Post-Cold War and Native American Spirituality

Published two years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead addresses the New Age Move ment increasingly popularized and embraced by mostly white middle-class Americans from the late 80s to the early 90s when the Cold War came to a dramatic end Intervening in this historical juncture where post-Cold War uncertainty fuels the popular demand for Native American spirituality, Silko's novel reclaims Native American tribal spirituality as an alternative channel for radical geographical imagination, a post-Cold War global coalition of Third World subjects and Native Americans who have been systematically marginalized and silenced during the Cold war In New Agers' consumerist fetishization of Native spirituality, Silko recognizes a tendency to emphasize what its practitioners refer to as "personal transformation and spiritual growth" The novel strongly suggests that the New Age's "fixation on self-discovery and self healing" in its appropriation of Native spirituality resuscitates the old Cold War discourse of "mental hygiene" that promotes self-help techniques like positive thinking, mind control, and stress management Through the journey of the Laguna Pueblo protagonist from the discourse of "mental hygiene" to Native American tribal spirituality, Silko points to a post-Cold War spiritual and political vision of global connectedness based on the revitalized tribal spirituality, a point further illustrated in the last part of the novel, "One World, Many Tribes"