American Indian Culture and Research Journal

We will not ever get anything till we make Alcatraz. Leslie Marmon Silko wrote that the Hopi deliberately chose an austere physical environment in which to anchor themselves. The high mesas compel the people to come together repeatedly in labor, ceremony, and prayer for the common good. The physical environment, once learned, allowed a Hopi place to evolve across more than seven centuries. If one were to make a list of other sites in North America as seemingly untenable as the Hopi mesas, Alcatraz Island would have to be written at the top of that list. So difficult is the place that the only long-term attempt to live there was made by those society outcasts deemed too dangerous to live elsewhere, and their overseers. Yet, as foreboding as a site might be, Silko believes that until a viable and balanced relationship to place is found, a people cannot truly be said to have emerged. Place and human identity must be invested in each other for ethnogenesis to occur. In his own effort to identify an Indian sense of place, N. Scott Momaday has named this achievement, “reciprocal appropriation,” wherein humans invest themselves in place while simultaneously incorporating place into fundamental experience. Moreover, he says, it requires a “moral act of the imagination.”