From Scroll to Screen
ENGL 165SS - Spring 2002, Carol Braun Pasternack
Tue, 4/9
Retelling tales: Tradition and Change
Kim Barnes interviewing Silko, "A Leslie Marmon Silko Interview," The Journal of Ethnic Studies 13.4 (Winter 1986), p. 95:
KB: I find the yellow woman, Kochininako, particularly interesting. do you see the myths concerning her as having arisen from the need for escape on the part of the woman from a kind of social and sexual domination?
LS: No, not at all. The need for that kind of escape is the need of a woman in middle-America, a white Anglo, the WASP woman. In the Pueblo, the lineage of the child is traced through the mother, so it's a matrilineal system. The land is generally passed down through the female side because the houses belong to the women. One of my early memories was when our house needed to be replastered with the traditional adobe mud plaster. It was a crew of women who came and plastered the house. Why? The women own the houses so the women maintain what they own. . . . What's operating in those stories of Kochininako is this attraction, this passion, this connection between the human world and the animal and spriitual worlds. Buffalo Man is a buffalo, and he can be in the form of a buffalo, but there is this link, and the link is sealed with sexual intimacy, which is emblematic of that joining of two worlds. At the end of the story, the people have been starving , and the buffalo says, "We will give up our spirits, we will come and die for these people because we are related to them. Kochininako is our sister-in-law." She's a -- what do you call it in anthropology or sociology, one who shatters the cultural paradigms or steps through or steps out. She does that because there's a real overpowering sexual attraction that's felt. The attraction is symbolized or typified by the kind of sexual power that draws her to the buffalo man, but the power which draws her to Buffalo Man is actually the human, the link, the animal and human world, those two being drawn together. It's that power that's really operating, and the sexual nature of it is just a metaphor for that power. So that's what's going on there. It doesn't have anything to do with, "Things are really bad at home, so I think I'll run off for awhile." That's not what it's about.
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