Native American and Catholic Spaces in Leslie Marmon Silko's The Man to Send Rainclouds
Native American and Catholic Spaces in Leslie Marmon Silko's The Man to Send Rainclouds

Summary/Abstract: My paper looks at Leslie Marmon Silko’s short story The Man to Send Rainclouds as an emblematic text representing the intricate and complex relationship between two cultures and sets of values: the Native American and the Catholic. “They found him under a big cottonwood tree” – the story opens propelling us in medias res into the liminal sphere of a ritual that foreshadows a clash of the two cultural spheres. My reading proves how within this ritual space and time of old Teofilo’s funeral the two seemingly hermetically closed cultural spheres yield to the subversive power of liminality and open up if not towards each other then towards a long-forgotten, or rather repressed common ground symbolically represented here by “the blue mountains in the west.”

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