NONFICTION - March 17, 1996

YELLOW WOMAN AND A BEAUTY OF THE SPIRIT: Essays on Native American Life Today by Leslie Marmon Silko. (Simon & Schuster: $23; 205 pp.) The two main messages in this collection of essays from the author of “Almanac of the Dead” are that the Pueblo (Silko’s own) people are inseparable from the land and that Silko’s language springs organically from the land and pictures she has taken of that land. Silko’s great-grandfather was a white man, her mother’s mother was part Cherokee, her mother’s family came from a Plains Indian tribe. Growing up, Silko was often asked by tourists passing through the reservation in Laguna, N.M., to step out of the photographs they took of the other Indian children because she looked too white. Her stories of discrimination by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents and border police are simple and common and illuminating and frustrating.