American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.