Among the discerning judges were the selectors for the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, who chose Leslie Marmon Silko as one of their very first group of fellows, to receive what is now known as a “genius” award. The MacArthur Foundation, in chosing Leslie—an old friend of mine—already had ample evidence of her blazing talent. Between 1974 and 1981 she published a wholly original book of poems (Laguna Woman), a brilliant book of short stories (Storyteller), and her early masterpiece, the haunting, heartbreaking, Ceremony, which rises near to greatness and can easily stand as one of the two or three best first novels of her generation, a book that has been startling and moving readers in their thousands for more than a quarter of a century. Far from resting on her already considerable laurels, Leslie plunged into the long swim across time and history that became Almanac of the Dead, which the critic Sven Birkerts rightly called one of the most ambitious novels of our time. The Almanac absorbed Leslie Marmon Silko for more than ten years; it was followed by a lovely book of essays (Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, after which she returned to a theme which is woven through all her work: the theft, by the invading Europeans, of the native people’s long-accumulated and reverently guarded wisdom about the natural world.
