A woman of Laguna Pueblo descent, she is one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
[10] Silko learned much of the traditional stories of the Laguna people from her grandmother, whom she called A'mooh, her aunt Susie, and her grandfather Hank during her early years.
Silko garnered early literary acclaim for her short story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," which was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant.
A well-known novelist and poet, Silko's career has been characterized by making people aware of ingrained racism and white cultural imperialism, and a commitment to support women's issues.
[15] Her novels have many characters who attempt what some perceive a simple yet uneasy return to balance Native American traditions survivalism with the violence of modern America.
The novel tells the story of Tayo, a wounded returning World War II veteran of mixed Laguna-white ancestry following a short stint at a Los Angeles VA hospital.
He is returning to the poverty-stricken Laguna reservation, continuing to suffer from "battle fatigue" (shell-shock), and is haunted by memories of his cousin Rocky who died in the conflict during the Bataan Death March of 1942.
His initial escape from pain leads him to alcoholism, but his Old Grandma and mixed-blood Navajo medicine-man Betonie help him through Native ceremonies to develop a greater understanding of the world and his place as a Laguna man.
Ceremony has been called a Grail fiction, wherein the hero overcomes a series of challenges to reach a specified goal; but this point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric, since it involves a Native American contextualizing backdrop, and not one based on European-American myths.
Fellow Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen criticized the book on this account, saying that Silko was divulging secret tribal knowledge reserved for the tribe, not outsiders.
[18] Ceremony gained immediate and long-term acceptance when returning Vietnam War veterans took to the novel's theme of coping, healing and reconciliation between races and people that share the trauma of military actions.
It was largely on the strength of this work that critic Alan Velie named Silko one of his Four Native American Literary Masters, along with N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch.
In 1981, Silko released Storyteller, a collection of poems and short stories that incorporated creative writing, mythology, and autobiography, which garnered favorable reception as it followed in much the same poetic form as the novel Ceremony.
The vision of the book stretches over both American continents and includes the Zapatista Army of National Liberation revolutionaries, based in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, as just one group among a pantheon of characters.
The story is set against the back drop of the enforcement of Indian boarding schools, the California Gold Rush and the rise of the Ghost Dance Religion.
Written using distinctive prose and overall structure influenced by Native American storytelling traditions, the book is a broad-ranging exploration not only of her Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican and European family history but also of the natural world, suffering, insight, environmentalism and the sacred.
In 1986, Silko published a review entitled "Here's an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf", on Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich's novel The Beet Queen.