Yellow Woman by Leslie Silko

Leslie Silko writes about the preservation of Native American history in her short stories. She wrote the story of Yellow woman with human identity, imagination, and storytelling as they are inextricably interwoven to the land and to the Mother Earth. Drawing on her background of oral narrative, Silko wove these four elements together in such a way to identify herself of multiple ethnicity as a Native American, Mexican and white ancestry. She explores the sexually uninhibited Laguna society before the arrival of Christian missionaries, when woman took lovers, hunted, and had gone to war along with men.

The young woman (Yellow Woman) in the story declares herself a Modern woman far from old-fashioned ideals, looking for different roads to choose than what was pre-ordained as her destiny as a Native American. "I will see someone and then I will be certain that he is only a man-someone from nearby and, I will make sure that I am Yellow woman. Because she is from time, past, I live now, and I have been to school and there are highways and pick up trucks that Yellow Woman never saw." The character of Yellow woman is in search of her sexual identity when she meets a mysterious Navajo man named Silva. Silva insists in calling the young woman (Yellow woman) and tells her that she will comply with him.

The young woman (Yellow woman) tells the stranger that her name is not YellowWoman she knows who she is that they had met at the river yesterday afternoon whereas he laughs and replies "What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what you will do today, someday they will talk about us and they will say those two lived long ago when things like that happened." Silva denies he is Navajo. Yellow Woman wonders about this man who can speak the pueblo language so well but who lived on a mountain and rushed cattle. She decides that this man Silva must be Navajo because pueblo men did not do things like that. The young woman wonders then if Yellow Woman had known what she was and if she knew that she would be a part of the stories. Yellow Woman was another name that her husband and relatives called her so that only the Katsina spirit from the North and the storytellers would know who she was.

The story is almost dream like an Indian folk tale, leaving the reader to wonder if her adventure with this mysterious stranger was real or a vision of the young womans. At the end of the story Yellow Woman returns home to her family after having had supposedly disappeared for a few days, and the family does not know that she was missing.