Lullaby

Like many literary movements, the “Native American Renaissance” is a loosely defined period of history; writers and literary works associated with the movement span the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The term itself is sometimes problematic because it implies that a period of time existed when Native Americans were not engaged in the arts.

Literary works from this era tend to share a similar set of concerns. These concerns include the pressure felt by Native Americans to assimilate into white American society and the difficulty of preserving indigenous culture in the face of those demands. “Lullaby,” for instance, concerns one important way that forced assimilation impacts families: the removal of Native American children from their parents’ custody. Although this practice had culminated in the establishment of Native American boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it continued in various guises long after the schools were founded; prior to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, Native American children were likely to be taken from their families and placed in foster care, just as Ella and Danny are in “Lullaby.”

Silko’s work also resembles that of other Native American Renaissance-era writers in its ambition to capture a distinctly Native American mode of storytelling. In part, this mode means that Silko incorporates elements of oral tradition, like the Navajo lullaby, into the written text. However, it also involves breaking the conventions of linear narrative. For many Native American tribes, time is not so much a line as it is a circle; the world is conceptualized not as steadily advancing towards some future state (which is typical of Americans and other Western traditions), but rather as moving through various cycles (e.g. the seasons). Native American art tends to mirror these cycles in form and/or function. An example of this cyclical motif is the “Yeibechei song” mentioned early in “Lullaby,” which is a kind of healing chant that would normally be performed only as part of a multi-day winter ceremony. Silko works to create a similar sense of circularity in the story itself, often via the repetition of words or images (e.g. Jimmie’s blanket) in a way comparable to the refrain of a song.