American Indian Culture and Research Journal

[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.