Tag Archives: Ceremony

Drought and the Human War on Nature

By Robin Bates | Published: July 19, 2012

Pueblo novelistLeslie Marmon Silko finds a combination of spiritual, psychological and economic explanations for drought.

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Dostoevsky and the Arizona Shootings

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2011

When I posted, on Saturday morning, my blog entry for Sunday, I little realized that I would be turning for help later in the day to the work I was discussing. Doestoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is guiding my response to the horrific shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Judge John Ball, and 16 others, including a child. […]

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Are Dystopian Novels Useful?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2010

The new Arizona immigration law, which authorizes police to engage in racial profiling (even while claiming not to), has me thinking back to Almanac of the Dead, a 1991 novel by Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko.  This imaginary recreation of a 21st-century future predicted this would happen. I don’t like Almanac the way I like Silko’s […]

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Witchery Unleashed in the Gulf

By Robin Bates | Published: May 3, 2010

Just days after celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we experienced the greatest oil spill in U.S. history. And it is still going on! I can’t begin to express how discouraged I am about the news. I have boycotted Exxon since the Valdez tanker spill fouled the Alaskan coast in 1989, and here we […]

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How to Respond to Tea Party Rage

By Robin Bates | Published: March 29, 2010

Leslie Marmon Silko  This week we celebrate both Passover and Easter, and the world, as it was during the original Passover meal and then again when Jesus celebrated it under Roman rule, is still filled with rage. The weekend newspapers were filled with stories of Tea Party anger, which is being directed at the recent […]

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Fighting off Sickness and Death

By Robin Bates | Published: April 30, 2009

It may have seem incongruous, in a website featuring old works, to have started off my first blog entry with a quotation from the contemporary Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko. But I find her faith that stories have the power to “fight off sickness and death” so close to my own view that it […]

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