Leslie Marmon Silko

Abstract Many of the same themes that run through the work of Vine Deloria propel the writing of Leslie Silko. Sovereignty, com­ munity, and the vitality and power of a tradition that is constantly evolving are fundamental categories for the Laguna author. Rejecting racially based essentializing, she stated in a 1980 interview, “Community is tremendously important. That’s where a person’s identity has to come from, not from racial blood quantum levels.”1 Applying such a criteria to herself in an autobiographical statement six years earlier, she wrote, “I grew up at Laguna Pueblo. I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna. This place I am from is everything I am as a writer and human being.”2 Like Scott Momaday, she is a writer who sees herself as a writer (and not as a “representative Indian”), “in whom a concern with memory and the past operates as a constitutive element in both writing and personal/cultural survival and growth.”3 And like Momaday (and Mourning Dove before him), she artfully weaves traditional orature and the sacred/ceremonial into Western literary forms.