Born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on Laguna Pueblo, a Native American reservation fifty miles west of Albuquerque. The Laguna Pueblo is central to her sense of herself as a person and a writer. In The Man to Send Rain Clouds, she explains: "I grew up at Laguna Pueblo. I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna. This place I am from is everything I am as a writer and human being."

One of three sisters, Silko describes her childhood as "sheltered." Her parents valued education, and encouraged their daughters to succeed on many levels. In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out, Silko tells Donna Perry that her father, Lee Marmon, taught her to shoot a gun at age seven and let his daughters compete in contests against grown men: "My dad would say, 'Well, my girls can do...