"Storyteller" is a rich, many-faceted book. It consists of short stories, anecdotes, folktales, poems, historical and autobiographical notes, and photographs. It begins with the description of an old Hopi basket in which there are hundreds of photographs, all taken, presumably, at Laguna Pueblo, N.M., near the turn of the century. "The photographs are here," we are told, "because they are part of many of the stories and because many of the stories can be traced in the photographs." Implicit in this statement, of course, is the very notion of an anthology or even a random sampling, rather than a "story" as such or a sustained narrative. The book is a mélange. Here and there are moments of considerable beauty and intensity, moments in which, according to the central tenet of storytelling, the language is celebrated.

Leslie Silko … lived for a time in Alaska, and it evidently...