[W]ith a good story there is no end to the possibilities. -Leslie Marmon Silko I. THE AUTHOR AND HER WORKS The publication of Ceremony [5] in 1977, nine years after N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize, marked the appearance of the first novel by an American Indian woman, Leslie Marmon Silko, at a time when American Indian literature (if not its literary criticism) had entered what Kenneth Lincoln [Native 137] called a renaissance. Within two years of Ceremony’s publication, American Indian Quarterly devoted an entire symposium issue to it, edited by Kathleen M. Sands [178,179], immediately laying a foundation of critical analysis of substantial breadth.