Leslie Marmon Silko, born in 1948, was raised in the Laguna Pueblo fifty miles west of Albuquerque.

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Leslie Marmon Silko, born in 1948, was raised in the Laguna Pueblo fifty miles west of Albuquerque. Her heritage was mixed; white, Mexican, and Native American. In an interview by Kathyrun Shanley, published in ‘The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology’, Silko said, "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 a human being."

As a child she grew up with her great grand mother, Maria Anaya. It was Maria Anaya who played such an influential role in Silko's life of storytelling and writing.

The home Silko grew up in was one of the Marmon houses on the fringes of the Laguna Pueblo. Silko talked about her home in This Song Remembers, Self-Portraits of Native Americans in the Arts. She said, "I always thought there was something symbolic about that--we're on the fringe of things." She and her family were considered somewhere in between. Not quite excluded but not quite included either. When Silko was young, she assisted with the ceremonial dances but did not participate in them. Silko's love for stories began in that home where she would listen to the way things were for her great-grandmother and imagine how things would be for her as an adult.

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Growing up at the Laguna Pueblo reservation, she attended an Indian school and later attended a school in Albuquerque 50 miles away. After high school she went on to attend the University of New Mexico. Silko published her first work, Tony's Story in 1969 and later wrote her first book Laguna Women Poems in 1974.

In 1977 Silko published her first novel, Ceremony. Ceremony explains how vital storytelling is to the Pueblo culture and how White culture has made many attempts to destroy these stories as well as their ceremonies. Silko's second major novel, Storyteller was published in 1981. It explains the stories about her ...

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