I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.
Interpretation
Stories are essential for human existence and resilience against life's challenges.
In this quote, Leslie Marmon Silko emphasizes the profound importance of stories in human life. Rather than merely serving as entertainment, stories carry deep meaning and significance, acting as a vital resource for individuals to confront and cope with the harsh realities of illness and mortality. They provide context, connection, and understanding in our lives, thus becoming essential tools in our collective struggle against suffering and the inevitability of death.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the power of literature in healing.
To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.
Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.
The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - "can we really reach each other.
Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions, on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.
But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.
Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.
People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.
If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause.
The use of "religion" as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.
In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you've lost, what can you say about that?
You can't be in business with international development and not understand basic issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and white privilege.
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