ABSTRACT
Those basic rights to ontological well-being that Bachelard’s Poetics of Space takes for granted are precisely the rights that Native Americans have witnessed the diminishment of in their own communities. His poetics of ‘inscape’ resound with an assurance denied communities that have either suffered enforced displacement or environmental degradation – or indeed both. So in this chapter I move to alternative worldviews, as expounded in particular by Silko and Hogan; but in order to throw them into sharper relief I begin by returning to Bachelard’s chapter on ‘Nests’.
