Dialogue Between Indigenous and Western Traditions in Louise Erdrich's Larose and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

The paper explores the dialogue between Indigenous and Western traditions in Louise Erdrich’s LaRose and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony in the context of Native American ethnic prose and the so-called “Indian Renaissance”. National identity is seen as a key category that structures the literary projects of contemporary Native authors and functions as an instrument of decolonization and reinterpretation of the American canon. Drawing on the works of O. Shostak, A. Chavkin, D. Stirrup and others, the study emphasizes the spatial poetics of Erdrich and Silko’s novels, which is deeply rooted in the geocentric worldview of Indigenous cultures. The article demonstrates how a transcultural perspective enables these writers to transcend classical oppositions, such as “colonizer – colonized” and “center – periphery,” and to represent culture as a dynamic field of reciprocal appropriations. Particular attention is paid to the literary representation of national identity at the levels of sign, symbol, metaphor and narrative space, as well as to the motifs of collective memory, colonial trauma, ecological consciousness and the sacrality of land. Comparative reading of LaRose and Ceremony reveals how reconfiguration of geographic and symbolic space under colonial pressure produces new forms of Indigenous subjectivity, while sacred geographies remain a spiritual core of survival and resistance.