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Yellow Woman | Introduction

First published in 1974 in Kenneth Rosen's anthology, The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories By American Indians, ''Yellow Woman'' has subsequently appeared in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1981 work, Storyteller, a collection of poems, stories and photographs. ''Yellow Woman'' tells the story of a young Laguna Pueblo woman who temporarily goes off with a strange man she meets on a walk along the river. The woman is swept up in the traditional Keresan myth of Kochininako, the Yellow Woman, who left her tribe and family to wander for years with the powerful ka'tsina, or spirit, Whirlwind Man. The story features a compelling blurring of the boundaries between myth and everyday experience, between contemporary Native American life and ancient myths.

In Kenneth Rosen's anthology, The Man to Send Rain Clouds, ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ was published to stand alone. In Storyteller, Silko surrounds ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ with additional poems and stories that further elucidate Yellow Woman's relationship to the land, the spirits that pervade it and the stories that derive from it. Bernard Hirsch writes in American Indian Quarterly that ‘‘this multigeneric work lovingly maps the fertile storytelling ground from which her art evolves and to which it is here returned—and offering to the oral tradition which nurtured it.’’ In conjunction with the other works included in Storyteller, ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ manages to both recreate and comment upon the oral traditions that have sustained the Laguna Pueblo community.

Yellow Woman Summary

The poem that prefaces ‘‘Yellow Woman’’ suggests that the story that follows is mythic. Whirlwind Man belongs ‘‘to the wind,’’ and he and Kochininako, Yellow Woman,"travel swiftly / this whole world.'' At the story's opening, the unnamed female narrator awakens at dawn next to a man on a riverbank. She watches the sun rise, then gets up and walks south, following their footprints from the day before. She comes across their horses, and she looks for but cannot see her pueblo (a multi-storied dwelling built of adobe; capitalized, the word also means "people" in the sense of a tribal group).

She returns to the sleeping man to tell him she is leaving. He reminds her, smiling, that she must come with him. He calls her "Yellow Woman'' and will not answer her questions about who he is, saying only that the night before she had guessed who he was and why he had come for her. The narrator insists she is not Yellow Woman (‘‘I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side of the mesa. Your name is Silva and you are a stranger I met by the river yesterday afternoon’’). Laughing, he tells her that what happened yesterday has nothing to do with today. He calls her Yellow Woman again. The narrator evokes the Keresan myth explicitly, telling him that ‘‘the old stories about the ka'tsina spirit and Yellow Woman can't mean us.’’

The narrator recounts that in the old stories, Yellow Woman went away with a spirit from the North and lived with him for a long time. Eventually, she returned to her pueblo with twin... » Complete Yellow Woman Summary