SOURCE: Karno, Valerie. “Legal Hunger, Law, Narrative, and Orality in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller and Almanac of the Dead.” College Literature 28, no. 1 (winter 2001): 29-45.

In the following essay, Karno asserts that “Storyteller” and Almanac for the Dead illuminate the “interrelationships between the Native American body, the landscape, and American law.”

American law is not usually considered through the lens of orality. Contract law, as well as the notions of intent and consent, has in courts' efforts to establish “objective” standards of conduct, evolved away from what were seen as primitive standards of orality and commensurate visceral or spoken agreements, to a privileging of the seemingly more progressive written word. But the discourse of orality, veiled in the images of digestion and incorporation, has actually functioned critically in the legal formation and development of the United States. Influenced by biological science,¹ early American legal science considered national evolution through...