[Originally published in Joy Porter and Kenneth Roemer, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 245-56]
{245}
ROBERT M. NELSON
Leslie Marmon Silko: storyteller
Novelist, poet, essayist, photographer, cinematographer, and in every case storyteller: Leslie Marmon Silko is perhaps the most familiar and most often anthologized American Indian writer today, and her novel Ceremony is as widely recognized as any other contemporary American novel.1 In Ceremony as in all her other work to date, Silko's creative vision has been shaped in nearly equal measure by the land and by the variety of oral and written storytelling performances that were a part of her life growing up at Laguna Pueblo. According to both cultural anthropology and oral tradition, Laguna has always been one of the most adaptive pueblo communities in the Southwest, and many of the stories comprising Laguna oral tradition preserve the complex strategies of resistance and assimilation that have enabled the people to survive and adjust to myriad external pressures. Like her native Laguna, Silko's work is a study in cultural mediation2 and spirit transformation. Again and again her creative vision celebrates the transformative power of story and place, working together for life in a healing way.
Backgrounds
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in
Albuquerque, New Mexico on 5 March
1948. Her mother, Virginia Leslie, was originally from Montana; her father,
Lee Howard Marmon, was at the time just out of the Army, beginning his
career as a professional photographer and managing the Marmon Trading Post
in the village of Old Laguna, about fifty miles west of Albuquerque. Along
with her two younger sisters, Wendy and Gigi, Leslie was raised in one of the
houses on the southeast edge of Old Laguna village, the part of the village
closest to the Rio San Jose and, just beyond the river, US Route 66, now
Interstate 40.
Silko was born into a family
environment already rich with story. From its
beginnings, the Marmon family had been prominent in Laguna's history of
contact with Euro-American social, political, economic, and educational {246}
forces, and its story (like Laguna's) has always been one of outsiders who
became insiders and of insiders who became outsiders -- a story about cultural
transformations and the artful merging of Laguna and Anglo influence. The
first Laguna Marmons, brothers Walter and Silko's great-grandfather Robert,
came from Ohio in the 1880s as surveyors, married Laguna women, and
became part of the community, Walter as a school teacher and Robert as a
trader; both eventually were elected to serve as Governor of the Pueblo.
Great-grandfather Robert's second wife was Silko's full-blooded Laguna
great-grandmother Marie Anaya Marmon, younger sister of Robert's deceased
first wife. This is the "Grandma A'mooh" lovingly referred to in Storyteller and
several of the essays in Yellow Woman, who in her youth left Laguna for some
years to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and who "spoke and
wrote English beautifully,"3 who passed time with young Leslie and her sisters
both telling them stories from Laguna oral tradition and reading aloud to them
from Brownie the Bear and the Bible. Her husband Robert, who had shelves of
books in his house, also became conversant in Laguna oral tradition and in
1919 was the source of two of the traditional storytelling performances
collected in Boas's monumental Keresan Texts. Their son Henry, Silko's
"Grandpa Hank," attended the Sherman Institute, California's version of
Carlisle, while "Aunt Susie" (Henry's sister-in-law Susan Reyes, married to his
brother Walter) attended both the Carlisle Indian School and Dickinson College
(also in Carlisle); upon returning to Laguna she served the community as a
schoolteacher and also as a Keresan cultural historian -- a "storyteller" like her
mother-in-law Grandma A'mooh, in one of the most important senses of that
term. When anthropologist and ethnographer Elsie Clews Parsons came to
Laguna to collect the stories published in Boas's edition and in several other
shorter collections during the years between World Wars I and II, she stayed at
the house of a Marmon kinswoman, Henry's cousin Alice (identified by
Parsons as "Mrs. E. C. Eckerman"), another of the family storytellers Silko
frequently cites as one of her own mentors. In Silko's own time, her father
(who served as Tribal Council Treasurer during the time that uranium began to
be mined at Laguna) headed a project to republish John Gunn's largely
forgotten 1917 collection of Laguna oral traditional tales entitled Schat-Chen.
Not surprisingly, given such a heritage, Leslie Marmon Silko grew up in a
house full of books and stories -- Laguna stories, Euro-American books, books
about Laguna stories, Laguna stories about Euro-American contact -- a legacy
of cultural interplay and mediation that has profoundly influenced her own
storytelling style and repertoire.
Silko's creative preoccupation with the
theme of cultural mediation is
often reflected in the Laguna landscape that functions as setting, and {247}
sometimes even character, in much of her work. For Silko, one of the most
important of all such places is the bend of the river a short distance from the
house where she was raised, itself located at the very southeast edge of the
village, where the traffic of the main US cross-country interstate highway
mirrors the older, quieter motion of water moving on the land. In several of
Silko's Storyteller pieces, particularly those featuring the Kochinninako /
Yellow Woman motif, this part of the river figures as a contact zone,4 where a
female representing Laguna identity "within" meets a male who represents
some other cultural or spiritual identity "out there." This place is also the
liminal zone in which the spirits of the Katsinas, passing through it from the
direction of sunrise into the village in November, take on the corporeal form of
the masked dancers, a transformative event recalled in Ceremony (82) and also
in Auntie's story about Tayo's mother Laura, which positions her at this place
at sunrise, returning to Laguna (70). This is also the place that Tayo positions
himself at sunrise on the morning following the autumnal equinox (and the
Jackpile mine episode) at the end of the novel (255). In the work of many
writers, such places take shape as wastelands, deserts, lifeless and/or
life-threatening expanses; in Silko's work, as at Laguna, the site of such
transformative contact events appears as a place of comfort and regenerative
energy, a place characterized by the twin blessings of shade and moving water
even throughout the long summer months. Silko's own affinity for this place
reflects, perhaps, her own felt "position," occupying as she does a marginal site
with respect to both Laguna "within" and the dominant Anglo mainstream "out
there" -- and as she depicts it, it's not a bad place to be.
In addition to the education she was
receiving from the land and the
storytellers in her extended family, Leslie attended the BIA school at Laguna
through the fifth grade and then parochial schools in Albuquerque during her
teenage school years. She then attended the University of New Mexico, where
she was enrolled in the general honors program and received her BA in English
(with honors) in 1969, the year the Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to
Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. She then enrolled in the American
Indian law program at the University of New Mexico Law School, but after a
semester transferred into the creative writing MA program there.
Though her interest in writing
predated her college years -- she was
already writing stories in elementary school -- that interest blossomed during
her years at the University of New Mexico, during which time she took several
couses in creative writing and saw her first work published ("The Man to Send
Rain Clouds" in New Mexico Quarterly, Winter-Spring 1969). By 1971 she had
chosen writing, rather than the practice of law, as her vocation, {248} and in
1974 (at the end of a two-year teaching stint at Navajo Community College) her
career became effectively established with two publications: her poetry
chapbook Laguna Woman (Greenfield Review Press) and Kenneth Rosen's
The
Man to Send Rain Clouds, an anthology of nineteen Native American short
stories, seven of them (including the title story) by Silko. In that same year,
another of Silko's short stories, the oft-anthologized "Lullaby," was published
in Chicago Review, and Silko was awarded an NEA writing fellowship.
She then moved to Ketchikan, Alaska,
where she lived for two years with
her husband, John Silko, and her two young sons, the older of the two from a
previous short-lived marriage during her college years. There, supported
partially by a Rosewater Foundation grant, she wrote most of what was to
become the novel Ceremony (1977). The time she spent in Alaska at Ketchikan
and the small community of Bethel strongly engaged her imagination --
"Storyteller," the title story of her major collection of short works and the only
piece not set at or near Laguna, is unmistakably Alaskan in setting and character.
Returning to the Southwest from
Alaska, Silko continued to write while
holding academic appointments first at the University of New Mexico and then
at the University of Arizona. The year after Ceremony was published, Silko
moved from New Mexico to Arizona and acquired a ranch in the mountains a
few miles northwest of Tucson, where she continues to live. In 1981, after her
marriage to John Silko had been dissolved, Seaver Books published her book
Storyteller, which brought togethermuch of her previously published poetry and
short fiction, re-embedded in a webwork of family narrative accompanied by
photographs of the sources of her storytelling identity -- photographs, that is, of
the people and the places to which those stories attach. In that same year, Silko
was awarded a five-year, $176,000 MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship,
allowing her to devote herself full time to her artistic pursuits, including writing
the novel that over the course of the next ten years would become Almanac of
the Dead.
Ceremony
Many of the oral traditional
stories that Silko heard and read came to
shape the structure and texture of her first and most famous novel, Ceremony.
From the very outset of the novel, the narrative persona aligns herself with
Keresan oral tradition by claiming to be one of a very long line of storytellers
whose role is to preserve and pass along the story set in motion by
"Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought Woman" (also called Spider Grandmother, who in
many of the Laguna and Acoma stories figures as the original life-force or
{249} Creatrix); this story is the life of the people, life
for the people.
Throughout the novel, passages from the old stories, or "hama-ha" stories as
they are called at Laguna and neighboring Acoma, serve to orient a reader
already familiar with these stories in the otherwise sometimes chronologically
and geographically confusing tale of Silko's twentieth-century protagonist,
Tayo. These fragments of story, or embedded texts, remind such an audience
that the long story of the people contains precedents for everything that happens
in the life of any one of the people. As might be expected, most of the hama-ha
stories embedded in Ceremony -- including the story of the family feud between
the first sisters, Corn Woman and Reed Woman; the story of the gambler
Kaup'a'ta, who once imprisoned the rainclouds; the story of Arrowboy, who
disarms the Gunnadeyah witches by seeing what they are up to; and the long
nine-part backbone story of the coming of Pa'caya'nyi and Ck'o'yo medicine to
the village and the consequent departure and recovery of Our Mother
Nau'ts'ity'i -- have clear precedents in the published ethnographic records of
Laguna oral tradition. But Silko also weaves in material derived from Navajo
story and ceremony, particularly in the episode set in the Chuska Mountains in
which Betonie, a venerable old Navajo hataali (singer or "medicine man"),
enacts a healing ritual that aligns Tayo with the Ghostway story of a young
hunter whose human identity is recovered after having been stolen by Coyote.
For readers not already familiar with
the Laguna and Navajo stories behind
the embedded texts in the novel, Silko offers a second, equally illuminating
point of reference in the form of the geography and topology -- the "landscape"
-- of the novel. In Ceremony, Silko's creative vision is profoundly rooted in the
landscape of her native Laguna: "When I was writing Ceremony," she wrote to
poet James Wright in 1978, a year after the novel was published, "I was so
terribly devastated by being away from Laguna country that the writing was my
way of re-making that place, the Laguna country, for myself" (Delicacy 27-28).
In some ways, the novel offers the reader a guided tour of Laguna country, as
Tayo eventually re-visits every part of it, from the southwestern corner of the
reservation around Patoch butte to the westside villages of Cubero and
Casablanca; from the one-time truckstop and bar at Budville on the west side to
the isolated traditionalist village of Mesita on the east side; from Mt. Taylor in
the northwest to Alamo Springs and the sand hills to the southeast; from
Paguate village to the north, where some stories say the Laguna people
originally emerged from the Fourth World into this one, to Dripping Springs to
the south, where water springs cold and clear out of the sides of a sandstone
mesa. And at the center of the novel's geography lies Old Laguna village,
adobe houses clustered about the gleaming white Catholic mission {250} near
its highest point but containing also, as we see at the novel's end, the
ceremonial kiva, newly whitewashed for the latest autumnal equinox. This is
where Tayo must return to tell, for the first time in his life, his story and theirs
to the old men of the village who have been awaiting his return, the way the
people in the old stories are always awaiting the recovery of whichever
protagonist has departed.
Reinforcing the novel's dominant
theme of departure and recovery, many
of the key episodes are situated in border, and therefore potentially
transformational, zones -- border towns like Gallup, New Mexico (where Tayo
is born) and Villa Cubero (on the western edge of the Laguna reservation,
where the Night Swan settles prior to the War); the corner of Mount Taylor
called North Top at Laguna, parts of which lie both on and off the reservation;
the sheep camp (modeled after the Marmon family ranch) that lies just
southwest of Patoch Butte, the formation that marks the southwest corner of the
reservation; the two-mile-long open pit Jackpile Mine that lies along Laguna's
north border, a monstrous artificial inversion of the lake after which Kawaika
(The Beautiful Lake, which the Spanish translated as Laguna) was originally named.
Set in the years following World War
II, Ceremony is above all about
healing, and about the healing power of the stories and the land. The disease
that has infected the people, including Silko's protagonist Tayo, is the old bane
known at Laguna as Ck'o'yo medicine, which takes several new, but
precedented, forms in the novel: World War II and its dreadful fallout,
including such new art forms as nuclear fission and the atomic weapons
capable of destroying all life; the polarization of the world's populations along
both ideological and generational lines, including the emergence of a bitter
animosity between "full-bloods" and "halfbreeds" that threatens to destroy
twentieth-century Native communities; and the pervasive feeling of separation
and isolation, of anomie or existential alienation, that came increasingly to
characterize the American experience in the twentieth century. What Tayo must
come to understand is that these are indeed not separate diseases but rather
symptoms of a single disease made insidious precisely by its ability to disguise
itself as separate diseases. Like the other Indian veterans who have returned to
the reservation communities, Tayo suffers the effects of this disease most
overtly in the form of the "war stories" that haunt his dreaming and waking
hours, and like most of the other vets Tayo attempts to self-medicate with yet
another version of Ck'o'yo medicine, alcohol. But even early in the novel, Tayo
vaguely understands that neither the disease nor the cure is that simple. As
Silko puts it, "They all had explanations; the police, the doctors at the
psychiatric ward; even Auntie and old Grandma; they blamed liquor and they
blamed the war"; but when a doctor offers this {251}
diagnosis to Tayo, he
replies "It's more than that. I can feel it. It's been going on for a long time'"
(53). Old Betonie later confirms Tayo's suspicion and gives Tayo a story that
effectively locates Tayo's personal illness within the context of the timeless
struggle between life and the forces of witchery that seek to consume life; using
this story as a corrective lens, and assisted by Spider Grandmother's daughters
the Night Swan (prior to the War) and Ts'eh (after the War), Tayo becomes
able to complete the healing journey of return that Betonie sets in motion with
story and song.
Other works
Silko continues and develops the
role of Laguna storyteller in her next
book, aptly titled Storyteller (1981). In critical reviews Storyteller has been
variously described as a collage, a montage, or even more loosely an
assemblage, and indeed the contents of the book may seem bafflingly random
and eclectic until the work is treated as a storytelling performance in which the
storyteller is depending on visual imagery to do most of the cultural work of an
oral tradition. Seen from this perspective, the text is a virtual encyclopedia of
storytelling styles and story materials adapted to textual form, all the kinds and
ways of traditional story and storytelling -- from the grave and formal tone of
the old hama-ha stories like "One Time" and "Up North" to the conversational,
even chatty, cadences of contemporary anecdotes such as "Uncle Tony's Goat"
and "I Just Fed the Rooster." As though to make the point that these are not
separate kinds of story but rather varieties or phases of a single, familial life
form, Silko includes several pieces like "Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story" and
"Storytelling" which clearly contain both kinds of material while showing their
family relationship.
Silko also makes a dramatic point in
Storyteller of challenging the usual
distinction that most readers are conditioned to make between words and other
kinds of visual imagery, for included in the composition of this text are
twenty-six photographs which (as we are told in the opening piece of the
collection, "There Is a Tall Hopi Basket") are illustrative of this or that piece of
prose and poetry, much as the storyteller's body language may illustrate one
point or another of the spoken text in a live oral performance. It is a technique
she uses at least once in Ceremony: readers will recall the black-and-white star
map that appears in the novel near the beginning of the Mt. Taylor episode, an
episode that can be read as a re-happening of the older story of Sun Man's
showdown with the gambler katsina Kaup'a'ta, which reappears in Storyteller
under the title "Up North" -- a story that in turn features a star riddle as its
climactic element. Silko makes this technique the formal basis for Sacred
Water (1993), subtitled "Narratives and Pictures," {252}
a self-published and
hand-stitched eighty-pager in which each pair of facing pages shows a
photocopied photograph opposite its companion piece of prose. Speaking of
this book in a short essay titled "On Nonfiction Prose" she says, "photocopies
of my photographs of clouds and dry washes are an integral part of the text; the
photocopy images are as much a part of my essay on water as the narrative of
the essay . . . In the creation of the text itself, I see no reason to separate visual
images from written words that are visual images themselves" (Yellow Woman
195).
At the same time, the storytelling
voice and vision in this book is, like the
voice and vision of Ceremony, firmly rooted in the land and landscape of
Laguna. In fact, the only verbal piece in Storyteller not set in the Southwest
around Laguna or its geographical and sociological neighbor Acoma is the title
story, "Storyteller." Perhaps it is equally telling that the only two photographs
in the book not taken at or near Laguna (numbers 23 and 25) are both taken in
the Arizona landscape outside Tucson, where Silko herself has lived since
leaving Laguna and a principle setting for her three subsequent works --
Almanac of the Dead (1991), Sacred Water (1993), and
Gardens in the Dunes
(1999). Perhaps these two photos are best understood as the author's way of
illustrating how the life of a story, like the life of the storyteller who derives
from them and cares for them, can bridge the perceived separations not only
between moments of time and cultural categories but also between places.
Forays into non-print narrative with
which Silko was involved around the
time of the composition of Storyteller parallel her concerns as a storyteller-in-print. In 1978 Silko
was the subject of a documentary film entitled "Running
on the Edge of the Rainbow," one of a series of filmings of oral narrative
performances produced by Larry Evers at the University of Arizona, in which
she played herself as a Laguna storyteller. Around this same time Silko began
to develop her own interest in the visual arts, in particular filmmaking, an
interest encouraged earlier in several graduate courses as well as by her father's
career as a professional photographer. During the late 1970s and early 1980s,
even while her written work was relocating itself in a much larger sociopolitical
context with Tucson rather than Laguna at its center, Silko's filmmaking efforts
remained anchored at Laguna. There, she founded the Laguna Film Project with
an eye to creating a trilogy of films, to be collectively entitled Stolen Rain. In a
1978 letter to James Wright, Silko speaks of working on "the scripts which
attempt to tell the Laguna stories on film using the storyteller's voice with the
actual locations where these stories are supposed to have taken place. In a
strange sort of way, the film project is an experiment in translation -- bringing
the land -- the hills, the arroyos, the boulders, the cottonwoods in October -- to
people unfamiliar {253} with it, because after all, the
stories grow out of this
land as much as we see ourselves as having emerged from the land there"
(Delicacy 24). In 1980, with support from an NEH grant and anticipating
eventual PBS release, she filmed and produced "Arrowboy and the Witches," a
sixty-minute video version of an old Laguna story included in Storyteller under
the title "Estoy-eh-moot and the Kunideeyahs" (Storyteller 140-54).5 She
filmed it in the mesa country south and west of Old Laguna, a landscape of
cottonwoods and sandstone caves in an area locally known as Dripping
Springs, which has been in the care of the Marmon family for several
generations. As part of the setting for this film but also partly, perhaps,
fulfilling the words she attributes to her father in Storyteller -- "You could even
live / up here in these hills if you wanted" (161) -- Silko erected a stone cottage
near the base of the Dripping Springs mesa. It burned down shortly thereafter,
but its ruins are still there, along with the shell of the Spider Grandmother
dwelling that also appears in her film.
As Storyteller does
mainly in print and "Arrowboy and the Witches" does
mainly in motion-picture form, much of the non-fiction work published by
Silko since Storyteller (most of it collected in her 1996 Yellow Woman and
a
Beauty of the Spirit) continues to integrate the conventional domains of visual
and verbal art as well as the conventional categories life and land. In 1989, for
instance, an essay entitled "The Fourth World" appeared in Artforum, a journal
of the visual arts, and in 1995 her photoessay "An Essay on Rocks" appeared in
a special issue of Aperture magazine. As in her filmmaking, Silko's creative
vision remains grounded in her years growing up at Laguna: in "The Fourth
World," Silko speculates about the connections between the high teenage
suicide rate around Laguna and the open Jackpile uranium mine, while in "An
Essay on Rocks" her story about a boulder in a Tucson arroyo ends with an
allusion to the story of a similar rock on Mt. Taylor that first appeared in
Storyteller (77-78). And in 1996, the Whitney Museum in New York published
Rain, a selection of photographs of Laguna faces and places taken by her father,
Lee Marmon, with accompanying text by Silko.
The concept that printed words
themselves are visual images, and thus
close relatives of other visual art forms, is also one of the starting points of
Silko's most ambitious work to date, Almanac of the Dead (1991). The title
refers to the Great Calendar of the Mayan tradition, a way of reckoning time
that involves creating and preserving a pictorial image (or "glyph") of each of
the faces of time in the understanding that time is a life form that periodically
renews itself though transformation: "The days, years, and centuries were spirit
beings who traveled the universe, returning endlessly" (523). As Silko tells it in
the novel, the sisters Zeta and Lecha, the initial twinned female {254}
protagonists of the novel, are keepers of a surviving portion of one of these old
Mayan codices, inherited from their grandmother Yoeme (the name means
"Yaqui" in the Yaqui language). In this fragment, the past five hundred years --
that is, the years between the time of the sustained European invasion of the
Americas and the present of the novel, published on the eve of the US
Columbian quincentenary -- is predicted as the epoch of Death-Eye Dog, one of
a series of epochs comprising the Long Count; the fragment also contains
annotations, made by its various keepers, of historical events that read as
fulfillments of the ancient prophecy. Arguably, Silko's novel may be read as yet
one more annotation on the epoch of Death-Eye Dog; from this perspective, the
novel also may be read as an introduction to the next epoch of human history, a
period to be initiated (as in North America's own Ghost Dance prophecies) by
"the disappearance of all things European" (Almanac frontispiece).
In Almanac of the Dead,
Silko portrays Tucson, the novel's apparent
center of gravity and the setting for much of the story, as a hopelessly corrupt
city "home to an assortment of speculators, confidence men, embezzlers,
lawyers, judges, police and other criminals, as well as addicts and pushers"
(frontispiece), trembling on the edge of apocalyptic redemption thanks to its
locus with respect to the Azteca migration motif. But even in Almanac of the
Dead, Sterling, Silko's on-again-off-again male protagonist, is a native of
Laguna, and the novel can end only when the "Exile" of the novel's second
chapter returns to Laguna in its final chapter, titled "Home":
Sterling hiked over the little sand hills across the little valley to the sandstone cliffs where the family sheep camp was. The windmill was pumping lazily in the afternoon breeze, and Sterling washed his face and hands and drank. The taste of the water told him he was home. Even thinking the word made his eyes fill with tears. (757)
Like Tayo's in Ceremony, Sterling's personal history is a story of contact with
attractive but dangerous non-Laguna forces, departure from Laguna, and
eventual return to Laguna with the acquired knowledge of how to live with
those forces. Both men's histories recapitulate the "Yellow Woman" motif that
Silko so strongly associates with the image of the river that snakes its way
along the southeastern corner of Old Laguna. In Ceremony, Tayo completes his
personal return (and re-enacts the annual return of the Laguna katsina spirits)
by crossing this river from the southeast at sunrise (255). In Almanac, however,
the water-spirit of Kawaika takes the shape of the giant spirit snake
Maahastryu, who formerly inhabited the lake after which the Laguna people
were originally named. Maahastryu has reappeared in the open pit of the
Jackpile uranium mine, "looking south, in the direction from {255} which the
twin brothers and the people would come" (763) in fulfillment of a prophecy of
which the Laguna story is but a small part.6
Silko continues to explore the motif of
departure and return in Gardens in
the Dunes (1999). Set at the turn of the century, this quiet, elegant novel
imitates the style of Victorian historical romance in the diction and narrative
distance that characterize the telling of the story; ultimately, however, both plot
and style work to give voice to Silko's persistently Laguna storytelling persona.
Though the protagonist, Indigo, is from Arizona, one of the Sand Lizard clan,
the fragile gardens of the title recall Silko's own description of the gardens near
the Laguna village of Paguate that were all destroyed by the Jackpile uranium
mining operations in the 1950s (Yellow Woman 44). From a Victorian
perspective, the novel recounts the life and Pyrrhic liberation of protagonist
Hattie Abbott, acquired at the cost of the demise of her photographer and
botanist husband Edward Palmer. Hattie and Edward are collectors of exotica,
and one of their early acquisitions is the child Indigo, a runaway from the
Sherman Indian Institute in Riverside, California. From the perspective of the
Indian protagonist, the plot of the novel recapitulates the familiar Laguna motif
of departure and recovery: Indigo, like her Laguna analog
Kochinninako/Yellow Woman, is spirited away from her homeland by an alien
force (here, the failing colonial zeitgeist informing the barren couple Hattie and
Edward). After surviving this encounter through a complicated process of both
resistance and assimilation, Indigo returns carrying new life for the people -- in
the form of her story; in the form of the child newly born to her older sister
Salt; in the form of the new alliance between the sisters of the Sand Lizard
people and the Laguna sisters Vedna and Maytha; and in the form of the new
seeds (exotic gladiolus tubers, which the women plant next to native datura in
the ancient Sand Lizard gardens in the dunes). Like the hybrid calves of the
speckled Mexican cattle in Ceremony, all these new forms become, by the end
of the novel, a part of the long story of the people.
To date, seven books and innumerable
critical essays have been published
on Silko's work, and most of the criticism has been positive, especially in the
case of Ceremony.7 Silko was recently named a Living Cultural
Treasure by the
New Mexico Humanities Council. In 1994 she also received the third
Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Lifetime Achievement
award, an honor she now shares with, among others, N. Scott Momaday (1992),
her Acoma neighbor and old friend Simon Ortiz (1993), and longtime Creek
friend and co-actress (in "Running on the Edge of the Rainbow") Joy Harjo
(1995). Honored by critics and creative writers alike, Leslie Marmon Silko has
clearly earned her status as one of America's premiere storytellers.
{256}
Notes
Major secondary works
Arnold, Ellen, ed., Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Barnett, Louise K., and James L Thorson, eds., Leslie Marmon Silko: a Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.
Chavkin, Allan, ed., Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: a Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Graulich, Melody, ed., "Yellow Woman," Leslie Marmon Silko. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
Jaskoski, Helen. Leslie Marmon Silko: a Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998.
Salyer, Gregory. Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Twayne, 1997.