Ceremony Summary

Ceremony

Author: Leslie Marmon Silko

Setting: Laguna Pueblo reservation (Nevada)

Primary Characters: Tayo, Auntie, Old Grandma, Pinkie, Harley, Leroy, Emo

Secondary Characters: Robert, Josiah, Rocky, Ts’eh, Night Swan, Tayo’s mother

PLOT

• ·      Tayo returns to the reservation from WWII with post-traumatic stress disorder.
• ·      Pinkie, Leroy, Harley, and Emo are also experiencing the symptoms of PTS, but they self-medicate with alcohol, a habit that Tayo doesn’t particularly enjoy.
• ·      Tayo’s friends constantly talk of the good times at war, and this bothers Tayo because they are becoming part of the “white” culture.
• ·      Just as Tayo is giving up hope for recovery, Old Grandma calls Old Ku’oosh, the medicine man, to aid him.
• ·      Ku’oosh performs an ancient ceremony that helps, but doesn’t cure, Tayo. They fear that the older ceremonies don’t apply to Tayo’s newer situation.
• ·      Tayo begins to think of the past:
• o   Rocky (Auntie and Robert’s son, Tayo’s cousin) and Tayo became good friends during high school when Tayo moved in with them. His mother had left, so Auntie and Josiah took him in.
• o   Auntie puts a lot of effort into keeping the two boys apart (due to Tayo’s reputation as his mother’s son), but it fails.
• o   Tayo and Rocky enlisted in the army the summer following high school.
• o   Josiah began having an affair with a Mexican woman, Night Swan, who encouraged him to buy Mexican cattle. Tayo helps him with the cattle that summer.
• o   When a drought occurs, Tayo performs a rain ceremony that cures the dry spell and prevents Josiah from visiting Night Swan.
• o   Because of this, Josiah has Tayo take a note to Night Swan, and the two end up making love. Tayo finds Night Swan to be irresistible.
• ·      Tayo sees a new medicine man, Betonie, in the hills atop Gallup, a nearby town full of poor Indians.
• ·      Betonie invents a new ceremony for Tayo’s situation, although Tayo fears this medicine man because of his supposed ties with white people.
• §  Emphasis on the implied tension between whites and Indians.
• ·      Betonie completes the first part of the ceremony and sends Tayo home.
• ·      Tayo begins to search for Josiah’s cattle in the countryside.
• ·      During the search, he follows the stars to a woman’s house (Ts’eh), where he spends the night.
• ·      The next day, Tayo finds the cattle fenced in a white man’s pasture. When he enters the pasture, the cattle run off into the distance.
• ·      As he continues to hunt his cattle down, a mountain lion approaches Tayo. He follows the animal’s tracks to his cattle.
• ·      Two white hunters find Tayo trespassing in the pasture, but leave him to go after the mountain lion instead. It begins to snow, and Tayo knows that it will cover the tracks of the lion and ruin the hunters’ plan.
• ·      Tayo returns home with the cattle, but the persisting drought reminds Tayo that his ceremony is not complete.
• ·      Tayo spends the summer with Ts’eh, before finding out that Emo (his former best friend, now representing evil in Tayo’s life) is spreading rumors about him. Furthermore, the “white police” are hunting down Tayo to take him back to the Veterans’ Hospital.
• §  Emphasis on the present dichotomy of Tayo and Emo (and their values)
• ·       Tayo meets up with Harley and Leroy thinking they are on his side, but finds out that they have joined Emo’s side and plan on killing him.
• ·      Running from his former friends, Tayo finds himself in an abandoned mine. He realizes that this is the last station of his ceremony (the mine represents white culture) and waits through the night, with the wind aiding him.
• §  Emphasis on nature’s relationship with Tayo
• ·      Tayo must watch as Leroy and Emo torture and kill Harley, and keep himself from saving his friend.
• ·      After the night in the mine, Tayo returns to Ku’oosh and informs him of what has happened since they last met. Ku’oosh reveals that Ts’eh is, in fact, A’moo’ooh, a Laguna spirit. She has blessed Tayo’s ceremony, and thus it is able to be complete.
• ·      With the ceremony complete, the drought ends and the devastation to the Natives caused by whites is over.

QUOTES

“Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war. They blamed themselves for losing the new feeling; they never talked about it, but they blamed themselves just like they blamed themselves for losing the land the white people took. They never thought to blame the white people for any of it; they wanted white people for their friends. They never saw that it was the white people who gave them that feeling and it was the white people who took it away again when the war was over.”

            This quote is a synopsis of Tayo’s thoughts on his friends after the war. It also links their actions to the overall behavior of white culture, which is an ever-present nemesis in the story.

“Old Grandma shook her head slowly, and closed her cloudy eyes again. ‘I guess I must be getting old,’ she said, ‘because these goings-on around Laguna don't get me excited any more.’ She sighed, and laid her head back on the chair. ‘It seems like I already heard these stories before—only thing is, the names sound different.’”

            Laguna culture emphasizes a cosmological cycle, and that is what Old Grandma is metaphorically commenting on. Though her commentary follows Emo’s killing of Pinkie (and she appears to be referring to that), it has a much deeper meaning in Laguna culture. The nature of the book – multiple stories being told simultaneously – follows this circular nature.

THEME

            Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony sheds light on a clash of cultures – whites and Native Americans – that is destructive, and she emphasizes the resistance of the Natives to such oppression while encouraging her people to adapt to the changes around them in order to keep their culture alive.

·      The title, Ceremony, refers to Tayo’s modern-day equivalent of an older ritual used to cure soldiers’ psychological illnesses after battle. His ceremony was modified to fit the changing nature of war, just as the Natives themselves must adapt to changing times to keep their culture alive.

·      Silko structures the novel in a nonlinear fashion, emphasizing the nonlinear element of nature that the Pueblo people believe in.