Leslie Marmon Silko, 1948 -

Novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). Silko was raised on a Pueblo Reservation in the Laguna tradition. Her community was made up matrilineal families, where women own the houses and the fields, and are the authority figures, and men do much of the child rearing. Silko once said, "I grew up with women who were really strong, women with a great deal of power. If someone was going to thwart you or frighten you, it would tend to be a woman. Your dad is the one who's the soft touch." Her first major success came in 1977, with her novel Ceremony (1977). It is the story of Tayo, a former World War II prisoner of war, who returns to his Laguna Pueblo reservation, where he listens to the ancient stories of his people. In it, Silko wrote, "I will tell you something about stories/[he said]/They aren't just entertainment./Don't be fooled./They are all we have, you see,/all we have to fight off illness and death./You don't have anything/if you don't have the stories."