SOURCE: “‘To Understand This World Differently’: Reading and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller,” in Ariel, Vol. 25, No. 1, January, 1994, pp. 89-113.

In the essay below, Krumholz describes Silko's attempts to engage non-Native American readers in Storyteller in order to inform their understanding of Laguna culture.

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller is a book of stories and a book about stories: it contains traditional Pueblo Indian stories, Silko's family stories, poems, conventional European style short stories, gossip stories, and photographs, all woven together to create a self-reflexive text that examines the cyclical role of stories in recounting and generating meaning for individuals, communities, and nations. Storyteller has been described as an uniquely Native American form of autobiography and as a simulation of the oral tradition in written form.¹ The book simulates the oral tradition both in the compilation of many stories that create their own interpretive context (functioning like an...