Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation. This land is in the southwestern United States and was home turf to Native-American peoples before the first Europeans (Spaniards) arrived, and before the United States gained the land from Mexico. Albuquerque, the town she was born in, reflects in its Spanish name the history of the earliest European conquest of the Americas. The state she was born in, New Mexico, reflects the region's close ties to the Mexican nation southwards, the nation that only gave up the territory of New Mexico after a bitter war with the United States. Leslie Marmon Silko, of European and Keresan descent, was born a United States citizen on March 5, 1948. Silko's art and life are deeply informed by this history of cultures meeting, meshing, and clashing.

Silko and her two sisters were brought up in Old Laguna, a small town...