Though considered a Native American writer, Silko's heritage is mixed. Her great-grandfather, Robert G. Marmon, was a white man from Ohio who came to Laguna Pueblo, in New Mexico, in 1871 as a teacher. He married Maria Anaya, a Pueblo woman, and spent the rest of his life on or near the Laguna reservation. Silko's mother, Mary Virginia Leslie, was part Cherokee, and her father, Leland Howard Marmon, a photographer, was a mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo Indian. In her writing and speaking Silko has chosen to focus on her Native American ancestors and seldom, if ever, mentions non-Indian relatives. Since the themes of her writing often center on the struggle of those with mixed blood to find acceptance, an understanding of this mixed racial and cultural heritage is crucial to an understanding of her work. In the biographical note to the 1973 edition of Laguna Woman: Poems, Silko wrote, "the core of my writing is the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or a mixed-blooded person; what it is to grow up neither white nor fully traditional Indian." Moreover, much of her work--including Storyteller (1981), Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures (1993), Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996), and Rain (1996)--has self-consciously explored her own familial and cultural roots.
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