Yellow Woman

Leslie Marmon Silko

It was hard for me to chose which essays in this week's book to talk about. There is so much information and insight within them all. I didn't read them in order, I skipped around from the back to the front to the middle. There's just something about reading a collection of stories or essays from front to back that makes me want to put them in some sort of chronological order. Reading them in a chaotic fashion allowed me to be able to read each story separately and keep each piece's meaning separate in my mind. Crazy I know, but it worked for me.

The first essay that I turned to was "The People and the Land ARE Inseparable." It was this piece in which I first caught a glimpse of something, but I wasn't sure what it was. There was conflict between the words and the lines, but I was attributing that conflict to the years of fighting over land and boundaries, the Europeans taking over and defining what was right and what was wrong, what was theirs and what belonged to the Indians. Because that was how they had always done it and the white culture was more powerful, that was how it was going to be done, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. On the surface, there was nothing there that we hadn't already learned. But it wasn't until later, when I read "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit," I realized that the conflict wasn't only about whites and Indians. It was about culture, and it lies within each human being.

In this book, Leslie Silko is a odds with herself. She is torn between what was and what is, and her mixed heritage seems to complicate the war. But the thing is, Silko knows that is who she is, and she accepts it and draws from it. And I think that the book is not only about learning Laguna heritage, but her learning to live as an Indian in a white country without loosing her heritage. It's also about what we can all learn from each other. In the video, she continues teaching the difference of then and now, how we as a people need to remember that the earth is a living being too, and our greed is killing our relationship with the earth.

"In the old days," is Silko's favorite phase throughout this book. In the old days, there was acceptance for who a person was. No one judged another based on appearance or sexual orientation. The "live and let live" philosophy made life simplistic, and everybody was happy.

Today, people seem hell bent on telling you what's right and what's wrong. (Sound familiar?) We are constantly plummeted by others telling us how to think, telling us how we should act. Judgments are passed on others in magazines, newspapers, and television. With the advent of Facebook, all of us can join in telling others how to live their lives. With the constant flood of media coming our way, it's amazing to me that each human brain can differentiate one's own individualism from a mass conglomeration of nonsense. But then again sometimes it can't.