Biography of Leslie Silko

Leslie Silko (born 1948) is one of the foremost authors to emerge from the Native American literary renaissance of the 1970s. She blends western literary forms with the oral traditions of her Laguna Pueblo heritage to communicate Native American concepts concerning time, nature, and spirituality and their relevance in the contemporary world.

Silko, of Laguna Pueblo, Plains Indian, Mexican, and Anglo-American descent, was born in Albuquerque and raised on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in northern New Mexico. As a child she attended schools administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and also learned about Laguna legends and traditions from her great-grandmother and other members of her extended family. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Mexico in 1969 and briefly attended law school before deciding to pursue a writing career. While working on her fiction, Silko has taught at several universities and colleges throughout the southwest. She is also the single parent of two sons.

Silko's first novel, Ceremony (1977), is a nonchronological work that interweaves free verse poetry and narrative prose. The story is set primarily in the years following World War II and revolves around Tayo, a veteran of mixed white and Laguna heritage who returns to the reservation shattered by his war experiences. He ultimately finds healing, however, with the help of Betonie, an elderly man who, like Tayo, is an outcast from Laguna society due to his white heritage, and T'seh Montano, a medicine woman who embodies the feminine, life-giving aspects of the earth. Through them, Tayo learns that his community's ancient ceremonies are not merely rituals, but a means of achieving one's proper place within the universe. To underscore this concept, Silko incorporates Laguna myths and historical incidents, reflecting the Pueblo's abiding connection to the natural world which counteracts the despair and alienation engendered by white society. Critics applauded Ceremony, echoing Frank McShane's estimation that the novel "is one of the most realized works of fiction devoted to Indian life that has been written in this country, and it is a splendid achievement."

Silko's next work, Storyteller (1981), is comprised of poems from her earlier collection Laguna Woman (1974) as well as short stories, anecdotes, folktales, historical and autobiographical notes, and photographs. According to Bernard A. Hirsch, "this multigeneric work lovingly maps the fertile storytelling ground from which [Silko's] art evolves and to which it is here returned--an offering to the oral tradition which nurtured it." Several of the pieces from this work have been accorded significant attention. One such story, "Yellow Woman," is based on traditional abduction tales in which a kachina, or mountain spirit, kidnaps and seduces a young woman on her way to draw water. In Silko's version, a contemporary Pueblo woman realizes that her liaison with a cattle rustler is in fact a reenactment of the "yellow woman" legend. The boundary between her experience and the myth slowly dissolves as she becomes aware of her active role in the traditions of her community. Upon returning to her family, she hopes that the story of her affair will be passed on as a new episode in the visionary drama kept alive by the oral tradition.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Silko presents an apocalyptic vision of North America in which Native Americans reclaim their ancestral lands after whites, lacking the spiritual and moral force of the Indian world, succumb to crime, perversion, drug addiction, and environmental degradation. Some critics have objected to what they perceived as Silko's exaggeration of corruption in Anglo-American society. Malcolm Jones, Jr., observed that "in [Silko's] cosmology, there are good people and there are white people." However, most have praised her vivid characterizations and inventive plotting, contending that while The Almanac of the Dead may perturb some white readers, it is a compelling portrait of a society founded upon the eradication of Native Americans and their cultures.

Leslie Marmon Silko has earned acclaim for her writings about American Indians. She first received substantial critical attention in 1977 with her novel Ceremony, which tells of a half-breed war veteran's struggle for sanity after returning home from World War II. The veteran, Tayo, has difficulties adjusting to civilian life on a New Mexico Indian reservation. He is haunted by his violent actions during the war and by the memory of his brother's death in the same conflict. Deranged and withdrawn, Tayo initially wastes away on the reservation while his fellow Indian veterans drink excessively and rail against racism,

After futilely exploring Navajo rituals in an attempt to discover some sense of identity, Tayo befriends a wise old half-breed, Betonie, who counsels him on the value of ceremony. Betonie teaches Tayo that ceremony is not merely formal ritual but a means of conducting one's life. With the old man's guidance, Tayo learns that humanity and the cosmos are aspects of one vast entity, and that ceremony is the means to harmony within that entity.

Although Silko's subsequent literary output has been less than prodigious, it has not been without significance. In 1993, she published an autobiographical narrative entitled Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures that placed particular emphasis the importance of water. That book was followed in 1996 by Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today, in which Silko discourses on a wide range of topics, including storytelling, the power of words in the Pueblo, and the relationship between memory and photography. Silko's most recent novel, Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel (1999) tells the story of a young Native American girl in flight from the destruction of her own tribal world by whites. In 2000, the University Press of Mississippi published Conversations With Leslie Marmon Silko. Although Silko has not granted many interviews during her professional career, the sixteen in this collection provide insight into her views of living oral traditions.

With its depiction of life on the Indian reservation and its exploration of philosophical issues, Ceremony established Silko as an important artist from the American Indian community. Charles R. Larson, writing in Washington Post Book World, called Ceremony a novel "powerfully conceived" and attributed much of the book's success to Silko's incorporation of Indian elements. "Tayo's experiences may suggest that Ceremony falls nicely within the realm of American fiction about World War II," Larson wrote. "Yet Silko's novel is also strongly rooted within the author's own tribal background and that is what I find especially valuable here." Similarly, Frank MacShane wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Silko skillfully incorporates aspects of Indian storytelling techniques into Ceremony. "She has used animal stories and legends to give a fabulous dimension to her novel," he declared. MacShane added that Silko was "without question ... the most accomplished Indian writer of her generation."

Some critics considered Ceremony a powerful confirmation of cosmic order. Elaine Jahner, who reviewed the novel for Prairie Schooner Review, wrote that the book "is about the power of timeless, primal forms of seeing and knowing and relating to all of life." She observed that the Indian custom of communal storytelling provided the novel with both theme and structure and added that Tayo eventually "perceives something of his responsibilities in shaping the story of what human beings mean to each other." And Peter G. Beidler focused on the importance of storytelling in Ceremony by writing in American Indian Quarterly that the novel is both "the story of a life [and] the life of a story." Beidler called Ceremony "a magnificent novel" that "brings life to human beings and makes readers care about them."

After the publication of Ceremony in 1977, Silko received greater recognition for her earlier short stories. Among her most noteworthy stories were "Lullaby," "Yellow Woman," and "Tony's Story." "Lullaby" is an old woman's recollection of how her children were once taken away for education and how they returned to a culture that no longer seemed familiar or comfortable. Writing in the Southwest Review, Edith Blicksilver called "Lullaby" Silko's "version of the Native American's present-day reality." "Yellow Woman" concerns a Navajo woman who is abducted by a cattle ranger whom she suspects to be the embodiment of a spirit. In MELUS A. LaVonne Ruoff wrote that "`Yellow Woman' is based on traditional abduction tales, [but] it is more than a modernized version." Ruoff attributed the difference to Silko's emphasis on "the character's confusion about what is real and what is not." "Tony's Story" is about an Indian who kills a vicious policeman. In MELUS, Ruoff noted Silko's ability to equate the murder with the Pueblo exorcism ritual. "Tony's Story," Ruoff declared, "deals with the return to Indian ritual as a means of coping with external forces."

Some of Silko's stories were included in the anthology The Man to Send Rainclouds, which derives its title from Silko's humorous tale of conflict between a Catholic priest and Pueblo Indians during an Indian funeral. Silko also included some of her early stories in her 1981 collection Storyteller, which features her poetry as well. In the New York Times Book Review, N. Scott Momaday called Storyteller "a rich, many-faceted book." Momaday acknowledged Silko's interests in ritual and the Indian storytelling tradition and her ability to portray characters and situations. "At her best," Momaday contended, "Leslie Silko is very good indeed. She has a sharp sense of the way in which the profound and the mundane often run together." James Polk gave similar praise in Saturday Review when he wrote that Silko's "perceptions are accurate, and her style reflects the breadth, the texture, the mortality of her subjects."

Silko's other writings include Laguna Woman, a 1974 poetry collection, and The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, a collection of correspondence between Silko and poet James Wright, who died of cancer in 1980. In addition, Silko has been honored with a Pushcart Prize and an award from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation. The latter award--$176,000--was particularly appreciated by Silko, who produced most of her writings while also working as an English professor. Acknowledging her cash prize, she told Time that she was now "a little less beholden to the everyday world."

Associated Works

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-)
• At the time of Silko's birth:
• Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated at age 78
• Harry S Truman was president of the U.S.
• A new 1949 Ford four-door sedan sold for $1,236
• Brandeis University was founded at Waltham, Massachusetts
• Norman Mailer, 25, published The Naked and the Dead
• The times:
• 1930-1960: Modernist period in American literature
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1960-present: Postmodernist period in American literature
• 1990-1991: Gulf War
• Silko's contemporaries:
• Tom Clancy (1947-) American writer
• Stephen King (1947-) American writer
• Gerald Adams (1948-) Irish leader of Sinn Fein
• Jeremy Irons (1948-) British actor
• Donna Karan (1948-) American designer
• Mfume Kweise (1948-) American head of NAACP
• Selected world events:
• 1951: Japan gained independence from the Allies
• 1954: U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that public school segregation is unconstitutional
• 1961: Daniel Petrie's film Raisin in the Sun released
• 1974: "Streaking" became a U.S. fad
• 1986: Paul Simon released the album Graceland
• 1993: An earthquake measuring 6.4 on the Richter Scale killed 20,000 in India

Further Reading

• Allen, Paula Gunn, editor, Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, Modern Language Association of America, 1983, pp. 127-33.
• Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 14, Gale, 1995.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 23, 1983, Volume 74, 1993.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 143: American Novelists since World War II, Third Series, Gale, 1994.
• Native North American Literature, Gale, 1994.
• Patraka, Vivian, and Louise A. Tilly, editors, Feminist Re-Visions: What Has Been and Might Be, University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 26-42.
• Scholer, Bo, editor, Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization, Seklos, 1984, pp. 116-23.