Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit

“From a High Arid Plateau in New Mexico”

After something dies, people or other animals eat it or use parts of it, and whatever remains returns to dust to nourish the plants: “Nothing is wasted” (25). Ancient Pueblo people filled vacant rooms with debris and castoff objects, digging a shallow grave in the corner to bury their dead. They treated the remains of everything with respect for its previous spirit and being. Similarly, the Antelope People did not waste the antelope that consented to give its meat, so the people would not starve. The Pueblo knew that if they were careless with the antelope’s remains, they would have trouble finding antelope next year. Everything, from people to rocks, eventually turns to dust, “and in this becoming they are once more joined with the Mother” (27).

“From the Emergence Place”

In the English language, the viewer is construed as separate from or outside of the landscape, but the Pueblo potters believed that people were a part of the landscape: “Human identity is linked with all the elements of creation through the clan” (28). The identity of everything is linked to all that around a thing or person. When Pueblo potters abstracted things in representation, they also imbued them with other meanings, like linking squash blossoms to the cardinal directions or a lightning bolt to good fortune or death, depending upon context. The Pueblo people preferred more abstract renderings because they felt as though lifelike renderings were too restrictive; in order to make contact with the rendering’s spirit, it needed to be a universal rendering of that thing.

Because the Pueblo people lived in such an unforgiving environment, they relied upon the cooperation of their environment: “survival depended upon harmony and cooperation not only among human beings, but also among all things” (29). They believed the Earth and Sky were sisters; in one story, the evil Gambler steals the Rain Clouds for his own personal gain, causing a drought which the Sun Youth and Grandmother Spider eventually end by setting the Rain Clouds free.

“Through the Stories We Hear Who We Are”

Despite subsisting amidst droughts in stone cities with buildings five stories high, the ancient Pueblo never recorded their knowledge and belief in writing, relying instead upon inclusive oral narrative. “Everything became a story” (31), and everyone was expected to listen and be able to recall at least a portion of narrative accounts so that the stories would remain intact, even if a key elder died. Conflicting versions of narrative arose but were all accepted as ways the biased speaker had heard the story told before: “the ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute truth” (32). Stories held important information, such as behavior and migration patterns of prey and noticeable geographic formations for lost travelers, but the exact dates were less important.

One story, which was usually told after passing a large sandstone boulder north of Old Laguna, concerned the Yellow Woman and the monstrous giant, Estrucuyo, who tried to eat her, cornering her in a cave too small for him to fit into. The Twin Hero Brothers heard the Yellow Woman’s cries and killed the giant, cutting out its heart and throwing it far away. The spot the heart landed is marked by the sandstone boulder.

Another story concerns Silko’s great relatives, sheepherders who were set upon and killed by Apache raiders using a mesa to obscure their approach: “Pueblo and Apache alike relied upon the terrain, the very earth herself, to give them protection and aid” (34). The story is linked to the landscape: “the continuity and accuracy of the oral narratives are reinforced by the landscape—and the Pueblo interpretation of that landscape is maintained” (35).

“The Migration Story: An Interior Journey”

The Laguna Pueblo migration stories refer to locations on the highway linking Paguate village with Laguna village, suggesting they continue to follow the same route their ancestors did in the Migration story from the unspecified Emergence place: “Thus, the landscape between Paguate and Laguna takes on a deeper significance: the landscape resonates the spiritual, or mythic, dimension of the Pueblo world even today” (36). The natural springs by Paguate village are critical for Laguna survival and recall the spiritual Emergence place from which all life sprung into cultural identity. However, the stories are also not meant to be taken literally, as white anthropologists wish, but rather identify a journey of awareness from which the people emerged from the earth.

In the Emergence story, the people found the opening into the Fifth world too small to climb out of to reach the land Mother Creator had promised, and the antelope and the badger had to help them escape. They had to imagine their relationship to everything around them to emerge, solidifying, for the Pueblo, the relationship between landscapes and dreams.

The stories told also strengthen the relationship between communities, assuring them that they are never the first to face humiliation or loss. A deep arroyo near King’s Bar has claimed the cars of many—both outsiders and Pueblo people alike: “People in the area regard the arroyo much as they might regard a living being, which has a certain character and personality […and] maintains a strong connection between human beings and the earth” (40). The unforgiving terrain and its supposed barrenness means that the people place great value on life, as survival is a triumph.

“Out Under the Sky”

Silko’s earliest memories are of being outside; when her father was younger, he also retreated to the safety of outside to escape from feeling like an outsider because of his mixed-race heritage. Silko rode her horse farther than her father ventured, never feeling afraid or lonely because she had listened to the old stories, which made her familiar with and connected to the landscape and its creatures. It also excited Silko to listen to stories and know the location where the story took place from her travels:“The landscape sits in the center of Pueblo belief and identity…[f]or this reason, the Pueblo people have always been extremely reluctant to relinquish their land for damns of highways” (43). The pit mining north of Laguna destroyed the gardens and orchards, leaving psychological scars on the Laguna people.

“Landscape as a Character in Fiction”

Many of the author’s short stories featured landscape elements that directly influenced the outcome of events. One such story, “Storyteller,” centers around a young Eskimo woman’s revenge for the death of her parents. The womanuses the Alaskan tundra to kill the white murderer by drowning him in a river frozen over with ice. The young woman understands her relationship to the environment in a way the murderer never can, although she realizes they will both eventually be reunited with the tundra. The presence of ice and storytelling within the story belies the Yupik Eskimos’ belief that the world will end as “an immeasurable freezing will descend with a darkness that obliterates the sun” (47).

For the Pueblo people, written words are suspect “because the true feelings of the speaker remain hidden as she reads words that are detached from the occasion and the audience” (48). In the spoken word, there is not as much emphasis placed upon the structure as in Anglicized storytelling, and the audience must trust that the meaning will be made evident eventually. In the Pueblo Creation story, Thought Woman thinks of her sisters, and then she and her sisters think of everything else to create the world. The Pueblo people do not place as much importance upon the language used, as there are at least six different languages used by twenty different Pueblo groups; however, they are concerned with the story and its communication. They believe that all language is a story, and that words exist as stories within stories, as everything is shaped by experience. Part of the story is thought to reside within its audience; for example, how “the origin story constructs our identity” (50).

In the Creation story, there are people of the Antelope and Badger clans who think of themselves as of this story: “One moves, then, from the idea of one’s identity as a tribal person into a clan identity, then to one’s identity as a member of an extended family” (51). A person’s identity is thusly shaped by stories. Although outsiders differentiate between the importance of family stories and tribal stories, the Pueblo people do not, placing just as much value on the Creation story, for example, as Silko’s story about her great relatives being slaughtered by Apache raiders on the high mesa. Storytelling is integral to childhood but also continues throughout a person’s life, including family accounts of the times a family member did something either negative or positive, which then lends perspective to the issues people must face. The stories center around keeping people together and often do not concern a certain time, as they are continuous.

One story involves a Vietnam vet who forgot to put his parking brake on and his car rolled down into the arroyo. This tragedy was tempered by another story of a man who similarly forgot, but who also left his wife and children in the car when it was swallowed by the arroyo, and they were badly injured.

Silko’s Aunt Susie once told a story about a little girl in Acoma who wanted yashtoah (corn mush crust), so her mother told her to fetch some wood. When the girl returned, she had found snakes instead of wood, and her mother told her to put the snakes back. The girl was hurt by the remark and decided to drown herself in the lake. She met an old man who tried to dissuade her from her intention, but he couldn’t catch her, so he told her mother what the girl planned. Her mother started making as much yashtoah as she could, and she went after her daughter, but her daughter jumped in the lake anyway, and all her mother could see was her little girl’s death feather in the lake. The mother was very sad, and scattered all of her daughter’s clothing and moccasins, along with theyashtoah, on the mesa where she lived, which turned into the beautiful butterflies of Acoma.

Anthropologists consider this story to be very old, and Silko’s version repeats valuable information—like the recipe for yashtoah—and has appropriated English words. The narrator likens this experience to that of the African and Caribbean peoples, who also had conquerors’ languages imposed upon them. However, the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not try to teach Native Americans the Western canon, but rather the abysmal education system. Even though the narrator was exposed to very little literature in school, she was constantly exposed to stories and storytelling at home, and people said that as long as she remembered the stories, she would be all right.

When Silko returned to Laguna Pueblo after college, she was worried that the storytelling had devolved, but found the youth still knew the stories she had learned growing up, told in both Laguna or English. Similarly, the Pueblos have been allowed to stay with their land, so they still have the land to tie them to the stories and vice versa. When Silko’s Aunt Susie told her stories, she would first tell a young child to go open the door to let their ancestors bring them the gifts of stories. When Aunt Susie was very old, she said she would soon be visiting her ancestors in the land of the dead and would be able to write down their stories for the narrator, believing death was “a journey that perhaps we can only begin to understand through an appreciation for the boundless capacity of language that, through storytelling, brings us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time” (59).