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Collective Memory Literature Review

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Annotated Bibliography
Critical Work on Indigenous Identity and Collective Memory
Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American
Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5, 1997, pp. 1386–1403. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2171069. Confino explores the most effective methods for using memory to articulate the connections between the cultural, social, political, and representative social experience.
While historical accounts often focus on distinct memories, a study of collective mentality is often missing. Collective memory can be examined by looking at objects produced by the common man, such as popular literature, and also studying its reception.
By connecting fields instead of isolating memories, collective …show more content…

“Native American Timeline of Events.” Legends of America, Mar. 2017, www.legendsofamerica.com/na-timeline.html. Kathy Weiser’s timeline helps to conceptualize the extent of forced migration and the cause and effect relationships between wars, laws, and removals. Her history includes information on the Indian Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, the Indian Indenture Act, the
Homestead Act, the Navajo Wars, the Sioux Uprising, etc. The Indian Removal Act of
1830 forced the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole to walk the 1,200 mile “Trail of Tears.” Other forced removals included the Navajo Long Walk and the
Sioux Walk to Fort Snelling. The California Gold Rush spurred much bloodshed due to the settler’s greed for resources, making it the site of the worst slaughter committed against Native Americans. Laws and treaties were used against native peoples. For example, the Mining Act of 1872 excluded Alaskan natives from claiming ownership of their own land. Other acts used to reduce native landholdings included The Dawes Act of
1887 and the Sioux Act of 1888. By 1953, the BIA persuaded large numbers of Indians to relocate into urban areas. Weiser’s timeline is very informative and emphasizes …show more content…

The most influential essays for my research were “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories,”
“Language and Literature From a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” and “The People and the
Land are Inseperable.” Landscapes to Silko are also geologic memories, characters, visualizations, stories, and maps. Like a spider web, the center is the land and “human identity, imagination, storytelling [are] inextricably linked to the land, to Mother Earth, just as the strands of the spider’s web radiate from the center of the web” (21). Pueblo people have always connected certain stories with certain locations as a form of identity.
Thus, Silko explores what that means for migrated or displaced peoples, how landscapes function as characters in fiction, and why there are controversies between the U.S. government and indigenous peoples over what qualifies a piece of land as sacred. She also discusses how the ancient Pueblo people depended on collective memory to maintain and transmit an entire culture; from the youngest child to the oldest, everyone

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