Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1993

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-16

Chapters 17-20

Chapters 21-22

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 21-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 21 Summary: “On Nonfiction Prose”

Silko states that she once accidentally took a class on Victorian-era nonfiction essays in college and finds nonfiction the most difficult to master, especially when law school sucked “the life out of my imagination and out of my writing” (193). Except for letters, which she loved to write since she was six, she only wrote poetry and fiction. When she moved to Alaska, she used letter-writing as a means to avoid isolation. When she moved to Tucson, she also wrote letters to poet Jim Wright to combat feelings of loneliness, and she was devastated when he died before he was ever able to read their published book of correspondence. She finds letters as well as nonfiction readings to be integral to the development of her own nonfiction prose. In 1980, while Silko was writing Almanac of the Dead, she began writing about rocks and rain and taking photographs, often putting these notes aside to work on her novel. She would agree to write requested essays, but often “regret that I had ever agreed to write nonfiction and I would swear off nonfiction prose forever” (194). The photographs turned into Sacred Water:“The Pueblo people and the land and the stories are inseparable. In the creation of the text itself, I see no reason to separate visual images from written words that are visual images themselves” (195).

Chapter 22 Summary: “Old and New Autobiographical Notes”

“From the First Edition of Laguna Woman”

Silko was born on March 5, 1948, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up in the Laguna house made of rock and adobe where her father was born. She spent most of her time helping her great grandmother, Maria Anaya, who told her stories and married a white Marmon man, which was controversial: “I think that people watch us more closely than they do full-bloods or white people” (197). Her mother was from a Plains Tribe in Montana. Her mixed-blood heritage lays at the core of her writing, which she hesitates to say is representative of Indian people. Silkoattended University of New Mexico but dropped out of the law school there. She has two sons and lives with her husband, John Silko.

“Biographical Note to the Second Edition, Autumn 1994”

Silko now lives in Tucson and prefers solitude. She has noticed many errors in the first edition of Laguna Woman. She knows little of her maternal ancestry, although believes that one great-grandfather was half-German and another was English, as well as that a Grandmother spoke Spanish and another was part Cherokee. She remembers her Aunt Lucy giving her a leather-bound copy of Longfellow’s Hiawatha when she was in fourth grade. Although she once felt distant from her Cherokee relatives, she has realized that ancestral spirits are limitless and range across the Americas. She doesn’t know why the first edition of Laguna Woman had so many errors, although she expects it was a result of her emotional turmoil at adjusting to Alaska: “Human communities are living beings that continue to change […] Life continually changes” (200). Although anthropologists have predicted the end of American indigenous peoples for a while, the culture is thriving.

Chapters 21-22 Analysis

These chapters demonstrate the importance of circularity to the way in which the author has constructed the text. The last essay, “On Nonfiction Prose,” concerns much of the same information that begins the book’s Introduction. This circularity in narrative space coincides with the Pueblo belief in the circularity of time. In this way, it would only make sense that the narrative collection of essays must be finished in the same way in which it began, as this lends a sense of completion to the work. In this way, these chapters also repeat much of the information seen in other essays, using the Pueblo oral technique of repetition in order to place emphasis upon the importance of the information at hand.