In the following essay, Hirsch provides an in-depth examination of Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, a collection of writings in several genres which, the critic suggests, constitutes a piece drawn from a vast, everregenerating Laguna Pueblo oral tradition.

In the following essay, Wallace discusses Silko's Ceremony and N. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child and states that the novels "are attempts to articulate the survival of those people who are known as indians."

In the essay below, Krumholz describes Silko's attempts to engage non-Native American readers in Storyteller in order to inform their understanding of Laguna culture.

In the following essay, Swan discusses the male relationships in Silko's Ceremony and how they relate to the customs and practices of the Pueblo of Laguna.

In the following essay, Krumholz discusses Silko's collection, Storyteller, asserting that the author "appropriates the terms of the colonizer in order to change forms of representation, to change readers, and to change the world."

In the following essay, Swan analyzes the influence of matriliny typical of the Laguna Pueblo on Silko's Ceremony.

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.

In the following essay, Jaskoski maintains that by contextualizing stories between cultures, Silko transforms the Laguna tales in Storyteller into universal stories.

In the essay below, Krupat applies Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theories to Silko's Storyteller as he discusses the roles of authority and voice.

In the following essay, Evasdaughter asserts that, "the celestial laughter" Silko evokes in Ceremony "shows that Indian civilization is living and has the potential to transform anglo culture."

In the following essay, Taylor Evans asserts that, "One of the basic unspoken feminist assumptions—that women are essentially powerless—is debunked within Silko's texts, for the mothers and daughters are bastions of the American Indian society in times of great crisis."

In the following interview, Silko discusses her perceptions of herself as a writer, the role of oral tradition, women and men's roles in Laguna Society, and the nature of Native American political reform.

In the following essay, Blumenthal analyzes the symbolism of the spotted cattle and their importance to Tayo's journey for healing in Silko's Ceremony.

[Leslie Silko] attempts in some of her short stories and poems to explore the conflict between traditionalism and modernity. Fortunately, she has been able to transcend the limits of her minority experience…. Her intelligence, sensitivity, and remarkably controlled narrative techniques have produced fictional characterizations that do not typify the simplistic vision of the racial conflict. Even her extremely personal, semiautobiographical poetic renditions avoid the sentimental stereotype, revealing...

For Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), the strength of tribal traditions is based not on Indians' rigid adherence to given ceremonies or customs but rather on their ability to adapt traditions to ever-changing circumstances by incorporating new elements. Although this theme is most fully developed in her … [novel Ceremony], it is also present in her earlier short stories, "The Man to Send Rainclouds," "Tony's Story," "from Humaweepi, Warrior Priest,"...

Did Leslie Marmon Silko have in mind the word tao when she named the protagonist of her first novel? It's a striking resemblance, tao and Tayo. And clearly Tayo, who is a half-breed of the Laguna pueblo in New Mexico, where he is scorned by many for his mixed blood (and where his name, for all I know, may be common), and who is moreover a war veteran critically deranged by his experience of jungle combat, is much in need of finding the "way." He does find it, after prolonged illness and...

[To] my mind nobody has drawn on an Indian mythology with more grace and power than the Laguna writer Leslie Silko…. [Even] a cursory survey in Boas Keresan Texts of the originmyth episodes as told by Laguna and other Keresan Pueblo people will reveal the skill and tact with which Silko establishes and maintains a mythic pre-text for [Ceremony], the fictional story of Tayo, the disturbed Indian veteran of World War II…. Silko is no hidebound traditionalist as an artist, certainly, but nearly e...

"Storyteller" is a rich, many-faceted book. It consists of short stories, anecdotes, folktales, poems, historical and autobiographical notes, and photographs. It begins with the description of an old Hopi basket in which there are hundreds of photographs, all taken, presumably, at Laguna Pueblo, N.M., near the turn of the century. "The photographs are here," we are told, "because they are part of many of the stories and because many of the stories can be traced in the phot...

Ceremony will surely take its place as one of a distinguished triumvirate of first novels by contemporary American Indians. Like Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Welch's Winter in the Blood, it presents us with the characteristic protagonist of the contemporary Indian novel: the young Indian male who begins the novel confused and disoriented and who ends it relatively unconfused after reorienting himself to important elements of his family and tribal identity. The major themes of the novel, th...

[Ceremony] is a special and most complete example of [the affirmation of knowledge of source and place and spiritual return] and what it means in terms of Indian resistance [to forced colonization], its use as literary theme, and its significance in the development of a national Indian literature. Tayo, the protagonist in the usual sense, in the novel is not "pure blood" Indian; rather he is of mixed blood, a mestizo. He, like many Indian people of whom he is a reflection, is faced with circum...

Ceremony is about the power of timeless, primal forms of seeing and knowing and relating to all of life. The concept of an on-going communal participation in stories that shapes individual freedom according as the individual chooses to participate in the stories' development serves as the novel's theme and structuring force. Readers must join the novel's characters in a search for the meaning of the story that is revealed bit by bit throughout the book as Tayo, the protagonist, graduall...

The world that Silko creates in Ceremony is essentially a masculine one. Her story centers upon an Indian veteran named Tayo immediately after World War II. Crippled by more than his involvement in the war, his story (and Silko's novel) becomes an elaborate exorcism of the past, a purification rite of all the emotional tensions inflicted upon him since his childhood. As the narrative weaves in and out of the past and the present—juxtaposing scenes from Tayo's childhood and adolescence w...

The literature of the American Indian is ritualistic. Its whole purpose is to establish a sense of unity between the individual and his surroundings, which include the landscape, the weather, history, legends and all other creatures. The very act of storytelling is a part of this process: sometimes its purpose is medicinal, to cure an illness; at the very least it is an act of discovery, a search for physic wholeness wherein nothing is left out. Leslie Marmon Silko's first novel, aptly entitled �...

[In Ceremony] Silko demonstrates that she is a "saver"—of songs, religious rituals, histories, and stories of the Laguna Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Her determination to preserve so much, however, makes great demands on the reader, who must exercise a selectivity the author has not provided. Theoretically, there is no reason why a work of fiction cannot accommodate both the curator and the scribe of a culture, but Silko, I think, has not found the proper form for combining these offic...

Memory and invention are the stuff of Silko's storytelling. Although many of her stories [in Storyteller] traverse familiar territory—the dislocation of a disinherited people—her perceptions are acute, and her style reflects the breadth, the texture, the mortality of her subjects. The title story, set in Alaska, establishes the theme of cultural conflict that dominates the book. The strongest story, perhaps, is "Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand," a gently ironic tale ...