American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is a novel about a young man named Tayo who returns to the Laguna Reservation, probably in 1948, after horrifying experiences on the Pacific front in World War II and an unspecified period of time in a Veteran’s Administration hospital in California. He comes home a psychological mess after being released from a prisoner of war camp, probably in the Philippines. In one sense, Tayo’s story is straightforward enough. A man grows from confusion to clarity, from being lost to being found, from being muddleheaded to being clearheaded, from being alone to getting connected, from feeling afraid to feeling confident, from thinking of himself as a villain to realizing that he may just be a hero. Why, then, do so many first-time readers of Ceremony get so confused by this narrative? The central reason is that most of the novel takes place in the consciousness of Tayo, who, for the first hundred or so pages, has no idea who he is or where he is going. Part of Tayo’s problem is that he cannot sort things out properly; part of his madness is that he cannot distinguish past from present. And just as his mind is a jumble of events, the opening of the novel portrays unsorted, jumbled events. On the second page of the novel Tayo speaks of the tangle of events and memories in his mind: The memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket when he was a child, and he had carried them outside to play and they had spilled out of his arms into the summer weeds and rolled away in all directions, and then he had hurried to pick them up before Auntie found him. He could feel it inside his skull, the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more.

[Editor’s note: Duane Leslie Evans presented this lecture to Creek Nation member Joni Murphy’s American Indian Narratives class. Dustina Edmo (Lemhi Shoshone), an American Indian Studies major, videotaped the lecture, taking care to get close-up views of visual materials. Evans began the lecture by unpacking a box of related photographs, newsletters, books, and medals. At the end of the hour, he repacked the box while making his final comments, as a gestural conclusion in tandem with spoken remarks. The transcript of the lecture is in the Haskell archives, housed at the Haskell Cultural Center, along with the videotape. Kelli Edwards, a Creek Nation student at Haskell, and Denise Low transcribed the lecture, omitting about half of the transcript. The talk includes further autobiographical details of Evans, as well as a discussion of the challenges facing young Native students. In all conversations, Evans emphasized the lasting effect of the Bataan Death March on survivors and their families. Throughout the editing process, Low worked closely with Evans, a longtime neighbor, during the summer of 2003. Evans indicated that this lecture was the only time he would tell the story, because of its painful personal content. Low considered it an honor to be part of his story and to associate with the talented people who worked on this project.] I was raised by my grandmother. My mother is a Potawatomi from up north of Topeka. She had gone to Haskell Institute, along with a couple of her sisters, to complete nurses’ training. My mother went out to Albuquerque to be in nurses’ aide training, which is where she met my father, who is from the Laguna Reservation. What does all this have to do with Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony? According to the book’s back cover: Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution. Tayo’s quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremony that defeats the most virulent of afflictions, despair.

Good novelists often base their work on biographical and historical facts, but then transform those facts into the magic of fiction. In this essay, I show how Leslie Marmon Silko took factual raw materials and, through the alchemy of her creative artistry, transformed her novel Ceremony into something quite new and different. I consider first the real-life inspiration for several of the Laguna soldiers in Ceremony who fought in World War II. I then suggest a historical source for Silko’s information about the Bataan Death March and discuss some of the changes that Silko made in portraying the march in Ceremony. These changes help us to understand Silko’s purposes in creating the character of Tayo and the forces that put him in need of the ceremony that lies at the heart of the novel. I also show that Silko portrayed the Japanese with considerable sympathy. WAR VETERANS In a letter to her friend James Wright on 16 June 1979, just two years after the publication of Ceremony, Silko wrote of having recently visited Laguna from her home in Tucson: I have just returned from a short visit at Laguna . . . I thought a great deal about two of my father’s first cousins, Jack and Les, both dead now—Les died while I was here in Tucson. He wasn’t old, but he was one of the men I was writing about when I wrote Ceremony. Les had been a football star at the U. of New Mexico for one semester before he was drafted. The local press called him “Squaw” because he was Laguna. He was over six feet tall and even these last years he was a strong man—except for what the liquor did. I suppose it might be because a good part of him became part of the main characters of the novel that I spent some time looking at the house he and his brother Jack had lived in. . . . I suppose Les will be remembered for being called “Squaw” in the Albuquerque Journal and for his car wrecks and brawls.

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, Rocky appears only in the disjointed memories of the main character Tayo. He first appears as Tayo’s childhood friend and “brother” (actually, they are cousins) and second as a major part of Tayo’s prisoner-of-war experiences in the Pacific during World War II. These experiences result in his psychological and spiritual wounds. Most critics of the novel focus on these latter memories if they discuss Rocky at all. Part of Tayo’s eventual recovery from his war experiences hinges on releasing himself from the guilt he feels over Rocky’s death during the Bataan Death March. Even though no one holds Tayo responsible for Rocky’s wounds and death, Tayo had vowed to Auntie, Rocky’s mother, to “bring him home safe,” and he holds himself responsible when he does not. This interpretation presents both Rocky and Tayo as two men destroyed by the war, the former physically and the latter spiritually. Critic Paula Gunn Allen offers another view when she groups Rocky with other (male) characters such as Emo, Pinkie, and Harley who “are not of the earth but of human mechanism; they live to destroy [the earth] spirit, to enclose and enwrap it in their machinations, condemning all to a living death.” Here, Allen does not present Rocky as an innocent tragically destroyed by the war, but as an active force of destruction. I counter Allen’s assertion by examining the complex articulation of the character of Rocky in Silko’s novel, especially his relationship to Tayo, and I argue that both Rocky and Tayo are recuperated by the healing ceremonies Tayo discovers. In describing the recuperation of Rocky—a character who has died before the novel even begins—I focus on Tayo and the reader’s changing interpretation of Rocky’s life. As I will show, Tayo’s view of Rocky changes subtly over the course of the novel. First presented as a naïve assimilationist, Rocky later becomes the spiritual brother of Tayo. Hence, by the end of the novel, Tayo regains the brother he lost in the war.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is, among other things, a story of one people’s relationship to a particular geography and the resulting alienation when this sacred relationship is breached. Laguna critic Paula Gunn Allen reminds readers of what must always lie at the heart of any reading of Ceremony: “We are the land, and the land is mother to us all. The land is not really a place, separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies; the witchery makes us believe that false idea.” Witchery is the name for the force that separates people from the land, as well as friends, families, and traditions. Silko physically locates the climax of the novel—a witches’ ceremony—at Cañoncito, southeast of the Jackpile Uranium Mine, and so metaphorically correlates this site with witchery. The novel is ultimately Tayo’s story of how he must restore harmony between the land and his people. The story in Ceremony is arresting because it is based on fact and because the horrors at Jackpile have become an enduring toxic legacy for the Laguna people, a modern version of witchcraft. In this article, I want to reflect on the climax of the book—the torture and mutilation of Harley by Emo, Pinky, and LeRoy—and how Silko situates this horror at the Jackpile Mine. This scene could only have taken place at the mine, the place of ultimate desecration of Laguna land. It represents a site where, as Terry Tempest Williams reflects, a contract between human beings and the land was broken. After listening to the stories of Jackpile Mine told by Laguna people, I want to pass on their stories for teachers to use when teaching Ceremony and to reflect on the message for all of us as we try to comprehend the enormity of what occurred at the mine. In a 1985 interview with Laura Coltelli, Silko comments on the importance of listening to stories for what they mean now, and for the future. Silko was only twenty-three when she began writing the book, but part of the power of Ceremony comes from her knowing the community’s stories, as she lived in close proximity to Jackpile Mine. Other writers comment more fully on nuclear energy development as seen in Native literature. This study collects stories from Laguna residents and aligns them with parallel events in Silko’s novel.

A nondescript rock shelter in Texas provides unexpected evidence for shamanism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. There, archaeologists found clearly identifiable images of antlered human figures and entheogenic plant substances, including datura (jimson weed), peyote, and ephedra (Indian or Mormon tea), items associated with shamanistic practices. From a more recent site in Bandolier, New Mexico, datura seeds “in perfect condition” were found in the community house, occupied from 1383 to 1466. These could be interpreted as evidence of shamanism in the Southwest, long before Silko makes use of some of the same animal and plant elements. Motifs of antlered animals and ceremonial medicine plants occur throughout the novel. Ceremony has a dualistic plot structure, which alternates between the embedded traditional verse and the prose narrative. Additional strands of meaning are woven throughout these structures, including the language of animal and medicine plants. A deer is one of the central animals associated with Tayo, as well as the hybrid spotted cattle. Plants are present in a deliberate order, corresponding to the book’s four ceremonies. These entheogenic plants—Indian tea (ephedra), tobacco, morning glory, and datura—effect healing changes in Tayo’s consciousness. Most important is the ancient plant datura, the final ceremonial medicine and the one associated with Tayo himself. Four healers, each associated with the plants, conduct the book’s ceremonies: the traditional Laguna medicine man Ku’oosh; the nonorthodox mixed-blood Diné (Navajo) healer Betonie; the mystical spirit-woman Ts’eh, whose name resembles the Keres Pueblo word for Mount Taylor; and finally Tayo himself. By the end of the novel, Tayo learns the stories, the songs, the plants, and the ritual actions of a healer. Betonie sets Tayo on the path to become an active participant in healing by telling Tayo that he must find autumn stars, the spotted cattle, the mountain, and the woman Ts’eh (152). After Tayo experiences these, under the tutelage of Ts’eh, he finds a cliff drawing of an elk (230). This deer-like animal also signifies Tayo’s assumption of the role of ceremonial leader, or cheani.

One important symptom of the disease that the ceremony of Ceremony is designed to cure is flawed vision, physiological as well as psychological. At the beginning of the novel, Tayo does indeed suffer from physiological eyestrain—sunlight hurts his eyes so much that he vomits, and we are told that “he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes [World War II flashbacks] waited for him.” This early in the novel Tayo is desperate for a vision of biomechanics that aligns with the felt reality of his condition. Tayo also suffers from flawed psychological vision, mainly as a result of being contaminated by certain preconceptions that he, like most Americans, has acquired from the social environment. Tayo’s doctor Betonie later tells him that the Ck’o’yo witchery has created these preconceptions and put them into circulation to blind Indians into believing that the land is a dead thing and that, to put it in mid-twentieth century terminology, White is Right. In one important sense, then, the measure of Tayo’s recovery is change, or improvement, in his vision—physiological and psychological, and vision in the sense of perception as well as in the sense of conception or ideation. As I and others have argued elsewhere, Silko works to align the prose narrative story of Tayo’s transformation with the poetic-looking body of traditional Laguna narrative embedded in the text and functioning as the novel’s formal and thematic backbone. Two of these embedded texts are particularly germane to the theme of transformed—and transforming—vision. One of these is the Kaupata story that functions as a prologue and preview of the Mount Taylor episode; the other is the brief Arrowboy fragment that serves the same function for the Jackpile Mine episode. These two backbone stories treat the phenomenon of vision rather differently, one picking up the possibilities of development of vision where the other leaves off; like two of Betonie’s colored mountains, they represent successive phases of the overall process of moving from lack or loss of vision to recovery of it. In the accompanying phases of the prose narrative, Tayo must understand, and then use, the modes of vision modeled in these two stories of departure and recovery in order to become the one who can tell the story of Our Mother’s return to the Fifth World and to the People who are her children.

Historian Patricia Limerick’s book The Legacy of Conquest focuses on the history of the American West within the context of conquest as “the historical bedrock of the whole nation” and the American West as “a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.” Limerick writes that to “live with that legacy, contemporary Americans ought to be well informed and well warned about the connections between past and present.” The experiences, past and contemporary, of indigenous peoples form an integral part of this legacy. In Red Matters, Arnold Krupat asserts that “you just can’t understand America, more specifically, the United States, without coming to terms with the indigenous presence on this continent.” Still, in mainstream U.S. consciousness, there is little comprehension of the scope of past genocide or awareness of contemporary Native issues. Krupat writes that “this lack of awareness most immediately and directly hurts Native people,” but clearly “hurts Americans in general.” This statement becomes especially meaningful in the contemporary context of post 9/11 realities and the so-called “War on Terror,” constructed rhetorically through the political doctrine of neoconservatism. The building blocks supporting the rationale of perpetual warfare against an ideologically defined “evil” is located in traditionally imperialist rhetoric. To become intimate with the history of Native Americans in the evolution of the American nation means to better comprehend the destructive consequences of current imperial rationalizations which insist that the narrow parameters of Western cultural values define a highly complex world In “Lewis and Clark in Afghanistan,” Derq Quiggle traces the line of America’s imperial project from the Lewis and Clark expedition through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the illegal ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti.