Leslie Marmon Silko

Writer

• Born: March 5, 1948
• Place of Birth: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Author Profile

The tensions and cultural conflicts affecting many of Leslie Marmon Silko’s characters can be seen as fictional renderings of Silko’s experience. Born of mixed European American and Navajo blood, Silko spent her formative years learning the stories of her white ancestors and their relationship with the native population into which they married. Her great-grandfather, Robert Marmon, had come to the Laguna Pueblos in New Mexico in the early 1870s as a surveyor and eventually married a Laguna woman. Even more important to Silko’s development as a writer was the later generation of Marmons—half European American and half Native American—who continued to transmit the oral traditions of the Laguna Pueblo people. One such source was the Aunt Susie of Silko’s autobiographical writings. The wife of Silko’s grand-uncle, she was a schoolteacher in the Laguna Pueblos during the 1920s and years afterward passed on to the young Silko the oral heritage of her race. So intimate was Silko’s imagination with the elements of Laguna culture that her father’s family photographs serve as visual commentary on the sketches and stories of Storyteller (1981).

Like the Inuit woman in Storyteller, Silko attended the local school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but she remained there only a short time, moving on to Catholic schools in Albuquerque, eventually receiving a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in 1969. Like her ancestors, she taught school at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, where she wrote Laguna Woman (1974), her first volume of poetry, and Ceremony (1977), her first novel. One of the most well-known of her works and one of the best novels written by a Native American, the book tells the story of Tayo, a World War II veteran, who tries to cope with the conflicts of his mixed-blood heritage. Silko later went on to teach English at the University of New Mexico and the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Her short stories were beginning to appear in the early 1970s, and she quickly gained a reputation as one of the leading writers in the Native American Renaissance. The term is applied to the literary movement beginning in the 1960s that features works by Native American writers using tribal customs and traditions as literary material. Stories such as “Yellow Woman,” in which a mortal is seemingly abducted by spiritual beings, and “Uncle Tony’s Goat,” which retells an old Laguna beast fable, are typical of Silko’s handling of traditional indigenous material. One of her best stories, “Lullaby,” treats the conflict of an elderly Navajo couple as they seek to come to terms with the dominant culture and how that conflict strengthens their traditional values.

The tome Almanac of the Dead (1992) took Silko more than a decade to write. The fictional account spans nearly five centuries of North American history and describes a contemporary uprising of Native people against their oppressors, both inspired by and later inciting action by Zapatistas in Mexico. In its indictment of white hegemony and Western exploitation, the novel covers drug trafficking, weapons dealing, organ harvesting, and bestiality, among other destructive practices.

Silko's third novel, Gardens in the Dunes (2000), expressly contrasts nineteenth-century Native and Euro-American attitudes and behaviors toward nature through a coming-of-age journey. Her novella Ocean Story is a fictionalized exploration of Silko's own reconnection with the ocean and was published electronically in 2013.

Silko has forayed into nonfiction as well. Her essay collection Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1997) reflects on the challenges of modern Native American life, from cultural preservation to redressing racial injustice. The Turquoise Ledge, a memoir detailing not only her personal and family history but her explorations of the Sonoran Desert, was published in 2010. Over the years, Silko's work has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Grant, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Lifetime Achievement Award. Silko was granted the Robert Kirsch Award in 2020.

Bibliography

Allen, Paula Gunn. “The Feminine Landscape of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” In Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Design. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983.

Barnett, Louise K., and James L. Thorson, eds. Leslie Marmon Silko. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Barnett, Sofia. "Religious Studies Professor Discusses Work of Author Leslie Marmon Silko." The Brown Daily Herald, 23 Mar. 2023, www.browndailyherald.com/article/2023/03/religious-studies-professor-discusses-work-of-author-leslie-silko. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

Brumble, H. David. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Fitz, Brewster E. Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

Graulich, Melody, ed. “Yellow Woman”: Leslie Marmon Silko. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.

Jaskoski, Helen. “From the Time Immemorial: Native American Traditions in Contemporary Short Fiction.” In Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, edited by Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1987.

Jaskoski, Helen. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998.

Krumholz, Linda J. “‘To Understand This World Differently’: Reading and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Storyteller.’” Ariel 25 (January, 1994): 89–113.

Krupat, Arnold. “The Dialogic of Silko’s Storyteller.” Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature, edited by Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

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McAllister, Mick. “Homeward Bound: Wilderness and Frontier in American Indian Literature.” In The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989.

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Palmer, Linda. “Healing Ceremonies: Native American Stories of Cultural Survival.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill de. “Storytellers and Their Listener-Readers in Silko’s ‘Storytelling’ and ‘Storyteller.’” The American Indian Quarterly 21 (Summer, 1997): 333–335.

Ronnow, Gretchen. “Tayo, Death, and Desire: A Lacanian Reading of Ceremony.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse in Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

Salyer, Gregory. Leslie Marmon Silko. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1980.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Interview.” Short Story, n.s. 2 (Fall, 1994): 91–95.

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Literary Companion. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Print.

Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL) 2, no. 10 (Fall, 1998). Special issue on Almanac of the Dead.

Wiget, Andrew. Native American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1985.