Her mixed-blood heritage mirrors the tensions and the strengths that have characterized life at this Native American community at least since the late nineteenth century. In 1869 Walter Marmon came from Ohio to Laguna to survey the pueblo boundary. He remained in New Mexico, becoming a government schoolteacher at Laguna in 1871. The following year his brother, Robert G. Marmon, Silko's great-grandfather, settled at Laguna as a surveyor and trader. His second wife was Marie Anaya, a Laguna who had attended the Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. While Silko was a child, Marie Marmon -- whom she called "Grandma A'mooh" -- lived next door and provided the future novelist with a significant link to traditional Laguna ways.
Walter and Robert Marmon both served terms as pueblo governors during the 1870s. At that time the synthesis of Laguna spirituality and Roman Catholicism that had endured for three centuries was facing challenges from Protestant missionaries. As Protestants, the Marmons were agents of change and bore at least some of the responsibility for the destruction of the largest kivas at Laguna and for the undermining of Catholic influences.
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