RESOURCES
Primary Works
Ellen L. Arnold, ed., Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko ( Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2000).
Sixteen interviews with Silko, plus a chronology of her life. Silko does not grant
interviews often, but when she does so she talks in depth about her views of her
writing and her desire to work for social justice in general and justice for Ameri-
can Indians in particular.
Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
Collects twenty-one essays on topics that range from Pueblo culture to the
meaning and significance of land and water, from tribal politics to centuries of
U.S. mistreatment of American Indians, from photography to murals to rocks
and memoir. The book includes “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian
Perspective.”
Criticism
Ellen L. Arnold, “An Ear for the Story, an Eye for the Pattern: Rereading Cer-
emony,” Modern Fiction Studies, 45, 1 (1999): 69–92.
Recommends rereading Ceremony to appreciate the underlying patterns and
historical perspectives of the novel. The article includes a focus on orality in the
work.
Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, eds., Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999).
Focuses mainly on Almanac of the Dead. Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm
A. Nelson’s “Shifting Patterns, Changing Stories: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Yellow
Women,” offers helpful reading of the integration of the yellow-woman myth in
Ceremony, seeing affinities in both Tayo and T’seh. Although not directly about
Ceremony, Daniel White’s “Antidote to Desecration: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Non-
fiction” is helpful for understanding her version of indigenous philosophy and its
differences from mainstream thought, while Robert Nelson’s “A Laguna Woman”
offers biographical insights.
Susan Blumenthal, “Spotted Cattle and Deer: Spirit Guides and Symbols of
Endurance and Healing in Ceremony,” American Indian Quarterly, 14 (Fall
1990): 367–377.
Argues for a spiritual connection between Tayo and the deer and highlights the
importance of both the deer and the hybrid cattle in Tayo’s recovery.
Alanna Kathleen Brown, “Pulling Silko’s Threads through Time: An Explo-
ration of Storytelling,” American Indian Quarterly, 19 (Spring 1995):
171–179.
Discusses the process of coming to understand Native American beliefs about
storytelling and demonstrates how useful Silko’s poetry, the collection Storyteller,
and her essays can be to a deeper understanding of Ceremony.