Stories and the land are inextricably tied. In “I Still Trust the Land,” Leslie Silko writes, “Our

stories cannot be separated from their geographical locations.” Humans do not simply inhabit the world, but also form connections with it. In “I Still Trust the Land,” the desert hills tell a story of safety and comfort for the young Silko. For the “old folks” who “were going up against the state of New Mexico with only the stories,” the land tells “stories of childhood outings with adults to gather pinons or to haul wood, stories they had heard as children.” As long as they continue to tell stories, they will have the land.

         In contrast with Silko’s loving relationship with the land, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” by Joy Harjo tells the story of feeling stifled and trapped by one’s environment. Harjo describes the despondency resulting from urbanization and the longing for the comfortable “warm wood rooms” of one’s youth. The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch describes the “lives out there” in the “jagged columns of granite and shallow caves” of Snake Butte. The landscape holds lives, but sometimes one’s own life is not a part of it. For some people, life is an ongoing search for the proper setting to write their story.

         Sometimes, the mental landscape one creates is more important than the physical world. The title of this unit, “The 7-11 of My Dreams,” comes from the chapter “Imagining the Reservation” in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie. Imagination is an escape from physical confines of reality; imagination can rewrite stories and transform them into homes.