Danielson teaches English at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. In the following excerpt, she offers a feminist interpretation of Silko's "The Man to Send Rain Clouds."

Over the last twenty years, the general development of scholarship about women's lives and art parallels an unprecedented flowering of creative writing by American Indian women. But in view of these parallel developments, American Indian women have shown little interest in the feminist movement, and conversely mainstream feminist scholarship has paid strikingly little attention to the writing of American Indian women.

Leslie Silko's Storyteller (1981), a product of this literary florescence, has remained virtually undiscussed as a whole by critics of any stamp. With its emphasis on women tradition bearers, female deities, and its woman author's personal perspective, Storyteller seems to ask for a feminist critical treatment. . . .

Particularly applicable to Silko's Storyteller are feminist critical strategies to reclaim as legitimate literary...