Native Americans study their environment for many reasons but importantly because it is alive and speaking with them. A living university is where they have always lived so there has never been a time when they were not seeking information from the environment, testing their interpretations of what they observe, and formulating conservation behaviors that positively reflect what they and their environment want from each other. Whether this process is termed Native science or culturally sensitive natural interactions, it is a pattern that is typical of the Native American people who have participated in more than 136 ethnographic studies conducted by the authors. Paiute science is illustrated using ethnographic findings from forty-four field studies and the lived experiences of one of the authors.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is an anglophone novel that aspires to heal the effects of conquest and colonization through a decolonial politics that accepts hybridity, recognizes the sensitive work involved in transitions, and embraces Indigenous knowledge. Even as Silko celebrates hybridization, transitions, and boundary-crossing, she recognizes that these processes have a dangerous side – specifically, the potentially world-destroying effects of the nuclear arms race. The novel shows that settler colonialism is one aspect of an unfolding pattern that denies limits and boundaries; with the invention of nuclear weapons, it threatens to destroy the world. Silko’s message echoes Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1974 essay “Non-Violence in American Society,” commenting on the era’s social justice movements. Giving narrative form to Deloria’s message, in Ceremony the multiple strands of Silko’s political thought – the Native American Renaissance and decolonization, environmentalism, feminism, antiwar and anti-nuclear activism – are woven together in a story that is also a healing ceremony for readers. Ceremony aims to create a world where indigeneity emerges as the dominant force for a world at risk that is also a world in transition.