Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948)

     Our book gives us a clear and relevant biography of Silko, but kind of fails us in the background information we need most in order to understand the story. We do read on 3141 that “[A]mong her primary concerns as an artist are the continuity of native tradition and the power of ancient forces to govern modern life.” Some specific elements of traditon and ancient forces can be seen in a different understanding of space, time, and the interconnectivity of all living beings—plants, animals, and humans.
     The elements of space come up most clearly in the most famous of the Native American creation stories, that of the Navaho. In what is in great part a story of the search for the land they inhabit, the characters (most often insects) travel through several levels of the earth, and in each level they send out scouts in the four primary directions, looking for the land they are to inhabit. In almost every case, they offend the reigning spirit by committing adultery (which is to say, having sex with the other species (an intuition of evolution?). At any rate, in the end some good is done, and man is created from ears of corn (yellow woman?).
     We see some of the spatial importance by the direct mention of direction (“followed the river south,” “I walked north,” “one small window facing east.”). We also get the kind of pre-modern sense of space in a couple instances, such as when Silva says, “From here I can see the world” on pg. 3146 or on the same page when Yellow Woman says “I was standing in the sky with nothing around me but the wind.”
     The element of time is perhaps even more essential to the story. It is affixed in the kind of collapsing of the ancient times when the stories of Yellow Woman and the ka’tsina occurred, those stories that “couldn’t happen now” but which may in fact be unfolding in the story. There are several mentions of the unreality of what she is experiencing, and she even hopes that “eventually I will see someone, and then I will be certain that he is only a man” (3145).
An d for our purposes, perhaps the most important aspect of the story, and one which we might have been better prepared by our introduction, is the way that the human and other living things are interconnected. What we might have been forewarned of, for instance, is the kind of “shape-changing” that goes on in Native American lore. In the old Yellow Woman stories, for instance, the male “kidnapper/seducer” might have originally been a buffalo, or a wolf, and the meeting between the two both a confrontation of the spriti of the animal; and of man. The story of the ka’tsina that transformed from Buffalo to man, for instance, had the result, when yellow Woman returned to her husband, of making the wild buffalo docile in her presence, making it easier hunting for her family/tribe.
     In this story it seems that the totem of the ka’tsina is the horse. Look at the uncertain pronoun referent on 3144—as we are reading we don’t know to whom “he” refers, and in some way it is both the horse and the lover. On 3145 there is the same kind of collapsing of identity with the coyote and the lover. The descriptions of the body in sexual contact also carry attributes of the equine—“All I could know was the way he felt, warm, damp, his body beside me” (3145).
     I say “living things,” not just animals, noting on page 3147 that something of her actions are as inevitable as the blooming of a plant. We see this in the observation on the bottom of 3147: “I did not decide to go. I just went. Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn, just as I followed him.” Or, when she wakes up to see the black ants swarming over the pine cones near her foot, she thinks of her “family far below” her.
So, to understand how these stories directly influence the way that Silko envisions herself as a Native storyteller is important. We are left with the question—is this a traditional story in the ways the tales of old are? Or, is the positioning of herself as Yellow Woman a way for the narrator to justify her tryst with the virile stranger?
     We enter in medias res, or perhaps a little after the fact, so to speak. When we realize that it was the narrator who supplied the role of yellow Woman to herself, ka’tsina to her lover. And, it is she who controls the details of the story from then on. So, we know nothing of her state of mind before the action of the tale. When we do get depictions of the life in the pueblo, however, the domesticity is appalling. (Close quarters with the extended family, the making of Jello, etc.). Now, when Silko was asked whether her stepping out might have been an indication of her boredom, etc., whe answered with a quick and direct no. One writer suggests tat the narrator gain a greater appreciation of her surroundings in nature via the escapade and a greater understanding of herself. Another set of writers concentrates on the only lasting item that survives from the story, and that is the story itself—although there may not exist the present audience to hear and understand the story.

“Shifting Patterns, Changing Stories: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Yellow Women” Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm A. Nelson.
The story first published in 1974.
Sometimes she is killed by the ka’tsina spirit or her husband, sometimes she returns with a renewed spirit, and the tribe benefits.
Claims that with the narrator’s search for identity and sexual freedom comes a growing awareness of the land around her (124).
Looks at the moment when she wonders if Yellow Woman knew who she was.
When she says: “This is how it happens in the stories”, the use of the present tense signals that collapse of time I mentioned.
When she decides to tell that some Navaho had kidnapped me, is this kind of close to the truth?

Ruoff, A. LaVonne. “Ritual and Renewal: Keres Traditions in Silko’s Yellow Woman” stories.” MELUS, 5.4, Winter 78. 2-17
One of the themes of the story the power that physicaol sensation has to block out thoughts of home and family. Failure to see the pueblo indicates her separation from her real world.
What to make of the fact that it is she who comes up with Yellow Woman the night before?
Unlike in the traditional Yellow woman stories, he does not ask her to perform supernatural feats, simply to cook potatoes.
When she contemplates home, she fears that the only difference that her absence will make is that a story will be created about her.