Leslie Marmon Silko, “Yellow Woman”

This is a post-modern as well as a post-colonial story. That is to say, it mixes both Western and Native American traditions, ancient and modern world views, as well as placing a tale of a colonized culture into a Post-colonial world.

Silko uses as the seed for her story the Pueblo Indian story of Yellow Woman.

There are different versions of this story, but basically it goes like this: Yellow Woman meets a handsome young man by a river, and either he captures her, or she goes off with him of her own free will.  He turns out not to be just any man, of course, but a Kachina. 

(A Kachina is a kind a spirit.  There are different sorts of Kachina – some teach, some are warriors, some are tricksters.)

In any case, she is gone for quite some time.  Usually upon her return her people welcome her gladly, because she has brought some gift to the tribe: new babies who will be great warriors, or a new way to cure meat, or a new kind of weapon, or a new song. 

[How can there be different versions of the story?  Well, this is a part of Pueblo culture – of Native American culture in general, in fact, and of many cultures with oral traditions. When a cultural is kept orally, passed down communally, there are many different versions of a given story.  Which is the “right” version?  All are. 

This is very different from the way in which Western / Europeans look at a text, or at truth: we have canon, as we call it: the real version of the text, or of a truth.  As Silko says elsewhere: “…people were happy to listen to two or three different versions of the same event of the same story…. 

Defenders of each version might joke and tease one another, but…implicit in the Pueblo oral tradition was the awareness that loyalties, grudges, and kinship must always influence the narrator’s choices.” 

“The ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute truth.” In other words, among many people, there is not one single right truth, not one right way, but a communal discussion, various versions of reality, which leads to a consensus reality.

Here’s one Yellow Woman story that Silko gives us in a later essay:

In one story, the people are suffering during a great drought and accompanying famine. Each day, Kochininako has to walk farther and farther from the village to find fresh water for her husband and children.

One day she travels far, far to the east, to the plains, and she finally locates a freshwater spring. But when she reaches the pool, the water is churning violently as if something large had just gotten out of the pool. Kochininako does not want to see what huge creature had been at the pool, but just as she fills her water jar and turns to hurry away, a strong, sexy man in buffalo skin leggings appears by the pool. Little drops of water glisten on his chest. She cannot help but look at him because he is so strong and so good to look at.

Able to transform himself from human to buffalo in the wink of an eye, Buffalo Man gallops away with her on his back. Kochininako falls in love with Buffalo Man, and because of this liaison, the Buffalo People agree to give their bodies to the hunters to feed the starving Pueblo. Thus Kochininako's fearless sensuality results in the salvation of the people of her village, who are saved by the meat the Buffalo people "give" to them.

Also, Silko tells us: In the old Pueblo world, differences were celebrated as signs of the Mother Creators' grace. Persons born with physical or sexual differences were highly respected and honored because their physical differences gave them special positions as mediators between this world and the spirit world. The great Navajo medicine man of the 1920s, the Crawler, had a hunchback and could not walk upright, but he was able to heal even the most difficult cases.

Before the arrival of Christian missionaries, a man could dress as a woman and work with the women and even marry a man without any fanfare. Likewise, a woman was free to dress like a man, to hunt and go to war with the men and to marry a woman. In the old Pueblo world view, we are all a mixture of male and female, and this sexual identity is changing constantly. Sexual inhibition did not begin until the Christian missionaries arrived.

For the old-time people, marriage was about teamwork and social relationships, not about sexual excitement. In the days before the Puritans came, marriage did not mean an end to sex with people other than your spouse. Women were just as likely as men to have a "si'ash," or lover.]

Silko is obviously working with and against the Yellow Woman tale in her story. 

She gives us Silva, who seems like an actual human male, and may well be one.  At some points in the narrative, we think he is a one.  And our narrator (who remains unnamed, although Silva calls her Yellow Woman) sometimes thinks he is a human male, and sometimes can’t decide.  He must be a Navajo, she thinks; except he speaks Pueblo really well.  But he’s tall like a Navajo, and Pueblo men don’t steal (like those Navajo do!).

The name Silva means “from the woodlands” or “from the wilds,” and of course the Kachina in the traditional Yellow Woman story was often a mountain spirit.  So there’s that too.

And at one point, the narrator also thinks of him as Coyote, the trickster – there’s that too. 

Kachina can also be tricksters.

[What is a trickster? These are archetypal characters who break rules and get in trouble.  They show up in every culture.  Loki is a trickster.  So is Coyote.  So is Bugs Bunny.

Trickster aren’t just characters who are funny.  No, the trickster plays an important role.  Tricksters break rules – lie, transgress, steal, make rude jokes – in order to teach us what the rules are.

They also (maybe even more importantly) break the rules to change the rules.  People get attached to their rules – fixated on them, even.  Given long enough, people can start to think that rules are real things, and not (in fact) what they are, which are social constructs.

What does that mean, rules aren’t real?  Rules are social constructs? 

Well, you know this.  You just haven’t thought about it, probably.  Why do we stop at stop signs?  That’s not a real rule, right?  I mean, it’s not like the law of gravity.  Try breaking the law of gravity sometime, if you want to see what a real law is like, rather than one we have just made up. 

Laws like don’t steal and don’t shoot your neighbor and don’t run stop signs are made up laws.  We don’t break them because we have agreed not to break them, because we think it’s a good idea not to break them.  But they can be broken, and we all know that. 

Most of our rules and laws are like this – don’t marry your uncle, don’t cuss in church, don’t hit a policeman, don’t go outside the house naked – and most of them are good rules.  But if we start to think these rules are real things, like the law of gravity is a real thing, we can run into trouble, because sometimes these rules need to be changed, like when the world changes, and then what?  

What if we don’t realize these rules can change?  What if we’re convinced these rules are real and fixed?  That’s when we need tricksters to come set us straight.]

What happens when people begin to think that rules are real and fixed, rather than things we happened to have made up because having rules makes it easier to live together? 

Well, trickster Kachina comes and breaks the laws.  He breaks the rules.  Coyote, for instance, turns himself into a woman, dresses up all pretty, has riotous sex with his father-in-law (a terrible taboo) and – nothing happens.  The world does not fall apart.

In fact, it’s hilarious.

And a lovely child is born from this.

What are we being taught, here in this story, and in all the trickster stories?  We’re being taught that rules can be broken, rules can change.  That sometimes it is a good thing when that happens. 

(This is a story many of us hate to hear – most of us hate change so much – but it is a story lots of us need to hear.)

So here in Yellow Woman, Yellow Woman does what women are never allowed to do.  She goes off (a married woman!) with a strange man.  She stays away, for such a long time.  She comes home (sometimes pregnant).  

And – it’s okay.

It’s more than okay.  It’s a good thing.

Notice, though, how Silko interrogates this story.

Is Yellow Woman going off with Silva of her own free will? Or has she been captured?  Does Silva / Kachina / Trickster use force?

Notice how often she thinks about leaving, and then somehow can’t.

Notice how often, when sex is happening, words of force are used.

Notice that he is a thief.  He steals cattle.  Has he stolen her as well?

But notice too, at the end, how she seems to hope he will return; how she seems to feel the experience has been a good one.