Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit

Silko tells of how the US government punished those who refused to send their children away to boarding schools by imprisoning them, removing a critical part of the workforce, which in turn caused the people to starve. Food waste was not tolerated, and stories of drought years and starvation were commonplace. Every meal required thanks be given, although food was shared with strangers: “Hungry animals eat first and allow others to feed only when they have filled themselves […]To share one’s food is to demonstrate one’s humanity” (97).

When the Navajo and Apache first migrated south, they had difficulty adjusting to the new weather and land. The Pueblo people helped them, but the Navajo still had meager harvests, and took to raiding Pueblo villages to combat starvation. The Pueblos were upset and sent warriors to recover the food and livestock. Silko’s relatives caught up with the old Navajo men and boys trying to flee with a stolen herd of sheep, and the Navajo raiders expected to be beaten or killed. Instead, the Laguna men asked why they had stolen the sheep. When the Navajo explained they were starving, the Laguna gave them some of the sheep, saying next time to ask instead of stealing.

The Pueblo people still celebrate feast days, and strangers are welcome. Friendships even develop, and one Navajo man wept when he learned Silko’s grandfather had died on one of the feast days. Silko links this story to the US celebration of Thanksgiving, during which the Indians “no doubt realized that hungry pilgrims, like all hungry human beings, might be dangerous […] The hungry people must be fed; otherwise there can be no peace or security for those with the food” (98).

Silko likens Thanksgiving to All Hallows’ Eve, during which ancient Europeans would feed the spirits of dead ancestors as well as the hungry living. If they failed to do this, they expected reprisals. The narrator says that the US should feed its hungry every day in order to avoid danger. 

Because Silko is of mixed ancestry, she is sensitive to attitudes about persons of color. She remembers when the government attempted to wipe out race on forms and applications, replacing it with ancestry because race had no scientific bearing. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson spoke out against prejudice, and Congress asserted equality for all humans.

In 1967, Silko decided to investigate race in her college honors paper. Silko knew race was a hot issue, as many anthropologists believed race was a social construct, while segregationists said such a stance was false liberal data created to prove human equality. Silko had been raised in the Pueblo belief that people of all colors and origins were “one family—all the offspring of Mother Earth” (101), without hierarchy. She wanted to test this this teaching, believing the truth mattered more than her personal comfort or vanity. She read Carleton Coon, wondering if his white supremacy was linked to people teasing him about his last name as a child. Silko says that American racism is learned at birth.

The narrator talks about her own lack of belonging, which her father also felt, even though Laguna historically “accepted children of mixed ancestry because appearance was secondary to behavior” (102). Similarly, Pueblo cosmology is all-inclusive, as the ancient stories acknowledge that the Mother Creator had many children in faraway places. Even when the Spaniards came in 1540, and despite rumors of their horrific behavior, the Pueblo people were inclined to include them, searching for the good in them.

Silko’s great-grandfather was adopted into the community when he married A’mooh, and thus became a part of Laguna politics: “The anthropologists who would portray the Marmon brothers as dictators fool themselves about the power of the white men in a pueblo. The minute the Marmon brothers crossed over the line, they would have been killed” (104). Her great-grandfather was gentle and kind in opposition to his wife’s formidability.

Silko was raised by the old-time generation, so she rarely felt burdened by her mixed ancestry. Once, her great-grandfather was stopped by the manager as he and his sons walked through an Albuquerque hotel lobby. The manager said that “Indians” had to use the back door, upon which Silko’s great-grandfather informed the man that these were his sons and never went to the hotel again.Silko offers other stories of racism: her Aunt Esther, who believed she was superior because of her light skin; her grandfather, who was told “Indians weren’t able to design automobiles” (105);students who were punished for speaking Laguna at school; and Silko herself, whowas singled out by a tourist because she looked different. Silko states that“Racism is a constant factor in the United States; it is always in the picture even if it only forms the background” (106). It is being used now by greedy politicians to justify harsh immigration policies in regard to Mexico, just as it was used to justify actions towards Communist countries during the Cold War. The narrator likens the shame of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain to the US/Mexico border wall.

Silko next recalls being detained at the border multiple times, despite having an American driver’s license, and how white people were waved while any persons of color weredetained: “The Border Patrol exercises a power that no highway patrol or county sheriff possesses: the Border Patrol can detain anyone they wish for no reason at all” (108).The narrator remembers the threat of violence hanging in the air one night while stopped by a group of Border Patrol agents, whose anger shifted from Silko to the Border Patrol agents’ own dog, when it was unwilling or unable to find contraband in the car, despite the small amount of medicinal marijuana Silko had in her purse.

Silko describes the police state that has formed in the American southwest, in which the Border Patrol also detains people it suspects of aiding political refugees, while INS carries out raids at public high schools. Border Patrol Agent Elmer, in Nogales, Arizona, killed an unarmed undocumented immigrant a week after severely wounding another, threatening another agent who refused to help him cover up his murder. At the conclusion of his trial, the jury found him not guilty. Additionally, sexual assaults on undocumented women by Border Patrol agents have been documented for decades. President Clinton’s immigration policy, Silko states, was no more than thinly-veiled racism that is allowed to exist in America because America is not a true representative democracy, as evidenced by the fact that it requires huge amounts of money to run for office. Similarly, America verges on being totalitarian, as freedom to travel is integral to American identity. If racism remains unchecked in our society and continues to be perpetrated by government policies, Silko states that the ultimate outcome will be “madness and genocide” (114). 

Silko recalls the freedom she felt while traveling the Southwest highways, which she links to the freedom and pride associated with being an American citizen. This freedom has, for Silko, more recently been impeded. She and her friend Gus were traveling south from Albuquerque at night when they were stopped by Border Patrol agents, who demanded they get out of the car. When they resisted, the Border Patrol threatened them, and the agent’s unfounded anger reminded Silko of the disappearances of random people who were abducted during the 1970s Argentine war. Silko returns to the story about the Border Patrol’s dog, and how they misplaced their anger on the dog after it didn’t find any contraband, even though the narrator had marijuana in her purse.

Silko states that if your car is stopped, you are at the mercy of the Border Patrol and might wait hours for a dog to come sniff your car, or several more hours,should you request a search warrant, as is your right as an American citizen. Further, agents might strip search you in the process. Several high-profile cases have publicized the civil rights abuses of the Border Patrol, including the Michael Elmer case, mentioned in the chapter prior, and the case of an agent in El Paso, Texas, who put a loaded gun to a high school football coach’s head while he was driving his team.

Silko also identifies cases that have not received much publicity, including the case of the white UCLA professor who was detained because she was caught traveling back and forth from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, for research, or the elderly half-Chinese man who got lost and ended up driving in circles, only to be detained and questioned by border Patrol agents, who were convinced he was smuggling people.  Silko offers that “In the city of South Tucson, where 80 percent of the respondents were Chicano or Mexicano […] one out of every five people there had been detained, mistreated verbally, or questioned by INS agents in the past two years” (121).

Politicians use immigration, welfare, and street crime to dehumanize people of color, and for the first time the US government is working to eliminate solidarity between the tribal peoples north and south of the border, where they previously moved freely. The narrator finds irony in the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, and how this move towards freedom coincided with and juxtaposed the building of a steel wall between Mexico and the US. Silko marvels at the fact that America propagates free trade but not free migration. The INS has been given millions of dollars to modernize and expand its police force, even though the borders haven’t worked. Silko states that “A mass migration is already under way” (122), with roots in the kinship and shared commerce, cosmologies, and oral narratives of indigenous peoples, and it cannot be stopped because “the Americas are Indian country” (123). The narrator remembers seeing dozens of Indian and mestizo men riding north in boxcars one night, and how this reminded her of the ancient story of Aztlán, a beautiful northern land to which the people will one day return. 

The Pueblo concept of time is not definite, as “the Pueblos and their paleo-Indian ancestors have lived continuously in the southwest of North America for twelve thousand years” (124). By contrast, Europeans have been in the Americas for less than five hundred years, but with every generation, their connection to the land grows. Eventually, prophesies say that European customs will disappear, including the desecration of themselves: humankind “is nothing in comparison to the earth…The earth is inviolate” (125). Silko next tells the Creation story of Thought Woman, who is able to thinkeverything into existence.

Silko offers that in 1980, two Laguna employees of the Jackpile uranium mine found a sizable stone formation in the shape of a snake. The snake’s wide-open jaws faced west. People were skeptical of the discovery at first, because the Laguna had been there so long they believed this would not have escaped their attention. Similarly, the employees had been walking the same path for months and seen nothing; the snake seemed to have appeared suddenly, which excited people, because “the old stories mention a giant snake who is a messenger for the Mother Creator” (126). The snake in the story lived at a lake, but the neighbors got jealous and broke open the lake and the snake disappeared.

During the Cold War, the Laguna were unable to prevent the US government from mining for the uranium deposits and destroying orchards and fields. The mining companies tried to buy out Paguate village because the ore deposits were rich there, but the Pueblo people knew that the village was next to the Emergence place and refused, so the companies “sank shafts under the village” (128). Although the elders at first prohibited the Pueblo people from working in the mine, drought came in the 1950s and people had to work at the mine to survive.

Silko next tells a verse story about the medicine man Pa’caya’nyi coming with his mountain lion and magically making a bear appear.Pa’caya’nyi fooled the people into playing with magic so that they neglected the Mother Corn altar.

Pueblo communities resolve issues through nonaggression and negotiation, as cooperation is necessary to survive the desert plateau. Further, the Pueblo believe that this ideal of harmony must extend to plants and animals as well. In 1973, Paguate, New Mexico, located in west-central New Mexico, and within the lands of the Laguna Pueblo, was one of the first American communities to cope with teen suicide pacts. In the Paguate case, seven of the best high school students killed themselves without any justification, other than it was their turn. Although the Laguna people had witnessed suicides by army veterans with alcohol problems, this mass suicide shook the community.

Around the same time as this group of suicides, a Paguate man inexplicably hacked his two friends to death with a new axe, dumping their body parts in the weeds:“According to the elders, destruction of any part of the earth does immediate harm to all living things” (131), although outsiders ridicule the Pueblo people for thinking this. Silko contends that retribution for their complicity in destroying the earth seems to be the only justification for these otherwise unconscionable acts of violence.

Silko, along with holy people from tribes as far away as Canada and Mexico, have gone to see the snake, offering corn meal and other gifts as spirit food. This confuses outsiders, who do not understand that any location can become sacred. Similarly to how Laguna prophecies say European culture will disappear, Europeans have predicted Native Americans’ collective demise, trying to record stories of the elders, although some of the elders refused, saying that the people will only forget what is unnecessary, while believing that the great snake will appear again and again.