SOURCE: Krumholz, Linda. “Native Designs: Silko's Storyteller and the Reader's Initiation.” In Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, pp. 63-86. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Krumholz discusses the various narrative techniques Silko utilizes in Storyteller to guide the reader.

In a Tiffany's ad titled “Native Design,” the famous New York jewelry store advertises 5″-×-7″ frames for ＄300 apiece as part of their Native American Collection, with styles labeled “Hopi,” “Iroquois,” “Columbia,” “Mississippi,” “Mohawk,” and “Pueblo.”¹ This exemplifies the white American embrace and appropriation of American Indianness that makes it so difficult for American Indians to be heard in their own terms. Jimmie Durham, a Cherokee artist, describes a “Master Narrative” of American whites, a narrative that simultaneously erases, embraces, and consumes American Indians; a narrative that denies our colonial past, our colonial...