Yellow Woman (Historical Context)

Historical Context

The Myth of Kochininako, Yellow Woman

In The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Paula Gunn Allen observes that many different Kochininako, or Yellow Woman, stories circulate among the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos in New Mexico. The themes of these stories, she writes, are always female-centered and told from Yellow Woman’s point of view. Allen notes that Yellow Woman stories concern many different things — abduction, meeting with powerful spirits, getting power from the spirit world and returning it to her people, the birth of twins, the refusal to marry, weaving, grinding corn, getting water, outwitting evil spirits. Often, Yellow Woman stories highlight her alienation from her people. In some of the stories she is punished for her differences; others celebrate the ways in which her nonconformity helps the community. Kochininako might be seen as a role model for women, Allen suggests that she more accurately represents “the Spirit of Woman.” In her essay, “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit,” Silko agrees: “Yellow Woman is my favorite because she dares to cross traditional boundaries of ordinary behavior during times of crisis in order to save the Pueblo; her power lies in her courage and in her uninhibited sexuality, which the old time Pueblo stories celebrate again and again because fertility was so highly valued. . . . In each story, the beauty that Yellow Woman possesses is the beauty of her passion, her daring, and her sheer strength to act when catastrophe is imminent.”

Although Silko remembers looking at the traditional Native American tales collected in the 1920s by ethnologist Franz Boas and his protegee, Elsie Clews Parsons, she told Larry Evers and Denny Carr of Sun Tracks journal, “I’ve never sat down with them and said I’m going to make a poem or a story out of this.” Furthermore, “the things in the anthropological reports looked dead and alien” to her, not part of a living language and culture. Indeed, the assumption behind Boas’s and Parsons’s ethnological project was that the Keresan language was dying out and needed to be preserved. Since the Keresan language is primarily an oral language and is actively spoken by the Laguna as well as other Pueblo peoples, such an assumption was not only inaccurate but offensive to many of them. Indeed, Silko’s multiple and eclectic sources for “Yellow Woman” attest to the fact that the oral tradition is alive and well. In Storyteller, Silko explains: “I know Aunt Susie and Aunt Alice would tell me stories they had told me before but with changes in details and descriptions. The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of the stories and how they imagined those differing versions came to be.”

Native American Cosmology and World View

Balance and harmony are two primary assumptions of the Keres people who inhabit the Laguna and Acoma Pueblos of New Mexico. As Silko explains in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the

Spirit, the people and the land are inseparable: “In the old days there had been no boundaries between the people and the land; there had been mutual respect for the land that others were actively using. This respect extended to all living beings, especially the plants and animals.” Everything in Keres culture — the human, the animal, the vegetative, the spirit world — is interconnected like the strands of a spider’s web.

In Keres theology, the Great Creator is a woman, Thought Woman, or the Spider Woman. There is no time when Thought Woman did not exist. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen explains that Thought Woman is the only creator of thought, and that thought precedes creation. With the help of her two sisters, Thought Woman created the entire universe. Her presence is felt everywhere — on the plains, in the forests, in the great canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas. She is, writes Allen, “the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric of interconnection.”

Because everything is connected, the tribal concept of time is timelessness and the concept of space is multidimensional. As Silko’s retelling of “Yellow Woman” makes clear, the world of the everyday incorporates the ceremonial or mythic, and the mythic is present in ordinary experience. The past and the future dwell in the present moment. People cannot be separated from the landscape they inhabit. Every story contains every other story.

The Keres people are matrilineal, which means that women are central to their culture and descent is traced through the maternal rather than paternal line. Women are celebrated in social structures, architecture, law, custom and oral tradition. To address a person as “mother” is to pay the highest respect. In an interview with Kim Barnes in MELUS, Silko praises her Pueblo’s fluid gender roles and matriarchal culture: “In the Pueblo, the lineage of the child is traced through the mother, so it’s a matrilineal system. The houses are the property of the woman, not the man. The land is generally passed down through the female side because the houses belong to the women.”

Because Native American communities value harmony between all living things, it is difficult for their belief system to remain intact in the late twentieth century. In her book Song of the Turtle, Paula Gunn Allen writes, “Legislation and local regulations concerning grazing, logging, fishing, hunting and particularly land, mineral, and water and power management have dramatically impaired not only the environment but the survival of Native peoples as communities and cultural entities in their own right.”

The Legacy of Manifest Destiny

Manifest Destiny was a nineteenth century doctrine that the United States had both the right and the moral imperative to expand throughout the North American continent, which was characterized as an uninhabited wilderness. The philosophy of Manifest Destiny enabled the genocide of the people who already inhabited the lands to which white Americans laid claim (genocide is the systematic destruction of an entire people or culture). In 1834, under President Andrew Jackson, Congress designated all lands west of the Mississippi “and not within the States of Missouri and Louisiana and the Territory of Arkansas” to be “Indian Territory”; as Anglo-Americans traveled westward, however, the area designated “Indian Territory” grew smaller and smaller. During the 1838 Trail of Tears, in which the Cherokee Nation was forcibly moved from the Carolinas to “Indian Territory” (what is now Oklahoma), one out of every four Cherokees died from cold, hunger or disease. In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, historian Dee Brown writes that Manifest Destiny an “era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.”

To fulfill its Manifest Destiny, the United States Government made many treaties with the various tribal nations and broke almost all of them. The stealing of their land is not ancient history to Native American tribes; Silko’s father, Lee Marmon, was a tribal officer for the Laguna Pueblo people who successfully sued the State of New Mexico for six million acres that were improperly taken.

Compare & Contrast

• 1970: The publication of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee arouses widespread general interest in the history of Native American tribes.
  1990s: Native American studies have been integrated into many high school and college multicultural programs.
• 1973: The Department of Education’s Head Start Program begins operation in the Laguna Reservation, offering counselling and tutoring services to the schoolchildren of the reservation’s six villages.
  1990s: The Laguna Head Start Program is consolidated at a central site, with 120 children enrolled in the program.
• 1974: Laguna Pueblo residents begin producing their distinctive red, yellow, and orange pottery for sale. Painters and jewelry-makers recreate traditional tribal designs and market their works on a small scale to tourists.
  1990s: The Casa Blanca Village outside of Albuquerque is a shopping center that specializes in Pueblo handicrafts, providing a source of income for the Laguna Pueblo.