellers on the lands of the Southwest.

30Sacred Water lists many traditional practices aimed at conserving water, ranging from the natural sandstone basins and rock cisterns that preserve rain water around Laguna (18) to the household water systems that collect rain water from roofs in Ketchikan, Alaska (51). Through Silko’s poetic narrative, we perceive water’s immense power and our utter dependence on it. She examines survival strategies for both humans and the many desert animals that rely on natural pools, such as those Silko has installed at her ranch in Tucson.

31According to Anishinaabe geographer Deborah McGregor, traditional environmental knowledge is “fundamentally about relationships. It considers relationships not only among people, but rather among all our relations, including all living things, the spirit world, our ancestors and those yet to come” (78, my emphasis). In her piece, Silko describes the intimate relationships that other-than-human beings, such as water and plants, weave in the desert. She recounts how a red algae slime invaded her natural water pool, forming a solid material that prevented desert animals from drinking at night. This slime destroyed her water lilies and duck weed, but Silko chose not to use pesticides in the water, avoiding the potential harm or death of the animals reliant on the pool. Instead, she introduced a purifying water plant into the pool’s ecosystem: hyacinths which, in her own words, “digest the worst sort of wastes and contamination: decomposing rodents and dead toads … and even remove lead and cadmium from contaminated water” (Sacred Water 72).

32In The Turquoise Ledge, Silko expands these environmental observations and practices. Walking through the Tucson Mountains around her ranch, where she has now lived for more than thirty years, she pays attention to the rain water cisterns used by the Hohokam people and reminisces about those used by her family in Laguna Pueblo: “The people sought the sandstone formations because pools of rainwater collected in natural basins and cisterns in petrified Jurassic dunes … fossil water, artesian springs cold as ice, seeped and dripped down to form shallow pools” (18). Later in the book, she points out that the cisterns in Old Laguna are “still carefully protected as a blessed place,” for they provide water in periods of little rain and drought (257).

33Part 4 of her memoir, entitled “Turquoise,” is filled with intimate moments in which she interacts with rain as a beloved, sacred kin: she regularly takes her “wool rugs and clothing” and “Guatemalan woven palm leaf sombreros” out in the open so they are washed by the rain as a form of liturgical practice (211). She talks to the clouds and the rain in a direct, poetic manner (222), and conjures up rain ceremonies using some of the Nahuatl words she is learning from a dictionary (246-247). Water stories from Granma Lillie are interspersed with news of hurricanes, O’odham rain chants, and cloud poems penned by Ofelia Zepeda. She also connects the dear turquoise nuggets she gathers in her walks with the ancestors’ knowledge of water across the border and with planetary history. From astronomy books she learns that Star Beings comets brought water to earth millions of years ago (229). And because “water is a key component in the formation of turquoise” (6), the small turquoise stones chart the presence of water through the territory. These stones were also valuable items in the precolonial routes of commerce and exchange across North America: “From Mexico City all the way to Guatemala, the powdered soft turquoise was made into sacred blue green paint to adorn those chosen to be made into ‘jewels’ for Tlaloc, Lord of Rain” (260).

34In her walks, Silko often favors the trail through the big sandy arroyo and explains its significance: arroyos “are ‘rights of way’ for wildlife and humans on foot” (6). Through observations, practice, and care for the land, Silko develops a renewed form of “place-based consciousness,” that is, “a deep awareness of interdependence that results from respectful and participative engagement with a specific territory and its other-than-human inhabitants” (Brígido-Corachán, “Movement” 11). Away from Laguna territory but keeping it alive through her stories, Silko strengthens her relational understanding of water by studying the traditional environmental practices of the Hohokam people, who lived in the Tucson Mountains over 1000 years ago. In different chapters she draws our attention to Hohokam water cisterns in the rocks, the stone grinders they built next to Palo Verde trees, their crystals, and petroglyphs. She follows the arroyos shaped by summer storms and flash floods; she examines the movements of ants covering their palaces with flower petals to protect themselves from the floods. She also challenges the destructive action of a neighbor homesteader who violently removed boulders from the arroyo bed to use them in his ranch. Silko paints Star Being crosses in some of the remaining rocks to scare him off, given the disregard of local authorities after her calls for land protection.

  • 8 See Brígido-Corachán’s “Movement and Place-Based Consciousness” for a more detailed analysis of Sil (...)

35Her movements and actions follow the principles of Native science, which, according to Pueblo philosopher Gregory Cajete, “is based on the perception gained from using the entire body of our senses in direct participation with the natural world” (2). Shifting her/our perception from anthropocentric to Earth-centered paradigms, Silko builds a caring home for her other-than-human neighbors (bees, snakes, flowers, hummingbirds, grasshoppers, macaws, and dogs).8 She also brings together Laguna and Tohono O’odham beliefs and practices to create a sustainable framework that can function as a guide, for this is the ultimate purpose of Laguna stories. Pueblo lessons stressing the centrality of interdependence and respect impregnate Silko’s fiction and non-fiction works, from Ceremony to The Turquoise Ledge. As she argued in her essay “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit,” “the old folks used to tell us kids not to disturb the earth unnecessarily. All things as they were created exist already in harmony with one another as long as we do not disturb them” (Yellow Woman 64).

4. Flash Floods, Irrigation Ditches, and the Power of Community in Ofelia Zepeda’s Poetry

  • 9 Zepeda adds that “[i]t is beyond this border where some of [h]er family stories begin”; her parents (...)

36Ofelia Zepeda’s work as a poet and linguist is rooted in a profound commitment to language, memory, and tradition, as well as to her people and their storied landscapes. In her writing, Zepeda cultivates a respectful and reciprocal relationship with the land that includes other-than-human beings such as animals, rocks, or clouds. She creatively explores and embraces the power of ceremony in today’s world as a form of resistance against settler dominance and colonialist thought. She believes that it is “the work of poetry to gently, or fiercely redirect our interpretations” (Zepeda in Álvarez and Zepeda 417), to help us shift perspective. Often functioning like a ceremony or prayer, Zepeda’s poems conjure up and map the transborder territory of the Tohono O’odham, a community that has lived straddled across two nations, the United States and Mexico, since the mid-19th century.9 The Tohono O’odham “occupied approximately 24,000 square miles of the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona and Norther Mexico” (Marshall 164) and had to adapt to a place with “less than eight inches of [annual] rain” by moving between summer and winter villages (164). Identifying rain patterns and water sources in the area became key place-based knowledge that enabled them to survive in such challenging climate.

37Zepeda was not born in the Tohono O’odham reservation but within a rural migrant community of cotton farmers, along the border near Stanfield, Arizona, during the 1950s. As she explains in her “Autobiography,” “we were rural,” toki ‘oidag c-eḍ ki: or cotton field O’odham; “families like ours were a ‘marked’ group of O’odham because we did not leave the cotton fields after the season was over and return[ed] to the reservation, but instead lived there year-round” (408). They stayed in “housing provided by white ranchers they work[ed] for” but maintained the traditional village relations and regularly used the O’odham language (408-409): “We lived in neighborhood groups of relations. We all knew our relations, grew up playing together and burying our dead together” (409).

38Of Zepeda’s three poetry collections to date, Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert, contains the most poignant expressions of embodied environmental knowledge and relational practice. Seven poems are written fully or partially in the O’odham language, and many pieces center around water. The second poem of the volume, “O’odham Dances,” repeatedly invokes the O’odham expression ‘oig ‘o ‘oig ‘o—an invitation for rain to come, “the first source of water” (Zepeda “Opening Remarks”). All creatures, whether they walk, fly, swim, or crawl, “focus on the moisture” while they dance and celebrate water together, acknowledging their dependence on it (Ocean Power 12). As Kenneth Hada points out, the poem is a beautiful “translation” of traditional Tohono O’odham rain rituals onto English (57).

39In “The Man Who Drowned in the Irrigation Ditch,” Zepeda recalls the labor her family carried out in the cotton fields of Arizona in precarious conditions. The water “held many hidden dangers” (Ocean Power 3) and understanding its natural ways was key. As she herself explains in the Introduction to the book,

During sudden cloudbursts and extended rainfall, the volume of water in irrigation ditches multiplied in minutes. The workers in the fields ran to get across the ditches before the water rose too high or currents ran too swiftly … The ditches held only five feet of water, but the current moved too quickly for anyone to be safe. (3)

40Zepeda argues that “flooding waters were a cautious gift” for these cotton field laborers (3):

For us there was no reservation, no Housing and Urban Development, no tribal support.
We were a people segregated in row houses
all lined up along the roads of our labor. (30)

41The first two stanzas of the poem recall the canal’s recreational qualities—a place where children played and women “sat and dipped their feet” (30). The mother’s constant fear at the father’s potential fall into one of these cement ditches creates a sudden rupture. It was not water itself that was dangerous, but the precarious situation these laborers found themselves in while they were at work. The poet looks at the distant mountains, “a reminder of what the fields once looked like,” and describes the violence with which the water is “pulled from its secret storage place/ beneath the earth’s surface” to saturate the cotton fields (30) for human use and profit. Water’s violent reaction clearly signals that the earth itself is being disturbed.

42The second half of the poem focuses on the summer evening when her father rushed to aid a worker who had fallen into the ditch. He was scared but quickly joined the human response team spontaneously formed to save this neighbor. The response team was made up of friends and neighbors, not rangers or institutional agencies. Laborers know how to act quickly, quicker than the emergency patrol. In the poem, irrigation ditches function as a site of historical and family memory, chronicling the way rural O’odham related to these artificial courses of water, and highlights solidary practices among neighbors. Zepeda remembers the long walk she and her sister took after their mother, in fear it could have been their own father, “his legs … not strong enough to be straddling ditches” (29). The three women carried multipurpose towels in their hands, like other women already standing by the ditch: “to fan themselves/ to wipe sweat, to cover their heads and eyes from the sunlight” (32). The O’odham community reacted in unison as a communal body: the men entered the ditch with shovels, boots, and hoes (32); the women created a soundscape of grief that interconnected one another:

appearing as a single long strand of woman,
emerging.
In cautious unison they walk toward the edge of the ditch.…
Their movement is dreamlike. They peer into the muddy water.
And as if with a shared nervous system, their hands motion the towel each is carrying,
motion it to just above their eyes, covering their faces.
With a single vocal act they release from their depths a hard, deep, mournful wail. (33)

43The poet acknowledges the need to exert prudence and care when engaging water, to measure one’s relation to water and its power in a non-dominating manner. The final verses focus on traditional practices and interdependence, while celebrating the strength of community when it acts together “in cautious unison” (33). Historical memory and human solidarity are more effective than radars, emergency alerts, and governmental support.

44The poem titled “Flood of 1993 and Others” also reflects on the destructive effects of flash floods quickly forming after a period of drought and torrential rains. Divided into nine sections that are dedicated to the old trees, cactus, bear grass, pigs, remains, trails, grasses, boulders, and finally, to the Department of Transportation and Flood Control, the poem describes the devastation suffered by the other-than-human beings, violently reshaped and/or carried away by water during the floods. It is important to note that floods are not, by any means, a new phenomenon in the Southwest, although they are perhaps more intense and frequent as a result of climate change. When the Hohokam left their traditional villages set by the Salt and Gila Rivers in the mid-15th century, it was most likely due to internal conflict and floods which “may have damaged canal systems that supported large numbers of people” (Marshall 151).

45Floods also feature prominently in Tohono O’odham creation stories where Elder Brother and Coyote made people from clay after torrential water washed the original people away (Seiverston 193-194). In Zepeda’s poem, she directs her anger not at the torrential flow of water, which she sees as unavoidable—water’s right and will—but to the Department of Transportation and Flood control, whose telephone is off after 5pm. They fail to rescue the grasses and boulders, the pigs “floating down the river” (Ocean Power 23), the barrel cactus “hanging down in between tree trunks and large branches,” whose screams seem to be inaudible to everyone but the poet (21). The “old trees uprooted” point in a specific direction “as if telling us, the one that did this to us went that way,” demanding justice and responsibility (21). But

the Park Service employees don’t hear them.
Or if they do, they ignore them.
Too busy repairing concrete. (2)

  • 10 See for example the heartbreaking stories on other-than-human beings published by the Tucson Citize (...)

46The poem criticizes the apathy and neglect of the local authorities, more concerned with the park’s picnic tables, or a quick reparation of “concrete.” Restoring human traffic is their obvious priority. Although the Tucson Flood of 1993 had no human casualties, the destruction of the territory can be vividly perceived in any of the historical images and reports.10 In the poem, water claims the life of animals and reshapes mountains. It makes ashes and other ancestral remains flow through O’odham territory, spread in the four directions, or “ma[king] their way into the Gila River” and traveling further through Mexico, onto the warm sands of the Gulf (Ocean Power 23). The point here is clear: we must fully understand and respect the power and agency of water to remap, to retake its historical territory. Knowing the ways of water and acknowledging the earth’s sovereignty rather than intervening on it forcefully, is essential to avoiding its anger. For the O’odham, water is always a gift. One cannot get angered when it claims its old domains. Native communities in North America knew how to avoid flood plains in the springtime and are grateful for the “rich minerals and nutrients” that replenish the earth after a flood (Simpson, Theory of Water 24). Kindness and generosity are necessary elements in the regeneration of ecosystems and this includes the recognition that water keeps the land alive.

  • 11 See Ruth Underhill’s detailed account of this ceremony in her book Singing for Power and Angelica L (...)

47For the Tohono O’odham, both water and salt are sacred beings. Their historical territory extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean and salt is gathered once a year through a pilgrimage that involves walking for days across the Sonoran Desert to the Gulf of California.11 Zepeda’s poem “Ocean Power” recalls this traditional practice. Consisting of three narrative stanzas articulated through repetition and the predominance of the words “we” and “place,” it describes two O’odham men who are being deported from Arizona to Mexico and who encounter the ocean unexpectedly. The Ocean is considered a “deity” (Bahr qtd. in Lawson 192), and they feel unprepared and disrespectful for their visit in such violent circumstances. Water becomes a frightful sight that adds to the conflictive emotions and to the trauma produced by their forced relocation to the other side of the border. They are unable to understand nor express their feelings, which establishes a stark contrast with their driver’s own associations with water, tied to recreation and pleasure.

Words cannot speak your power.
Words cannot speak your beauty.
Grown men with dry fear in their throats
watch the water come closer and closer.
Their driver tells them, “It’s just the ocean,
it won’t get you, watch it, it will roll away again.” (Ocean Power 83)

48Like the wilderness in settler culture, the ocean is described as a powerful but also hostile space “with air too thick and heavy to breathe” (84). These men have lost their ability to communicate with it through language and ceremony and so their fear of deportation is aggravated by the deep awareness of cultural loss. Their people’s pact with water is broken and they feel utterly disrespectful.

We do not belong here,
this place with the sky too endless.
This place with the water too endless.
This place with air too thick and heavy to breathe.
This place with the roll and roar of thunder always playing to your ears.…
We have not put our minds to what it is we want to give to the ocean.
We do not have cornmeal, feathers, nor do we have songs and prayers ready.
We have not thought what gift we will ask from the ocean. (84)

49The men feel like trespassers in a sacred place because they did not follow the old ways in preparation for the encounter; they “have no medicine,” they cannot give anything back (84). Fear of “this place with the sky too endless” “with the water too endless” increases their urgency to reach back through memory, to ensure the possibility of survival and reconnection. If they can’t remember their ceremony they won’t become “song chasers,” “rain makers,” “good runners” (84).

50The significance of the salt-gathering ritual is recreated through symbolism, cultural detail, and repetition (Lawson), and through specific elements of the ceremony such as the dreams that the men wish could be asked from the ocean in the last part of the poem. As Angelica Lawson points out, the annual journey to the ocean established a relational ethic that strengthened “community responsibility and respect for the ocean. The pilgrims making the trek through miles of unforgiving desert were held in high regard and their journey was viewed as a physical sacrifice made to gain spiritual and environmental renewal” (192). The rewards of this journey were the salt and the rain it would bring. The poem makes the reader consider the importance of ritual and ceremony in O’odham interaction with water. To connect with the ocean, one must walk to it in the right way, one must speak its language, one must bring the appropriate gifts. This is part of what the Tohono O’odham call hindag, embracing a traditional way of life or path that strengthens their cultural identity: “a way of life inclusive of terms such as culture, heritage, history, values, traditions, customs, beliefs, and language” (Seiverston 242).

5. Final Lessons

51Zepeda’s maternal family comes from a small village in Sonora, Mexico, where they still perform the cloud-pulling ceremonies that aim at fixing the earth, and “they do [so] for the benefit of all humanity … to help bring rain” (Zepeda in Álvarez and Zepeda 418). Because the world is now much larger, they do not get discouraged if the ritual does not have an immediate effect. They remain hopeful that it will work next time, and this hope is not mere wishful thinking; it is grounded experiential and historical knowledge that tells them that rain will follow after a period of intense drought in the Sonoran Desert. This optimistic view of the future in the era of climate change should not be overlooked. Although many things are beyond our control, Zepeda explains the importance of maintaining a hopeful attitude as follows:

you must do your part. For my parents’ generation, that is how you confront a challenge. In a sense, it is hopeful. But it is not hope born out of a shallow wish. The O’odham have always been hopeful and realistic about the environment. Otherwise, they would have never lasted as long as they have in this desert. I find it helpful to think about it this way. I know that is how my parents would think and speak about it. (Álvarez and Zepeda 419)

52The ability to keep a balanced and grounded perspective across the fleeting present is now more important than ever. Silko and Zepeda urge us to connect the historical and experiential past with the future through committed practice and storytelling. Recovering traditional environmental knowledge, honoring the principles of Native Science, and engaging the land in a committed and respectful manner are valuable strategies in an era of climate vulnerability. In her recent book Theory of Water, Leanne Simpson coincides with Zepeda’s assessment: water has its own time frame and teaches us patience—the ability to listen to, understand, and respect other processes and ways of life on earth. For Zepeda “there is power in waiting” (Álvarez and Zepeda 419). Patience and a hopeful adaptation to new circumstances is part of what the O’odham elders called himdag, their way of life. It is not a passive but a transformative kind of hope, one that makes us aware of our own history and place, inspiring us to listen to other-than-human beings we share this place with, and to take action.

53Indigenous environmental knowledge impregnates Silko’s and Zepeda’s works and extends beyond them, like the branches of a river or the traditional irrigation ditches that helped Native communities survive in challenging environments. Through place-based observation, memory, and creativity, their writing leads us to a deeper understanding of water and of our relations with it—an understanding and cautionary respect that can help us confront the climate crisis. In Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer constantly engages the land as teacher offering primordial lessons that are often preserved in traditional Indigenous stories:

If Indigenous wisdom could be medicine for a broken relationship with the Earth, the moral obligation to share the healing must be accompanied by a prescription to avoid misuse. I hoped always to inspire an authentic revitalization of relationship with the land, not by borrowing from someone else, but by finding your roots and remembering how to grow your own. (xii)

  • 12 See for example Constant Mehéut’s “Spain, Facing a Future of Drought, Turns to Medieval Solutions” (...)

54Listening to what Indigenous water practitioners have to say matters and can help us reconsider our own place-based practices in a non-colonialist manner. In Spain, for example, there are many efforts to revitalize traditional environmental knowledge to combat water scarcity and the climate crisis. Exploring these autochthonous possibilities and plans of action through an Indigenous lens can perhaps spark alternative solutions that benefit the planet as a whole.12 Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups around the world in places like India, New Zealand, and even in Murcia (Spain), are currently fighting to have water’s “political ontology,” its identity as an other-than-human being, recognized by the law and protected (Wilson and Inkster). In Murcia’s coastal region, where large amounts of nitrates and pollutants from intensive agriculture and massive urbanization have caused an ecological catastrophe, an environmentalist movement has turned its Mar Menor into the first waterscape gaining legal personhood and rights in Europe. Legal and ontological changes have also been achieved by the Maori in New Zealand, where the Whanganui River has now human legal status, or the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India, which have also been recently declared living human entities. These actions clearly acknowledge that there is much that we can do to reestablish our broken relations with the lands and waterscapes we dwell on. Leslie Marmon Silko and Ofelia Zepeda’s storied landscapes describe Indigenous pacts with water that are more respectful and sustainable. Following the principles of Native Science, they provide valuable environmental lessons that can inspire us to establish more caring and responsible human/water relations in these challenging times.

Acknowledgement

55The author gratefully acknowledges the financial and academic support provided by the Generalitat Valenciana’s Consellería d’Innovació, Universitats, Ciència i Educació (Research project “Reconfiguraciones de género, raza y clase social en la literatura étnica norteamericana de la era Obama/Trump” GV/AICO/2021/249) and by the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University, which have contributed to the completion of this article.

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Hada, Kenneth. “One Must Know Where We Don’t Want to Go. Identity in Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power and Where Clouds Are Formed.” Journal of the West, vol. 51, no. 4, 2012, pp. 55-59.

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Notes

1 Acequia comes from the Arab word “as-s­āqiya”; it describes an irrigation channel built to grow trees and crops in temperamental climates such as those of the Mediterranean, which have always been prone to droughts. It entered the English language in 1113, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

2 Ann Marshall claims that elites from the larger villages may have managed these canals through “centralized leadership” (142).

3 In the city of Valencia, the Tribunal de las Aguas or Water Court still meets every Thursday morning in a public square to address water conflicts. This legal body of advisors is part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List, together with Murcia’s Council of the Wise Men of the Plain of Murcia, another water court in Mediterranean Spain.

4 Surrounding the city of Valencia, we can still find eight acequias madre or larger “mother canals,” which irrigate the lands around the Túria River.

5 See also Lawson’s, Round’s, and Černý’s linguistic analyses of rain and ceremony in Zepeda’s poetry.

6 Earth and text are, in fact, intimately intertwined in Sacred Water, since the first hand-made editions were printed on paper that contained “bits of blue corn” and “volcanic ash” from the area around Albuquerque (84). It was published by Flood Plain Press, Silko’s own publishing enterprise, launched to grant herself more creative freedom.

7 Water also played a central part in the foundation and naming of Laguna village. Laguna is a Spanish translation of the original Pueblo word, Ka’waik, which means “beautiful lake” (Sacred Water 23).

8 See Brígido-Corachán’s “Movement and Place-Based Consciousness” for a more detailed analysis of Silko’s radical hospitality and her construction of an earth-home in The Turquoise Ledge. For an ecofeminist reading of Silko’s memoir through a care ethics lens, see also Siqueira Galvão and Fernandes Alves’s recent article “Compassion and Resistance: An Eco-conscious Reading in The Turquoise Ledge.”

9 Zepeda adds that “[i]t is beyond this border where some of [h]er family stories begin”; her parents came from Mexico, a beloved place where rain ceremonies are still held and that she describes as “the other side: ganhu ´aigojeḍ ’amjeḍ,” or “the traditional homeland” (“Autobiography” 408).

10 See for example the heartbreaking stories on other-than-human beings published by the Tucson Citizen in October 1993 or the Arizona Geological Survey (1993).

11 See Ruth Underhill’s detailed account of this ceremony in her book Singing for Power and Angelica Lawson’s analysis of the poem vis-à-vis the traditional salt-gathering ceremony.

12 See for example Constant Mehéut’s “Spain, Facing a Future of Drought, Turns to Medieval Solutions” (2023). Valencia’s centuries old irrigation channels and local water justice courts have been often used as examples of community-based management of water resources and continuance of the pre-capitalist commons. See the work of Nobel-prize winner Elinor Ostrom Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, or the more recent book El patrimonio hidráulico del Bajo Turia: l’Horta de Valencia (Hermosilla Pla), which positively appraises our traditional irrigation systems in Spain.

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References

Electronic reference

Anna M. Brígido-Corachán, “Flooding Waters Were a Cautious Gift”: Indigenous Knowledge and Environmental Memory in Leslie Marmon Silko’s and Ofelia Zepeda’s Storied LandscapesEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 21-1 | 2026, Online since 07 April 2026, connection on 07 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25894; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/166g5

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About the author

Anna M. Brígido-Corachán

Anna M. Brígido-Corachán is Associate Professor of American Studies and director of the research group LÈNA (North American Ethnic Minority Literatures in a Global Context) at the University of Valencia. Her research interests include contemporary Indigenous literature and media, traditional environmental knowledge, and critical pedagogies.

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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