SOURCE: “The Web of Meaning: Naming the Absent Mother, in Storyteller,” in “Yellow Woman”: Leslie Marmon Silko, edited by Melody Graulich, Rutgers University Press, 1993, pp. 213-32.

In the following essay, Jones analyzes Silko's use of the traditional Yellow Woman myth as a means of presenting the stories of the Laguna woman, her mother, and herself—merging myth and autobiography.

They think I am stronger than I am. I would tell this like a story but where a story should begin I am left standing in the beat of my silences. There has to be someone to name you. 

—Wendy Rose, “Naming Power”

Storyteller by Leslie Silko begins with the image of “a tall Hopi basket … inside the basket are hundreds of photographs.” The form and structure of the text reflect this image; it is a collage of stories, poems, myths, folktales, autobiographical notes, letters and pictures. And, like...