Yellow Woman

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1974

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Background

Literary Context: Indigenous American Renaissance

In 1968, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn was published, spurring what scholar and critic Kenneth Lincoln calls a “Native American Renaissance.” Because this time period was concerned with environmental health, human and civil rights, and positive world change, the nation and the scholarly community became receptive to writers like Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joy Harjo. In their works, they explored themes of Cultural Alienation, as well as the conflict between tradition and progress—especially as it relates to the natural world—and tribes’ experiences of colonial racism. Like the Harlem Renaissance, this literary historical period reflects a group of disenfranchised people finding a voice through art and expressing the complexities, challenges, and beauty of their unique cultural experiences.

A hallmark of Indigenous American writing during this period is a reclamation of traditional storytelling styles translated to the medium of literary fiction and poetry. Silko’s “Yellow Woman” reflects these styles in its references to the Yellow Woman myth, the role of the narrator’s grandfather in her familiarity with the myth, and the rhythm of the story itself. Another common element in “Yellow Woman” is the incorporation of thematic natural imagery—the river and the mountains are natural boundaries which reflect the narrator’s struggle between the modern world and whiteness on the reservation and the traditional Indigenous world of Silva and the wilderness.

Lincoln’s coining of “Native American Renaissance” was immediately adopted by many scholars, but it is important to note that many Indigenous scholars reject the term. The term “renaissance” refers to a reawakening of lost art, as in the Italian and British Renaissance when classical work was literally rediscovered after a culture had died and passed into antiquity. Indigenous storytelling, however, continues to be a prominent feature of Indigenous culture and day-to-day life. In response to the critical reception of Lincoln’s work, A. Robert Lee says, “Admirers […] were quick to pronounce a landmark at once timely and striking in eloquence. Others thought the sense of new dawn unpersuasive, artificial periodization” (Lee, A. Robert. “Native American Renaissance: Timelines, Texts.” Native North American Authorship: Text, Breath, Modernity, Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2022, EBSCOhost, 17). As a result of critical reception, to call the movement a “renaissance” has been contentious.

Cultural Context: Indigenous American Identity

A recurring theme in Indigenous American literature of the 20th and 21st centuries is the conflict of identity in people who have experienced displacement, racism, and compulsory education designed to assimilate them into colonial European values. Many Indigenous Americans in the 20th century and beyond have more than one ethnic identity, which often results in internal conflict—especially for people whose culture values the wisdom and experience of their ancestors. Woven into the fabric of Indigenous experience are songs and stories that preserve traditions, morals, life lessons, and the very language of the tribe in question. Leslie Marmon Silko, like many of her contemporaries, draws on both the cultural storytelling traditions of her tribe and her own experience of having a diverse racial background to illuminate the challenges in understanding Indigenous American identity.

Much of the scholarly discussion around Indigenous Identity and Silko’s work involves her first novel, Ceremony. While the same themes apparent in Ceremony arise in “Yellow Woman,” they are conveyed in a more subtle and feminine way. Tara Ann Carter says that Ceremony and another Indigenous American novel of the same time period (Winter in the Blood by James Welch) both “serve as exemplars of the desire felt by Indigenous people to return to the old ways and to live the lives of tribal sovereignty and the exploration and desire for discovery/recovery of identity, both individual and collective” (Carter, Tara Ann. “First and Second Wave Native American Literature.” Yale National Initiative, 2016). The narrator in “Yellow Woman” is caught between the old ways of storytelling and the modern Indigenous experience. This tension is clear in the ambiguity of the narrator’s identity, as well as in the sharp contrast between her memory of her home in the Pueblo and the river and mountains she shares with Silva.