Yellow Woman

1. Yellow Woman • Setting: • Modern society • The pueblo community: The narrator’s family • In the mountains: Silva’s place

2. Characters: • Yellow woman (First-person narrator): from pueblo community • Silva (Forest): Maybe he is a Navajo • Narrator’s mother, grandmother, husband, Al, and her baby

3. Native American oral tale: • In an essay entitled “Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit,” Silko writes: her power lies in her courage and in her uninhibited sexuality, which the old-time Pueblo stories celebrate again and again because fertility was so highly valued.” http://www.answers.com/topic/yellow-woman-story-4 • She explores the sexually uninhibited Laguna society before the arrival of Christian missionaries, when women took lovers, hunted, and had gone to war along with men.

4. But I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman—I’m not really her—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. (2329) I know—that’s what I’m saying—the old stories about the ka’tsina spirit and Yellow Woman can’t mean us. (2329)

5. Maybe she’d had another name that her husband and relatives called her so that only the ka’tsina from the north and the storytellers would know her as Yellow Woman. (2329) Yellow woman went away with the spirit from the north and lived with him and his relatives She was gone for a long time, but then one day she came back and she brought twin boys. (2329) What they tell in stories was real only then, back in time immemorial, like they say. (2329)

6. I will be sure that I am not Yellow Woman. Because she is from out of time past and I live now and I’ve been to school and there are highways and pickup trucks that Yellow Woman never saw. (2329) I feel hungry and wondered what they were doing at home now—my mother, my grandmother, my husband, and the baby. Cooking breakfast, saying “Where did she go?—maybe kidnapped,” and Al going to the tribal police with the details: “She went walking along the river.” (2330)

7. I don’t believe it. Those stories couldn’t happen now,” I said. (2330) Do you ever work for them? “I steal from them,” Silva answered. (2331) I started wondering about this man who could speak the Pueblo language so well but who lived on a mountain and rustled cattle. I decided that this man Silva must be Navajo, because Pueblo men didn’t do things like that. (2331)

8. “Where did you get the fresh meat?” the white man asked. “I’ve been hunting,” Silva said, … “ The hell you have, Indian. You’ve been rustling cattle. We’ve been looking for the thief for a long time. (2333) I think four shots were fired—I remember hearing four hollow explosions that reminded me of deer hunting. (2333)

9. I saw the leaves and I wanted to go back to him—to kiss him and to touch him—but the mountains were too far away now. And I told myself, because I believe it, he will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river. (2334) I decided to tell them that some Navajo had kidnapped me, …(2334)

10. Issues for discussion: Marriage and Adultery (Duty and Desire) Myth and reality Celebration of female sexuality (Does yellow woman overcome the patriarchal oppression?) Steal (Silva steals the cattle from the white. (Can we relate this to the relationship between the white and Native Americans?)