SOURCE: "Mother-Daughter Relationships as Epistemological Structures: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Storyteller," in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, 1996, pp. 172-87.

In the following essay, Taylor Evans asserts that, "One of the basic unspoken feminist assumptions—that women are essentially powerless—is debunked within Silko's texts, for the mothers and daughters are bastions of the American Indian society in times of great crisis."

For the past twelve thousand years, most cultures have practiced the tradition of passing on the explanation of "being" and "becoming" to their offspring. While this function is not gender specific, the recipient of this information must have full faith and confidence in the one who is teaching. In many cultures, women carry the ontologies to their offspring. According to Leslie Marmon Silko, the Native American woman has been "the tie that binds her people together...