Texts:

"Yellow Woman." Edited with an introduction by Melody Graulich. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1993

"Language and Literature from a Pueblo Perspective." In Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York : Simon & Schuster, 1996.

A series of Yellow Woman Stories in Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Edited and introduction by Paula Gunn Allen.

Plan

This unit is intended to show the relationship between contemporary American Indian writing and the oral tradition. First published in Silko’s collection Storyteller, "Yellow Woman" has been re-issued in the text edited by Graulich, and includes an introduction, interviews, and critical essays. The reason I chose "Yellow Woman" is not that I consider it to be "better" than other stories (although it is one of the best), but that it has a good critical text (Graulich) to go along with it, and it has identifiable connections to a specific tradition of oral stories.

Silko’s "Yellow Woman" is a story which parallels the older Keres stories about a woman who is taken from her home, usually by an evil Ka’tsina. In some Yellow Woman stories, the husband attempts to rescue her. Eventually, the woman returns, having been changed, perhaps, by her experience away from the ordinary activities of Pueblo life. In Silko’s version, a woman stays with a man named Silva, who claims that she is actually Yellow Woman. He tells her, "But someday they will talk about us, and they will say, ‘Those two lived long ago when things like that happened.’" The woman in the story must decide whether she is in fact Yellow Woman, or if Silva is just using a good pick-up line.

"Yellow Woman provides the context for a wide range of issues. This story, for example, provides a way of discussing the relationship between the oral tradition and written discourse. In this story (and many of her other stories), Silko includes ideas and elements from the oral tradition to create a bridge between these two ontologically different means of communication. Because she bases her story on a specific tradition of stories, Silko thematically engages the concept of change: namely, how the oral tradition lives by continuing to take in new elements ideas in relation to a changing world. In "Yellow Woman," he woman knows the Yellow Woman stories, remembers that her grandfather loved the story, and now must decide whether the older stories have relevance for the present. Another issue is why the Yellow Woman stories continue to be compelling to listeners. Is it possible, for instance, to see the Yellow Woman stories as having an element of tricksterism, challenging the ordinary world of women at home, whose work is both important and necessary to the continued existence of the tribal group.

Suggested Unit

I. Discuss the older Yellow Woman stories

1. What happens in the stories
2. What are important elements Silko picks up later?

1. How is Silko’s story like and unlike the stories from the oral tradition?
2. What judgments, if any, do we make about the characters?
3. How does the story suggest that it is possible for the Yellow Woman stories to continue to exist when there are "highways and pickup trucks that Yellow Woman never saw"?

1. What does Silko say about the concepts of the oral tradition as it appears in the story?
2. What are some theoretical elements about language and literature that Silko talks about in her essays, and how do these elements manifest themselves in the story?

1. What is the value of unconventional viewpoints within a conventional society? What is the value of conventional existence as it appears in the story? In life in Milwaukee?
2. How does "Yellow Woman" help teach that American Indian cultures are changing, living cultures – not frozen images from the nineteenth century?