Dialectics of Time and Space in American Indian Women’s Writings

This study new-historically explores the dialectics of time and space in American Indian women’s writings to explain American Indians’ awareness of and attachment to their surrounding nature and its expression in the contemporary American Indian tribal life. With delimited focus on Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), this article analyzes American Indian approach to time and space reflecting Natives’ awareness of their surrounding place. Mythical stories of oral tradition inscribed in Tracks and Ceremony recreate American Indian timeless and macrocosmic realities. American Indian women writers have been selected owing to the matriarchal nature of American Indian social order wherein women have been the conscious carriers of their timeless oral tradition. The two selected novels of different settings express the cultural range of American Indian tribal belt from Canadian border (Tracks’ setting) to Mexican border (Ceremony’s setting). This range is evidence of the synchronic and diachronic integrations and distinctions of American Indian past, present and future.