In the following excerpt, Seyersted provides a thematic overview of Silko's "The Man to Send Rain Clouds."

In a sense [Leslie Marmon Silko] started to write in the fifth grade: "A teacher gave us a list of words to make sentences out of, and I just made it into a story automatically" (interview in Dexter Fisher, ed., The Third Woman . . .). But it was only at college in 1967 when she was forced to write a story in a creative writing course and found again that what was difficult for others came naturally to her, that she realized she was a writer. Back at Laguna she had just heard in headline form that an old man had been found dead at a sheep camp and had been given a traditional burial and that the priest had resented the fact that he was not called in. Unable to think of...