Summary

Silko begins this story with a condensed version of the Laguna Indian creation myth:

Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman

is sitting in her room

and whatever she thinks about

appears . . .

Thought-Woman, the spider,

named things and

as she named them

they appeared.

She is sitting in her room

thinking of a story now

I'm telling you the story

she is thinking

Tayo is a half-breed born of a Luguna Indian mother and an unidentified white man in Gallup, New Mexico. His mother is homeless, and his earliest memories are of the men who come in and out of their corrugated tin shelter in an arroyo outside of town, and of sleeping under the tables in a local tavern when his mother would go off with some man or another. At four years old, she takes him to her home in the Laguna Pueblo and...