Abstract
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.