Rough Knowledge and Radical Understanding: Sacred Silence in American Indian Literatures

Abstract

The ritual modes of knowing the world that Adrian Louis and Luci Tapahonso express in the above passages require a different "conceptual framework," with perhaps some of the unreasonable fallibility called for in Soros's manifesto. They direct the reader toward a silence off the page where song and dance, tumbleweed, buffalo, and spirit overlap. The indefinable boundaries which they invoke require a mode of categorization different from academic methods. Yet how is it that "we are restored" by the "motion of songs rising"? How do those tumbleweeds express the dance of "angry buffalo ghosts"? Tapahonso and Louis do not give answers to such "figurative" questions, yet these images function in more than figurative ways to shape their literary experiences. Their very mode of delivering