Ceremony

BY:Leslie Marmon Silko

Context

Born on March five, 1948 in Albuquerque, new Mexico and of mixed Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican ancestry, Leslie Marmon Silko grew up on a Laguna Pueblo reservation. She attended Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools, and then the University of New Mexico. After a brief stint at law school, she pursued graduate studies in English, and embarked the writing career that has led her to be considered the premier Native American novelist and poet of her generation. Silko has lived and taught English in New Mexico, Alaska, and Arizona.

Silko's first book was the poetry collection Laguna Woman, in 1974, followed by Ceremony, in 1977. The first novel by a Native American women to be published in the United States, Ceremony received immediate critical and popular acclaim. Since Ceremony, Silko has published numerous books, including: Storyteller (1981) which combines poetry, tribal stories, fiction, and photographs; a collection of selected correspondence with nature poet James Wright, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1985); the novel Almanac of the Dead (1991); Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996), a collection of essays on Native American life; and the novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999).

While one Native American author, D'Arcy McNickle, published several novels in the 1930s, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s, with N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and then Silko's work, that Native American authors became a significant presence in the American literary scene. During this same time, works by and about a range of "ethnic" or multicultural American authors began to gain access to publication and attention across the country. This was due in large part to the increased contact between communities instigated by the demographic shifts caused by World War II, and to the Harlem Renaissance and then the equal rights movements of the 1960s.

Ceremony is set on the same Laguna Pueblo reservation where Silko grew up. Pueblo Indians refers to the group of Native Americans, including Hopi, Zuni, and Laguna, from the Pueblo crescent, which runs from central new Mexico through northeastern Arizona. The Laguna Reservation lies between Albuquerque and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Pueblos first came into contact with whites in the 16th century when the Spanish settled in the area. Pueblo territory became a part of Mexico in the early 1800s, when Mexico gained independence from Spain. The United States took control of the region after the Mexican-American war, with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The United States government introduced the Reservation system, originally intended to maintain racial segregation, and established the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which instituted, among other things, government-run schools for Native American children.

All of Silko's work draws on her personal experience as a Native American. As she often points out in interviews, Native American culture is passed on through a profoundly communal process of storytelling. Silko bases her work on traditional Native American stories, using narrative techniques that emphasize their communal aspects, even in books authored by one woman. The oral nature of traditional Native American storytelling ensures that each version will be slightly changed, and updated. In this spirit, she affirms in interviews, Silko's works are a continuation, not a reinterpretation, of the traditional stories. Ceremony features the three most important figures in Pueblo mythology, Thought Woman, Corn Mother, and Sun Father both in their traditional stories and in updated versions. Tayo, the main character in Ceremony, is also a figure in traditional Laguna stories. All of Silko's works demonstrate her concern with the preservation of Native American culture, including traditions, languages, and natural resources, in combination with an awareness of the reality of cultural miscegenation .

Plot Overview

Returning home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation from World War II, via a Veteran's Hospital, Tayo must find a way to cure himself of his mental anguish, and to bring the rain back to his community. Combining prose and poetry, Ceremony interweaves the individual story of Tayo and the collective story of his people. As Tayo's journey unfolds, it is paralleled by poems telling old stories.

The trauma of thinking he saw his uncle Josiah's face among a crowd of Japanese soldiers he was ordered to shoot, and then of watching his cousin Rocky die, drove Tayo out of his mind. A period of time in a Veterans' Hospital gets him well enough to return to his home, with his Grandmother, his Auntie, and her husband Robert. This is the family unit that raised him after his mother, who had conceived him with an unknown white man, left him for good at the age of four. In his family's home Tayo faces not only their disappointment at the loss of Rocky, but also his continued grieving over his favorite uncle Josiah's death. He also contends with his guilt over a prayer against the rain he uttered in the forests of the Philippines, which he thinks is responsible for the six-year drought on the reservation.

As he slowly recuperates, Tayo realizes that he is not alone. His childhood friends Harley, Leroy, Emo, and Pinkie who also fought in the war contend with similar post-traumatic stress, self-medicating with alcohol. The company is little comfort. His old friends spend their drunken hours reminiscing about how great the war was and how much respect they got while they were in uniform. These stories only make Tayo think about the tremendous discrimination the Native Americans face at the hands of the whites, whom they nonetheless seem to admire, and he is even more saddened and infuriated. Just as Tayo begins to give up hope and to wish he could return to the VA hospital, his grandmother calls in the medicine man, Ku'oosh. Ku'oosh performs for Tayo a ceremony for warriors who have killed in battle, but both Ku'oosh and Tayo fear that the ancient ceremonies are not applicable to this new situation.

Tayo is helped but not cured by Ku'oosh's ceremony. It prompts him to consider his childhood, especially the summer before he left for the army. Although Auntie did her best to keep the two boys separate, Tayo and Rocky became close friends, and the summer after they graduated from high school, they enlisted in the army together. That summer, Josiah fell in love with Night Swan, a Mexican woman who lived just outside the reservation. At her urging, he invested in a herd of Mexican cattle, which Tayo helped him to care for. As so often happens, there is a drought that summer. Having heard the old stories of how droughts are ended, Tayo goes to a spring and invents a rain ceremony. The following day it rains. In addition to helping the crops and the cattle, the rain keeps Josiah from visiting Night Swan. He asks Tayo to bring her a note. Tayo delivers the note, and in the process is seduced by Night Swan.

Realizing that his ceremony has not been enough for Tayo, Ku'oosh sends him to the nearby town of Gallup to see another medicine man, Betonie, who knows more about the problems incurred by the contact between Native American and white cultures. Although he is skeptical of Betonie's strange ways and especially high connection with the white world, Tayo tells him of his what is troubling him. Betonie listens and explains that they must invent and complete a new ceremony. Tayo accepts. Betonie tells Tayo stores of the old ceremonies as he performs them. Then Betonie tells Tayo stories of his grandfather, Descheeny, and the beginning of the creation of a new ceremony to stop the destruction the whites, an invention of Native American witchery, are wreaking on the world.

Betonie sends Tayo back home, reminding him that the ceremony is still far from complete. When he meets Harley and Leroy on the way home, Tayo slips back into their lifestyle for a moment, but soon moves on, heeding the signs Betonie told him of as he searches for Josiah's cattle. Tayo follows the stars to a woman's house. After spending a night with the woman, Ts'eh, Tayo heads up into the mountains. He finds Josiah's cattle fenced into a white man's pasture. While Tayo breaks into the pasture, the cattle run off to its far reaches, and Tayo spends all night looking for them. As dawn approaches, Tayo is about to give up when a mountain lion comes up to him. Tayo honors the mountain lion, and follows its tracks to the cattle. Just as he herds the cattle out of the pasture, two white patrolmen find Tayo. Not realizing that the cattle are missing, but knowing Tayo has trespassed, the patrolmen arrest Tayo. Before they can bring him to town, however, they notice the mountain lion tracks and let Tayo go in order to hunt it. As Tayo heads out, it begins to snow. Tayo knows this will cover the tracks of his cattle and of the mountain lion, making the patrolmens' efforts fruitless. On the way down the mountain, Tayo meets a hunter, who lives with Ts'eh. When they arrive back at her house, she has corralled Tayo's cattle, which she keeps until Tayo and Robert return with a cattle truck to gather them up.

Returning home with Josiah's cattle, Tayo feels cured. However, the drought persists, and Tayo knows the ceremony is not complete. He goes to the family's ranch with the cattle, where he finds Ts'eh . They spend the summer together, but as it draws to an end Robert visits and warns Tayo that Emo has been spreading rumors about him. Shortly thereafter, Ts'eh tells Tayo that Emo and the white police are coming after him. Before she leaves, she tells Tayo how to avoid capture.

Following Ts'eh's instructions, Tayo easily evades the white police. Still running from Emo, he meets Harley and Leroy. Almost too late, Tayo realizes that Harley and Leroy have joined forces with Emo. Running again, Tayo finds himself in an abandoned uranium mine. As he looks at the gaping hole left in the earth, Tayo realizes that this is the last station of his ceremony, the one where he incorporates an element of white culture, the mine. All he has to do is to spend the night there and the ceremony will be complete. Soon Emo and Pinkie arrive. From a hiding place, Tayo must watch them torture Harley to death, and restrain himself from killing Emo in order to save Harley. With the help of the wind, Tayo survives the night. He returns home and goes back to Ku'oosh. After hearing all about Tayo's ceremony, Ku'oosh pronounces that Ts'eh was in fact A'moo'ooh, who has given her blessings to Tayo and his ceremony; the drought is ended and the destruction of the whites is stopped. Tayo spends one last night in Ku'oosh's house to finish off the ceremony, and then he returns home.

Analysis of Major Characters

Tayo

Tayo embodies the confluence of Native American and white cultures, both present in his ancestry, and in his experience, which brings him from the reservation, to the US army, to the Philippines, to a Veteran's Hospital, and back to the reservation. Carrying the signs of the cultural mixing in his green eyes often makes Tayo bear the brunt of a whole society's confusion at the ways in which the world is changing. Especially since he never knew his father and was abandoned by his mother at the age of four, Tayo encounters great difficulty in negotiating his mixed identity and experience. This is exacerbated by his Auntie who raises him with the constant reminder of his difference. Like most of his peers, Tayo is educated in white-run schools. Unlike his friends, however, he often finds the white ways of life faulty and continues to respect and to believe in the Native American traditions he learns from his family as well. Tayo is prepared to serve as a bridge between the older and younger generations of Native Americans.

World War II interrupts Tayo's life, as it does to most Americans of his generation. He comes of age on the battlefield, amidst tremendous death and destruction. His awareness of the connections among of all people and all things makes it incredibly difficult for Tayo to kill in a war he does not understand, in a place far from his home. The majority of the Native American men who return from World War II drown their trauma in alcohol, full of confused anger. Tayo, however, is more sad than angry. Painfully aware of the ways in which Native Americans were and are mistreated by whites, Tayo is not interested in glorifying his time in the army. These characteristics allow him to respond to the help the medicine men Ku'oosh and Betonie offer.

His lifelong desperation to belong in his family and his community, along with his deep-seated belief in the power of the old traditions, allow Tayo to take up the challenge offered by Betonie and to undertake the completion of the ceremony, which can cure both himself and his people. Although he often falters along the path, Tayo's acceptance of the Native American mythical world allows him to benefit from the aid of accidents, animals, spirits, and the elements.


Betonie

As a medicine man, Betonie bridges the real and the mythical worlds. As would be expected, he spends much of his time in communication with spirits and stories to which others do not have access. The story of his own childhood appears magical, as he is descended from a woman who one day appears hanging in a treetop and turned out to be in search of her husband. In these ways, Betonie is like the other medicine man in the story, Ku'oosh. However, Betonie is also shockingly connected with the mundane details not only of Native American society but also that of whites.

Betonie attended a white-run boarding school and keeps old gas station calendars among his sacred herbs and stones. He lives not at the sacred center of the reservation, but on a cliff overlooking a run-down white town. He is descended from generations of Laguna medicine men and women only on one side; the other part of his ancestry is Mexican. He is a kindred spirit to Tayo, standing at the brink of a culture clash. But while Tayo tries desperately to make sense of the world, Betonie was raised with a deep understanding of it, and a profound tolerance for it. Where Tayo cries, Betonie laughs.

While Betonie is wise, he is not omnipotent (all-powerful). Medicine men are vehicles rather than agents; they observe, remember, and advise, but they need patients through whom to perform their ceremonies. Betonie provides Tayo with the tools and the faith Tayo needs in order to complete the ceremony. Betonie's role is that of the teacher, rather than of the hero.


Auntie

Although Ceremony is clearly a Native American novel about the adverse effects white people have on Native American culture and on the world in general, the Native Americans in the story are not idealized, nor are they wholly positive characters. Along with Emo, Auntie is one of the most negative characters in the book. In addition to embracing some of the more destructive elements of white society, Auntie also adheres to Native American tradition in a destructive manner.

The eldest daughter of Grandma, Auntie, whose given name is Thelma, will be the next matriarch of her family. As such, she feels responsible to the community for her family and especially her younger siblings. However, Auntie is more concerned about how Laura and Josiah's actions will affect the respect the community gives to her family and what gossip they may cause to be spread, than she is with their welfare. Similarly, she follows the letter rather than the spirit of Native American traditions, leading her to condemn completely any relationship outside of the community. In addition to this blind adherence to Native American social mores, Auntie is a devout Christian who thrives on a narrow interpretation of the concept of martyrdom. In Auntie's understanding of martyrdom, she will gain the respect of her peers if she is seen to suffer for the sins of others. It is in this spirit that she raises Tayo, rather than out of any love for him or any sense of the Native American concept of family, which is not limited to nuclear (mother, father, and child) units.

Although Auntie is a highly problematic character who causes all sorts of unnecessary problems in Tayo's life, she is not demonized. Although she does not do it out of love, she does raise Tayo. She causes difficulty, but not ruin. Her mistreatment of Tayo is attenuated by the rest of her family. Auntie's misunderstanding of both Native American and Christian traditions is the result of the same clashing of cultures that affects everyone in the novel.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

The Importance of Storytelling

Storytelling in the context of Ceremony refers not only to the general process of telling a story but also to the particular Native American tradition of storytelling. Traditionally, Native American cultural is oral, and everything from biology to history to morality to medicine is passed on in the form of stories. While the elders in a community may be the official storytellers, storytelling is a profoundly communal event. Since stories are intended to pass on information that will be remembered, they are often rhythmic, almost sung, and contain a large amount of repetition. This mode of storytelling is presented in Ceremony in the form of poems, both framing the main narrative (at the beginning and end) and interspersed throughout. These stories are in fact traditional Pueblo stories, known outside of the context of the novel. Tayo's tale reflects the traditional stories but is original. Along with the arrangement of the prose and poem passages, it can be seen as Silko's personal intervention in the communal process of storytelling.

While the prose sections of Ceremony are primarily narrated in a third person limited voice, the poems vary between first and third person. They announce the elements of this theme that will recur throughout the novel. Stories have the power to heal: they contain the rituals and ceremonies that can cure individuals and communities. They do this primarily by reminding us of the interrelations between all people and all things. As a story is told communally or is shared by one person with another, it creates a sense of community between those people. The presence of both the first and third person in the poems reinforces this aspect. For Tayo, the stories represent the Native American understanding of the world that he grew up with but that the white schools, the army, and the doctors and the VA hospital tried to convince him were incorrect. As he remembers and reenacts the old stories, Tayo reconnects with his community, recovers from the trauma of the war, and returns the rain to his land. The stories teach Tayo that he is not alone, both because he shares stories with a whole community and also because content of the ancient stories remind him that others before him have had similar experiences—he is not alone, and there is always hope for renewal.

The Destructiveness of Contact Between Cultures

The contact between Native American and white cultures in Ceremony is largely destructive. While the novel presents its devastating effects in somber terms, it is not concerned with simply lamenting the fact that whites arrived on the American continent and established systems that prove fatal to the indigenous peoples. Rather, Ceremony presents an attempt to contend with the reality of a mixed cultural landscape in a way that allows Native American culture to persist, even as it changes. Tayo himself embodies the contact between Native American and white cultures, as he bears his mixed racial heritage in his green eyes. Tayo must learn to make use of the white parts of himself and of the world around him, without abandoning his primary allegiance to Native American traditions.

For many in the novel, the first contact between the cultures takes place in the white schools that the Native Americans attend. There, white teachers tell them that their stories are not true and that their understanding of the world is not valid. Most significant, the white teachers present a completely different view of science and nature, and, as a result, the younger generations of Native Americans want to abandon traditional farming practices. This creates an agricultural crisis that is exacerbated by the pollution of reservation lands by white mines and military industry. In addition, white towns attract Native Americans with the prospect of white-collar jobs and good pay, but racism denies Native Americans access to those positions, while the cash they are able to make allows them greater access to the bars and the alcoholism whites have also introduced. All of these serve as strong indictments of the effect of whites on Native American culture. However, the relationship between white and Native American cultures is completely shifted in Ceremony when Betonie reveals that whites are an invention of Native American witchcraft. In the revelation, although they are still a primarily destructive force, whites are shown to be a part of Native American culture and traditions.

The Necessity of Tradition

In Ceremony, preserving tradition is essential to saving the Native American community. Both for Tayo and in the ancient stories, forgetting tradition brings massive drought and disaster. A key role of the medicine men is to preserve tradition, as is symbolized by the crates of artifacts they store. However, in order for tradition to survive, it must change with the times. The reservation medicine man, Ku'oosh, is unable to cure Tayo because he knows only the traditional healing ceremonies, which are not applicable to contemporary illnesses. As Betonie explains, traditions must be constantly reinvented to reflect the ever-changing reality of the world. Similarly, the novel shows the dangers of blindly adhering to traditions rather than trying to follow their intent. Auntie represents those who simply follow the dictates of traditions, as she mistrusts any form of interracial relationship. Josiah, on the other hand, represents those who follow the spirit of traditions, such as when he finds a way to interbreed Mexican and Hereford cattle to create a herd that will be both hardy and productive.

The Constant Threat of Drought

Water is essential to the survival of crops and animals for the Laguna, whose primary occupation is agriculture. Without city-sponsored plumbing and irrigation systems, and not wanting to interrupt the natural flow of water with dams, the Laguna are completely dependent on natural rainfall. Living in the desert land that comprises much of the southwest of the United States, the Laguna are constantly threatened by drought. Many of the traditional stories and ceremonies revolve around ensuring adequate rainfall. The primary signal of the spirits' displeasure with something the people has done is a drought, and one of the greatest feats of a destructive spirit is the creation of a drought. However, as Josiah tells Tayo when he is a child, everything has both its good and its bad sides. While too little rainfall can be disastrous, so can too much, as Tayo learns in the Philippine jungle. Tayo commits a grievous error when he forgets this lesson and, in the midst of a flood, curses the rain. Whether or not Tayo's curse is actually responsible for the drought on the reservation, it is essential for his health as well as for that of his community that he learn through his ceremony to respect the patterns of nature. Once he does that, the rain returns.

Motifs

Nonlinear Narrative Structure

The Native Americans of the Pueblo see time as cyclical rather than linear. Silko produces a text that emphasizes this notion by using a nonlinear narrative structure. In most of Western literature, narrative proceeds in a temporal succession from beginning to end and from earlier to later. Although features such as analepsis (shifting back in time) and prolepsis (shifting forward in time) are standard, they are generally clearly marked and take up much less of the time and space of the novel than does the primary narrative. In Ceremony, on the other hand, it is often difficult to distinguish between primary and secondary narratives, or between past and present. Silko switches back and forth from Tayo's childhood to his time in the Philippines to various moments after his return, following no order except the order of thematic connections between the different events. The entire novel is narrated in the past tense, so whether an event actually occurred before Tayo's birth or in the midst of the ceremony, it appears to happen at the same time. The effect of this is to recreate a Pueblo sense of time, where all things are cyclic and where their immediacy is related not to how long ago they happened but to how important they feel in the present.

The Combination of Poetry and Prose

Silko's use of poetry invokes the rhythmic, communal storytelling patterns of the Native Americans, while her use of prose belongs to a Western narrative tradition. By combining the two in her novel, Silko asserts that the form as well as the content of the story is about the blending of the two cultures. Thematically, white and Native American cultures clash with each other more often than they complement each other, but the prose and poetry weave together easily. In many ways, they tell the same story; “only thing is,” as Grandma says at the end, “the names sound different.” The entire stories sound different as well, as versification (the division of the verses), rhyming, alliteration (the repetition of the first letter of a word), and repetition give the poems a distinctive rhythm. The poem at the end of the novel completes the line on the page before the first prose section, enclosing the entire novel within a poem. In other words, just as whites are said to be an invention of Native American witchcraft, so is a Western form of storytelling shown to be contained within a Native American form of storytelling.

Symbols

The Gallup Ceremonial

Every year, the white mayor and council of Gallup organize a Ceremonial. The Gallup Ceremonial symbolizes the ways in which whites misunderstand Native American tradition and appropriate it for their own purposes. Dancers from a wide range of Native American groups are invited the Gallup Ceremonial and are paid for their performances. This demonstrates the whites' lack of comprehension of the differences between Native American tribes, as well as their ignorance of the specific purpose of each individual ceremony. Whereas traditional ceremonies are performed around important events or times of year, with a specific ritual meaning, the Gallup Ceremonial is intended purely for the entertainment of whites. In addition, for the rest of the year, the town of Gallup at best ignores and at worst promotes the racist mistreatment of Native Americans, symbolizing the ways in which whites are eager to praise Native American artifacts but do not want to deal with the ongoing lives of real Native Americans.

Section 1 of ceremony

Summary

A series of three poems open Ceremony. The first poem tells of Ts'its'tsi'nako, thought-woman, the spider, who created the world with her sisters by thinking and naming things. The poem ends with the lines:

"I'm telling you the story she is thinking."

The second poem is entitled "Ceremony" and focuses on the power of stories, which contain, among other things, rituals and ceremony. The third poem, "What she said" simply reads:

"The only cure I know is a good ceremony, that's what she said."

The poems are followed by a blank page with the word "sunrise," after which the narrative begins.

Tayo tosses and turns, slipping between dreams of his home where Laguna and Mexican Spanish are spoken and dreams of his time during World War II in the Philippines, where he is surrounded by the sounds of Japanese. Waking, Tayo thinks about how confused his memories and dreams are. The only way for him to relax is to hold an image of a deer in his mind, but his mind quickly wanders to the Philippines, where in the humid climate, he thought he saw his uncle Josiah among a group of Japanese soldiers he was ordered to shoot. Even when his cousin Rocky turned over the dead bodies of the Japanese soldiers and reasoned the impossibility of the image with him, Tayo was sure his uncle was among the dead.

Tayo gets up and milks his goats. He sits in his kitchen, missing Josiah. There is a severe drought, similar to the one after World War I, in the 1920s. During the last drought, Tayo was a young boy and helped his uncle to carry water for the animals. Now he has few animals and no family. Tayo was gone for six years. He remembers the rain of the jungle in the Philippines. He and a corporal carried Rocky, with a gangrene-infested wound, on a sheet until anenormous flood tore the sheet from their hands and nearly killed them. Then, Tayo prayed against the rain, with a poem about drought. Tayo believes that the six years of drought are the result of his prayer to stop the rain.

In the Veterans' Hospital in Los Angeles where he went after the war, Tayo felt like white smoke: invisible, unconscious, unable to communicate. At first, Tayo can only speak of himself in the third person. He cries so much he makes himself vomit, but he slowly gets well enough to be released from the hospital. At the Los Angeles train depot, Tayo collapses. Awakening to the sounds and sights of a Japanese family, he thinks he is back in the Philippines. A depot man helps him up, explaining that Japanese-Americans are no longer held in internment camps. Tayo vomits again.

On the reservation, Tayo remembers his childhood with Rocky. He thinks about the Indian stories from his childhood which, despite his teachers having told him they were nonsense, he still believes.

Tayo's friend Harley stops by on an old ornery burro (mule) to visit. Harley was also a soldier, at Wake Island, and came back with a Purple Heart. The only change Tayo notices in Harley is his increased drinking. But then Harley alludes to an incident shortly after he returned from the war, and Tayo wonders how unchanged Harley really is. Harley went to help his family move their sheep to the Monta-o, which was less affected by the drought than the surrounding areas. Without any warning, Harley left the sheep, the dog, and his horse. He ended up in jail and half of the animals had been killed. As Tayo listens to Harley laugh about the incident, he realizes that Harley feels nothing. Tayo had his own problems, including a fight in a bar where he almost killed another old friend, Emo. Now both Tayo and Harley have been left in the desert to watch over the deserted ranches while their families care for the livestock in greener pastures. Tayo is happy to be alone; not Harley. Still, Tayo is easily convinced to join Harley on the long ride to the reservation line and the bars. As they ride, Tayo thinks about how his grandmother and Auntie talk about Rocky so much that Tayo feels Rocky was the one who survived the war, while he died, only his body has yet to be buried. Tayo starts to cry, and he feel himself back in the Philippines as he looses consciousness to sunstroke. Harley gets Tayo into the shade to rest.

Analysis

Ceremony is not divided into chapters; there are fifty-three long indents at the beginnings of paragraphs which indicate a separation into sections, but these sections are not numbered. Poems are interspersed throughout the novel at irregular intervals. The lack of easily identifiable section divisions in the story is a physical, formal (in form) reflection of the themes of interconnection between all things, repetition, and of the unclear lines between dream, myth, memory, and reality. As Silko refuses to conform to the standard presentation of a novel, in chapter form, she refuses to make her story conform exactly to traditional American standards. Similarly, as she seamlessly combines prose and poetry, she ignores standard generic (of genre) divisions. Ceremony is not only a story about Native Americans, it is a Native American story.

The poetic sections of the novel tell traditional Native American stories. The poetic form suggests that they are sung or chanted. These are part poem, part story, and part prayer. The narrator and speaker in these poems shifts between a first person singular and a third person, but these are the stories of the collective. There is not one narrator or one speaker who sings them. While they are clearly set apart from the prose narrative by the shift in form, the poems reflect the events of the rest of the story. In fact, they tell the same story, with different characters, as old Grandma remarks at the end of the novel. The poems also tell of the traditional Native American ceremonies, while the prose narrative must create a new ceremony. As the poems and the prose are woven together, so are the old and new ceremonies. In addition, the entire novel is framed by a poem, which begins with the single word, "sunrise" and continues on the very last page. In this way, the whole story is contained within a poem, so that the prose narrative as well as the poems, are part of a traditional Native American prayer, poem, or story. The poem "Ceremony" thematizes this idea. It also demonstrates the repetitive and interlocking nature of the novel. With the same title as the book, "Ceremony" is a poem within a story, whose subject is stories within poems. The two opening poems also comment on the power of stories to create and to change the world. Ceremony is not just a story about ceremonies, it is a ceremony itself.

As a result of the trauma of fighting in World War II, Tayo's dreams are haunted, and he is troubled by an inability to separate memories from dreams from reality. He is caught in a past moment that keeps on taking over both his sleep and his waking hours. Much of Tayo's distress comes from his confusion of his uncle Josiah with the Japanese soldiers he was killing. This confusion results in part from the similar physical characteristics of Native Americans and Japanese. The physical similarity is most likely due to a common ancestry. Tayo's recognition of this similarity demonstrates not a realization of ancient migratory patterns, but of the interconnectedness of all people. However, he cannot identify it as such. Tayo only feels that he is terribly confused, and must be partially crazy. This feeling has been reinforced by his time spent at a Veteran's Hospital. Although he left the hospital with a stronger awareness of himself and a greater desire to live than he had at the very ending of the war, Tayo's encounter with Harley shows that all of the native Americans who fought in World War II were traumatized in a way that has not been addressed. The men self-medicate with alcohol, which dulls their senses, but also unleashes the sadness, fear, and anger which they still carry.

Section 2 of ceremony

Summary

When Tayo arrives in New Laguna from Los Angeles, his Auntie takes him in and nurses him, as she took him in as a child in order to hide the shame of his mother, who was pregnant by a white man. Auntie, always eager to gain the recognition of her neighbors and friends for her burdens and hardships, raised Tayo alongside her own son, Rocky. Recuperating in her house, Tayo realizes that she still changes the sheets on Rocky and Josiah's beds weekly, as if there were still alive. When Auntie changes Tayo's sheets, she puts him into Rocky's bed. The experience is so traumatic for Tayo that he vomits. Daylight also makes him vomit, so he lies in the dark where he does not have to look at the mementos of Rocky's life, crying. Grandma, sitting in the dark by the stove, listens to Tayo cry and vomit. Since Rocky and Josiah's deaths, Robert, Auntie's husband, has a few more responsibilities, although most responsibilities belong to the women. Robert is the first person to chat with Tayo and tell him that he is glad to have Tayo back home.

Tayo feels that he is getting worse and wants to return to the hospital. He calls to his grandmother to tell her, but before he says anything, Grandma says he needs a medicine man. Auntie protests that rumors will start anew, as they did with Tayo's mother and the white men, and with Tayo's uncle Josiah and the Mexican woman. Grandma doesn't care about gossip. Auntie argues that the army doctors had prescribed no medicine men, but she accepts that Old Ku'oosh, the medicine man, will be called. She thinks one day she will be able at least to say "I told you so" as she did about Sis, Tayo's mother, who was almost run off the reservation by the village officers.

Ku'oosh arrives, and Old Grandma and Auntie leave him and Tayo alone. In the old dialect, explaining the origins of each idea, he reminds Tayo of the sacred places on the reservation. He spends a long time explaining to Tayo how the world is fragile and intricate. Tayo tells Ku'oosh that, as far as he knew, he did not kill anyone. Ku'oosh says that you cannot kill without knowing it, but Tayo thinks this is based on an understanding of the world that cannot account for modern warfare. Still, Ku'oosh sets Tayo up to go through the ancient rituals for cleansing after you have killed someone in battle, in a poem which explains the ceremony and warns that without these rituals your dreams will be haunted.

Before he leaves, Ku'oosh warns Tayo that while the ritual has helped some of the young men who returned from the war, it has not helped all of them. The old cures do not work as they used to since the white men came, and Ku'oosh fears what will happen if Tayo and the others are not cured. Ku'oosh leaves, and Tayo remains in bed, thinking of a story on a man who cursed the rain and had monstrous dreams. When he wakes, Auntie feeds him blue cornmeal mush, in accordance with the ritual. Tayo eats it and does not vomit. He no longer cares if he dies. He is able to eat, to go outside, and to sleep through the night. Not caring about being alive, it becomes much easier to live.

Tayo goes to Dixie Tavern with Harley, Emo, and Leroy, who were also in the war. As the other men get drunk, Tayo realizes how the alcohol dulls the pain and anger of the veterans. The guys and Tayo tell stories of their time in the army.

Analysis

All of the younger Native Americans are caught in the conflict between their values and traditions and those of United States; Tayo's case is only an extreme example. Auntie, Tayo's mother, and all of Tayo's friends experience similar conflicts. The problem long predates World War II. Auntie's character also demonstrates that the division between positive and negative does not run solely along Native and non-Native American lines. While some of Auntie's problematic behavior comes from her attempts to negotiate between two cultures, her preference for her own son and her subsequent mistreatment of Tayo are simply part of her own character. While the novel upholds Native American views and values, it does not present a simplistic praise of all that is Native American.

The main character and the majority of the secondary characters in Ceremony are men, however the balance of power between women and men is remarkably even. In the traditional stories, the gods and the sacred animals are fairly evenly distributed between men and women, giving men and women equal symbolic power in the story. Although the medicine men who we meet are men, they talk of medicine women who have predated them. The only elder in Tayo's family is a woman, and clearly the women control not only the symbolic but also the material wealth and power of the family. Since no Native American women served in World War II, in order to tell the story of that experience, Silko, herself a woman, had to chose a male protagonist. In interviews, Silko has also commented that she hoped in this novel to discuss basic problems and desires that exceed or go deeper than gender divisions.

The use of the English language in the novel is problematized as the narrator specifies that old Ku'oosh speaks in the old dialect, that he explains the deep connotations and significations of the words he uses. As we learn that each word has unique and extremely important meanings, we are reminded that we are reading a story in English when much of the conversation in it originally took place in Laguna. Our understanding of the subtle meanings of each word may not be perfect. But of course the novel is written in English and therefore is intended for an English-speaking audience. This sets up a tension between accessibility and inaccessibility, which should keep the reader slightly uncomfortable. Although the story is told, the narrator is careful to specify that it contains some subtleties and secrets that it does not reveal completely. What exactly those secrets and subtleties are is less important than the fact that they exist. In fact, the narrator explains in great detail the subtleties of Ku'oosh's words, but the reminder that they are not spoken in English holds a place for that which may not be shared.

If the Native American tradition contains some things that the English of the United States cannot understand, the reverse is also true. The crises on the reservation results form the old Native American medicine and ceremonies no longer being effective in the face of the influences and infiltrations of US culture.

Section 3 of ceremony

Summary

In the army, the men had regular pay, and in their uniforms white women danced with them without worrying about their being Indian. But when the other guys press Tayo to tell his war stories, Tayo sums up the experience of Indians in the war and after it in bleak terms: as long as they were in uniform they were not discriminated against, but as soon as the war was over and they shed their uniforms, the discrimination returned. As he talks, Tayo looks at Emo and realizes that Emo is furious at him for ruining their good time. Emo is angry with Tayo because he blames himself and the other Indians for losing the respect of the whites after the war; he does not think to blame the whites. Emo and the other guys go on drinking to try to recapture the feeling of belonging that they had during the war. Tayo gets quiet, and when he begins to cry the guys pat him on the back, thinking he is crying for Rocky and what the Japs did to him. But actually, Tayo is crying for them and there situation right there in the bar.

Tayo does not hate the Japanese soldiers. They always reminded him of his friends and family. Tayo remembers how after the flood knocked Rocky out of their hands, one of the Japanese soldiers picked him up again, covered him in a blanket, and shot him in the head, while Tayo screamed. The corporal tells Tayo that Rocky was already dead; Tayo will never know for sure.

Tayo wakes up in the shade with Harley, recovered from the sunstroke. He looks out at where the spring still flows and remembers gathering water from it with Josiah during the drought when he was a boy. As they gathered water, Josiah explained to him how every part of nature was important and that the old people said droughts only happened when people forgot.

As Tayo and Harley drink from the spring, Tayo thinks "maybe this wasn't the end after all." A poem tells the story of Pa'caya'nyi who came from Reedleaf town up north and asked the people if they wanted to learn some new magic. He brought his mountain lion, made an altar, and struck the wall and made water and a bear come from it. Everyone believed his magic so much that they forgot their mother corn altar. But Pa'caya'nyi's magic was just a trick. Mother corn was so angry at being neglected that she left, taking the plants and the grass, and the rain clouds with her.

Tayo and Harley finally arrive at the bar. Tayo settles himself in to get drunk and remember Rocky. Tayo remembers when he and Rocky killed a deer. He touched the deer when it was still soft and warm. When Rocky began to gut it, Tayo covered its eyes, out of respect as the people said you should. Rocky was becoming ever more skeptical of the old ways, as he excelled at school and his teachers told him not to be held back by the people at home. Both Rocky and Auntie were ready to sacrifice the old ways, which they saw as the only way to succeed in the white world. Rocky gutted the deep while Josiah and Robert came and performed the rituals to appease its spirit. When they returned to the village, there would be more ceremonies, which Rocky would avoid, disapprovingly.

Harley keeps feeding Tayo beer, remembering somewhat nervously what happened the last time they came to the bar. Harley kept telling the others to leave Tayo alone, but they continued bothering him until Tayo jumped up, broke a bottle, and shoved it into Emo's stomach. Tayo reassures Harley that he won't do the same to him.

The poem/story of Pa'caya'nyi continues, with the people realizing that they need to ask forgiveness and discovering Hummingbird who tells them that three worlds down there is plenty to eat.

Analysis

The narrative does not progress in a neat linear fashion. Although we do follow Tayo from his return to the reservation through some unspecified period of time until he is cured, the temporal succession of the episodes in the novel does not correspond to the progression of real time. Rather, the episodes in the novel are narrated as Tayo thinks of them. With one of Tayo's problems being his inability to neatly separate and categorize his memories, the order of the episodes in the novel is equally confusing. The narrative shifts back to Tayo's time in the Philippines, to his early days back on the reservation, and to his childhood at unpredictable and often un-marked moments. In addition to reflecting Tayo's own mental state, these shifts represent the cyclical nature of life, and the ways in which the past and the present are intimately, but often strangely, related.

In this section, we find the narration of two bar scenes intertwined. In the primary narrative, Tayo and Harley go to the bar. In the secondary narrative, Tayo remembers an earlier moment when he, Harley, Emo, and Leroy went to the same bar. These two narratives are also interrupted by stories from Tayo's childhood and by poems. While some of the poems in the novel stand alone or are picked up only a few times, one in particular will be continued throughout. This is the story of Pa'caya'nyi and how the people were tricked by his witchery into abandoning their mother corn, which resulted in a great drought. In the course of the poem, the people search for a way to get their mother and the rain back. Similarly, Tayo feels that he has caused the drought on the reservation, and his recovery will be intimately linked to the ending of the drought.

Racism plagues the Native American population. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the novel is set, racial segregation was still widespread in the United States, and racist attitudes were widely tolerated, even sanctioned by the state. The result of years of institutionalized racism for much of the Native American population is its internalization. Tayo describes the problem of internalized racism as he points out that his friends never think to blame the whites for the way they were treated before and after the war, but instead blame themselves.

Although Tayo is plagued with many of the same cultural conflicts as his friends, he has always maintained a certain belief in the Native American traditions. In some ways, this makes his experience much more difficult. Tayo could not easily succeed in the school system like Rocky. He cannot simply drown his troubles in idealized memories of the war with Harley, Emo, and Leroy. However, Tayo' s belief in the old ways also offers him a chance to be cured in a way much more profound than that achieved in drunkenness. His experience at the spring is the first indicator that his belief in the stories he was told as a child can help him in the present.

Section 4 of ceremony

Summary

Harley keeps drinking and talking about the incident, which sent Tayo back to the hospital. As he gets drunk, Harley begins to speak Laguna. On that other day, in the bar, Emo goes on about how the white men got everything, and in retaliation they should go out and get white women. Tayo goes to the bathroom, imagining his pee is a way to return water to the land but then slipping into memories of the war. When Tayo returns to the table, Emo accuses him of thinking he is better than the others because he is half-white. Growing up, Tayo was used to being teased and to his Auntie's shame and slowly came to realize the complex interactions between white men and Indian women as well as that of Indian men and white women. Emo tells stories of the white women he slept with while he was in the army. Then Leroy and Harley tell a story of a white woman Emo was having sex with, who suddenly fainted when she realized he was an Indian. This story makes Emo uncomfortable, and Emo accuses Tayo of not liking his stories because he thinks he and his "big hero cousin" are better than everyone else. But, Emo says, Tayo sure can drink like an Indian. Tayo ignores him. Then Emo gets out his bag of human teeth, war souvenirs, and talks about what great soldiers they were, and Tayo tenses as he senses how much Emo enjoyed the killing. Finally, Tayo jumps up and accuses Emo of being a killer. Emo laughs and accuses Tayo of loving Japs the way his mother loved white men, at which point Tayo lunges at him. When the cops come to take him away, Tayo's anger has been overwhelmed with confusion.

Tayo signed up for the army because Rocky did. They were the only two people at the recruiting session. Rocky was enthusiastic and only wanted to make sure that he and his brother could stay together. It was the first time Rocky had ever referred to Tayo as his brother: Auntie had always been very careful to maintain the distinction of the two boys being cousins.

Laura, Tayo's mother, left him with her brother Josiah and the rest of her family when he was four years old. Although she had left him before, everyone knew that this time was permanent when Josiah told Tayo that he had a brother now, and Rocky screamed that he did not want a brother. Tayo and Rocky slept in the same bed. While they were young, whenever Auntie was alone with the two boys she made sure that Tayo felt the difference of his status, although with the whole family the two boys were treated equally. As they grew up, spending less and less time alone with Auntie, their treatment equaled out, but Tayo remained acutely aware of all the undertones of Auntie's voice and movement.

Auntie tried desperately to keep Laura from running off, but the world was changing. The old Indian ways were becoming mixed with the white ways, and Laura was receiving competing messages from her community and from her teachers and the missionaries. Caught between two cultures, Laura became ashamed of both, and her sister and her people were not able to recover her. They were ashamed and angry and in conflict with one another over the events as well.

The poem/story of Pa'caya'nyi and the drought continues. Hummingbird offers to serve as a messenger for the people, if they provide him with a special jar over which they have sung a special song.

Analysis

The confluence of Native American and white cultures is embodied in Tayo's very being, as he is of mixed race. His birth and subsequent abandonment are the result of his mother's difficulties in negotiating the conflicting messages she received at home on the reservation and at the white-run school. Tayo's mother was of the first generation to experience white-run schools. Raised on the reservation and never having known his white father, Tayo is clearly Native American by culture. Since he is partly Native American, he experiences the same racism as his friends when he is in white society. Emo and his other childhood friends, however, have always noticed the difference. This is not only because they know the stories of Tayo's mother, but because his difference is marked on his body, in the color of his eyes.

Although Tayo in no way feels that he is white, he does feel a sense of separation from his community, which he is desperate to overcome. The metaphor for belonging to a community is belonging to a family. Since Tayo was raised by his aunt, he has always felt, just slightly, like an outsider even in his family. This again is in great part a result of cultural conflict. While family units in Native American culture often consist of several generations as well as groups of siblings living together—as is reflected in Old Grandma and Josiah's easy acceptance of Tayo—in white culture the nuclear family is most valued, as is reflected in Auntie and Rocky's initial reactions to Tayo. Tayo's desperation to feel a sense of complete belonging in his family is shown in his tremendous reaction to Rocky's first pronouncement that they are brothers, rather than cousins.

The effects of internalized racism are again demonstrated as Emo assumes that since he is half-white, Tayo would think that he is better, rather than worse, than those who are of full Native American ancestry. In addition, however, Emo maintains a certain belief that races ought to remain separated. Although he proudly tells stories of his exploits with white women, he criticizes Tayo's mother for liking white men, and he criticizes Tayo for liking the Japanese.

The poem offers a possible cure for the drought. The cure requires a messenger, and a ceremony. As Tayo's story is reflected in the poem, we know that in order to cure Tayo and end the drought of his time, a similar set of events is necessary. Tayo already stands out as the perfect messenger, but Ku'oosh, the medicine man, has warned him that the ceremony he has undergone is no longer effective.

Section 5 of ceremony

Summary

On the way back from signing up for the army, Tayo remembers that the family understanding has always been that Rocky will one day leave, but that Tayo will stay at home to help. At this realization, Tayo is reminded of the great feeling of loss he had at his mother's death. Josiah and Grandma think Tayo should go with Rocky, and so Auntie has to agree.

While they were in high school, Josiah invested in a herd of cattle. He bought them in Sonora, Mexico, from Ulibarri, a cousin of Night Swan, his Mexican girlfriend. Josiah was sure that the Mexican cattle were a better investment than the Herefords that others tried to raise because they were used to the desert. He tried reading books that the agricultural (ag) extension office sent him, but he found they were only suited to big farms away from the desert. Tayo loved the idea of the cattle because Josiah included him in the plans. Rocky mistrusted it because he believed the scientific books of the ag extension. Auntie mistrusted the idea because it was connected to the Mexican girlfriend.

A week later, the cattle are delivered to the Laguna reservation. Josiah lets them out near an area where the grass is still green. A week after that, when they return to check on the cattle, they find that they have broken through a fence and moved south. The men are woe to keep track of the cattle, but the animals continue to move slowly south and are very difficult to round up. As they get closer to Mexico, Josiah decides to brand them. He is able to catch and brand them, but they continue heading south. Josiah does not want Auntie and Grandma to know of his troubles.

The story/poem continues. Fly appears in the jar, and Hummingbird says they will go together. They go four worlds down and find everything growing and beautiful.

One day when Josiah goes to Lalo's store to get bootlegged beer, he sees a Mexican woman and falls in love with her. He returns the next day, and Night Swan invites him upstairs with her. She dances flamenco for him and tells him of how she used to dance and make men love her when she was younger. Night Swan is a grandmother now, and says that now when she dances it is for her granddaughters. But when the drought struck in Mexico, she moved north, and stopped near the Laguna reservation and Cubero because she liked the look of the mountain. At first, the Cubero women were upset because they imagined their husbands were going to see her, but they relaxed when they realized Josiah was with her every night. When Auntie finds out about Josiah and Night Swan, she is outraged, saying that it will bring shame on the family and upset old Grandma. But old Grandma doesn't mind people gossiping about her family as long as she has better gossip about them, which she usually does.

Tayo continues to help Josiah keep the cattle on Laguna land and to check on the sheep. They spend the summer this way, while Rocky relaxes. He has a football scholarship to college. After dinner, Josiah goes to visit Night Swan. Auntie compares Josiah's wandering to their old dog, which was hit by a car while it was following a bitch in heat. Tayo remembers how Josiah comforted him at his mother's funeral.

Having heard from Josiah that during dry spells holy men ride to the mountains and study the skies, Tayo gets up before dawn in the morning and rides to the canyon with the spring, concocting little rituals, and praying for rain. He watches the spider drink and thinks about the old stories, which he continues to believe at least to some extent, despite what his teachers tell him. On the way home, he sees a hummingbird. The next day it rains.

Josiah asks Tayo to take a note to Night Swan, since he won't be able to visit her that night. All summer, Tayo has felt Night Swan watching him. He is nervous. She invites him upstairs, and they make love. As he leaves, she tells him she has been watching him because of the color of his eyes, and Tayo comments that the kids have always teased him for having Mexican eyes. Night Swan tells him that people are just afraid of change and think that those who look different are to blame instead of realizing that change is all around. She also tells him to remember this day for later.

Analysis

As with Emo's accusation of Tayo for loving the Japanese, we see with Auntie's mistrust of Mexicans that any alliance between the non-whites is problematic. They are as aware of the differences between them as they are of any common differences or problems they may have with the whites. Nonetheless, as they have long inhabited the same land, there is a certain bond between the Native Americans and the Mexicans. The bond is symbolized in the Mexicans' provision of bootlegged alcohol to the reservation; the Prohibition on alcohol is the United States is in effect.

In this section we have the first clear indication of where the novel is set, other than on a reservation in drought-wracked land. The reservation is in Arizona, near the border with the Mexican state of Sonora. The border between Mexico and the United States was not drawn with any concern for tribal boundaries, and so in fact the people on the two sides of border often share a common ancestry. However, in Mexico interracial children were so commonplace for such a long time, that most of the people in the lower classes have some degree of mixed ancestry, while in the United States racial segregation was more widespread. For this reason, when Night Swan recognizes that she and Tayo have the same color eyes, she indicates their common biracial status.

Josiah's cattle serve as another symbol of mixed ancestry. First, they are Mexican cattle bought by a Native American. In addition, Josiah breeds them with Herefords. The mixed offspring will, Josiah hopes, demonstrate the Mexican cattle's resilience to drought and the Hereford's rich milk and meat production. Josiah consults the US texts on cattle but finds them inapplicable to his situation, symbolizing the more general failure of the western scientific tradition to account for and to pertain to the specificities of the Native American experience. Josiah and Tayo care for the cattle together, so that they also become a symbol for Tayo's status as a productive member of the family.

Night Swan is the first of two symbolic women in Tayo's life. In addition to being Mexican and of mixed race, Night Swan is someone who has traveled in search of water, and she is a sexy older woman. She is in perfect control of her sexuality; aware of its power, is careful with it. Night Swan seduces Tayo to teach him a lesson about difference and change.

Tayo's affinity with Hummingbird from the poem and his role as the messenger who can return the rain is confirmed. Even as a young boy, he succeeded in following the traditions he learned from Josiah to bring back the rain. Essential to this moment's foreshadowing of the end of the novel is the way in which Tayo is able to invent a new ceremony based on the tidbits of tradition, which he has learned.

Section 6 of ceremony

Summary

Tayo leaves Harley in the bar and goes to get menudo (a Mexican soup) in a nearby shop. The man in the shop is killing flies, and Tayo remembers when he killed flies as a young boy and Josiah told him how important the fly is to his people. Tayo heeded his uncle, but in the jungle, when he saw flies crawling all over Rocky, he killed them.

When Tayo returns to the bar, Harley is gone. Tayo walks to Cubero, to Lalo's bar, which closed down during the war but still looks the same. He has not returned to the spot since the night with Night Swan. That September, he and Rocky enlisted. Tayo heard that she left after Josiah's funeral. Tayo walks all the way back to Casa Blanca and sleeps in the barn behind Harley's grandpa's house; he sleeps all night without dreams.

Fly and Hummingbird go see their mother. They ask her for food and storm clouds. She tells them to have old Buzzard purify the town.

Tayo tells Robert that he is feeling better and is ready to take on some responsibilities at the ranch. Robert informs him the other members of the community want him to get help. Tayo understands that they want him to leave, that they have always wanted him to leave. He starts to feel terrible again.

Gallup is a town where white people go to get drunk and Indians visit as quickly as possible. A large number of half-breeds live in Gallup. Once a year, there is a great Ceremonial there. A young boy, who could be Tayo, lives with his mother under the bridge in Gallup. He eats scraps and sleeps under tables at the bar while she goes off with men. She builds a shack under the bridge where they live until some white men come and throw bottles at the women, who retaliate. All of the women are arrested, the shacks are destroyed and burned, and the boy is left alone.

Fly and Hummingbird go to old Buzzard with an offering and ask him to purify the town. Old Buzzard requests more offerings.

Robert and Tayo arrive in Gallup; old man Ku'oosh knows another medicine man there, Betonie, who might be able to help Tayo. Betonie lives above the ceremonial grounds, which were built by the white mayor and town council of Gallup to house a yearly tourist show featuring performances by a great number of paid Indian dance groups, and booths selling Indian crafts. The place makes Tayo feel sick.

Robert leaves Tayo alone with the medicine man. Tayo notices that the medicine man has green eyes like him; the medicine man's grandmother was Mexican. His hogan (house) is filled with things collected by generations of medicine men and women, mixing together things from the Indian and the white worlds, in order to remember and to keep track, Betonie explains. Tayo is afraid of Betonie, but he is also drawn to him. He begins to tell him of his experiences before, during, and after the war. Betonie listens and asks questions. Then he tells Tayo that he must complete the ceremony. However, he explains that the ceremonies also must change, as they have been changing to fit the shifts in the world ever since they were first invented. As Tayo listens, he realizes that this is the sort of cure the white doctors tried to prevent him from experiencing. As they eat dinner, Betonie's helper, Shush, comes out. He seems strange, and Betonie explains that he wandered off and joined the bears when he was young, and although Betonie was able to save him, he remains a little different. Tayo is afraid Shush may be a witch, but Betonie explains that witches are people who dress up in animal skins, and that the animals can tell they are not like them, while Shush is one of those who simply thought he was a bear, changing his attitude but never his appearance.

Analysis

Paradoxically, although whites discriminate against Native Americans, in Gallup refusing to pay them subsistence wages or to allow them to keep even the humblest of homes, they also flock to admire their traditions. The Gallup Ceremonial is representative of the ways in which the whites treat Native American culture as a commodity, with complete disrespect for actual Native Americans. Traditional dances are performed completely out of context, for the benefit of an audience instead of for their ceremonial purpose. Vastly different tribes and traditions are brought together for one Ceremonial, so that the whites can group them all together into the category "Indians" and not consider them as individuals. The Gallup Ceremonial promotes the notion of the Native American as a "noble savage," a creature who is well intentioned, even possessing certain admirable qualities, but slightly less than human and completely uncivilized.

Ever since the ceremony with Ku'oosh, Tayo has begun to have experiences, which he feels are curing him. He begins to draw on the lessons taught him during his youth, from the stop at the spring he and Josiah used to visit, to the return to Lalo's bar, which Night Swan predicted. But just as Fly and Hummingbird go to their mother with an offering and are sent back to perform another step in the ceremony, so is Tayo told to do the same.

While Ku'oosh fits a traditional image of medicine man, living on the reservation, with as little contact as possible with the white world, and completely steeped in tradition, Betonie is different. Ku'oosh realizes that Betonie's familiarity with the white world may allow him to cure those affected by it. Betonie does not fear or resent whites, but neither does he admire them. Tayo at first mistrusts Betonie's connection with the white world, but he soon comes to realize that Betonie sees the white world as part of the Native American world.

Betonie is the first person to whom Tayo opens up completely about his experiences. Betonie also explains Native American traditions to Tayo, bringing him back into his culture by allowing him to understand and therefore feel more a part of it. Although Tayo realizes that the kind of cure Betonie will offer is inimical to the one the white doctors prescribed, Betonie's explanations of Native American views also fit more easily with white interpretations of the world than do some of the other stories. For example, the story of a boy who becomes a bear demonstrates a transformation that white culture sees as impossible. However, Betonie explains that the boy does not actually, physically, become a bear, but rather that he thinks he is a bear and therefore acts like one and is accepted by the bears as one of their own. To say that the boy became a bear is not incorrect, but it is only one way of expressing the situation. Betonie is able to manipulate the traditional Native American ways of expressing things, as well as the white ways of expressing things. This allows Betonie to show that their world views are not as completely different from one another as Tayo may have thought and also allows Tayo to feel the ways in which his education at the white schools and his participation in World War II were not symbols of abandonment of his people, but only provided different forums for learning.

Section 7 of ceremony

Summary

Tayo tells Betonie about Emo, suggesting that maybe Emo is right: maybe the whites have taken everything from the Indians. But Betonie explains that first of all the whites only think they own the land, but in fact no one can own the land. Then he explains that the whites are only the invention of Indian witchcraft and tells the story of how at a great conference of witches white people were created and let loose on the earth like a plague.

Tayo, Betonie, and Shush ride to the foothill of the Chuska Mountains to spend the night in a small hogan. Looking around, Tayo realizes that he is in the highest spot in the world, measured not in miles but in importance.

Betonie tells the story of a young man who goes off to hunt deer and is captured by Coyote. His family goes after him and finds him, but he has been almost completely taken over by Coyote. They take him to the Bear People, who help them to perform a ceremony to save the young man. As he tells the story of the ceremony, Betonie performs the same ceremony for Tayo, painting a picture of the ceremony of which he tells, with Tayo sitting in the middle of it. Shush and Betonie chant prayers of Tayo as they cut his scalp, and they sing about his journey away and their hopes for him to come back. After that first portion of the ceremony, they bring him into the hogan for the night and feed him Indian tea. Tayo dreams about Josiah's speckled cattle.

Tayo awakens, and Betonie sits near him and tells him a story of long ago. The Indians knew something was wrong and rode around, until a group of young men found a light-skinned Mexican girl with hazel eyes tied up in a tree. They took her down and, knowing that they should not, brought her home. Then they realized they had to send her back but did not know how, so they brought her to the medicine man, Betonie's grandfather Descheeny. He told her he would not touch her and would send her home, but she replied that her people would not accept her back, so he took her as a wife. His other wives were upset because their traditions dictated that they should not touch "alien things," so Descheeny moved with her to a winter house below the mountains.

Descheeny knew she would come before she arrived, and he decided that he needed to work together with her in order to create a ceremony that could cure the world of the whites, who were working to end the world. Descheeny realized that now they all needed to work together, even making use of things from the whites. The Mexican girl also had come to work with Descheeny. She was the daughter of a Spaniard and Root Woman. When they saw the color of her eyes, they left her to die on a trash pile and made Root Woman leave the village. Root woman left, but she took the girl with her.

Fly and Hummingbird come back to the people for tobacco for old Buzzard, but there is no tobacco, so they go back to the fourth world below and ask their mother where they can get tobacco. She tells them to go ask caterpillar.

Analysis

Betonie's story of the invention of whites completely shifts the hierarchy in which people are seen. Not only are whites part of the Native American world, they are in invention of it and, furthermore, a malicious invention of its witches. Thus although whites wield a certain destructive power over Native Americans and the world, they are placed in a completely inferior status, not created equally with the Native Americans and all other people of color. If they are an invention of the Native Americans, they can also control the whites and their destruction. But this does not mean that whites can be the simple pawns of Native Americans. Even the witches who created them do not know how to eradicate them. Betonie can only work out a ceremony that will stop their destructive power.

Betonie's simultaneous telling of the story of an old ceremony and performing of a new ceremony confirms the words of the poems at the beginning of the novel, which stated that stories contain, and are themselves, ceremonies.

The story of Betonie's grandfather, Descheeny, confirms the alliances between Mexicans and Native Americans. The character of Root Woman shows that Mexicans are in fact of partially Native American ancestry. The Mexican girl is not just a tool that Descheeny uses in his ceremony; she has come to find him as much as he has come to find her, and they collaborate in the ceremony. The Mexican girl is the second in the series of powerful women figures in the novel. She stands on equal ground with Descheeny from the moment she mocks his offer of protection when she is first brought to him. This is a woman who needs the collaboration, not the protection, of a man.

Like Tayo and Night Swan, Betonie and the Mexican girl have hazel eyes. In addition to being biologically viable, the presence of the marker of difference in the eyes in particular is of great symbolic importance. The particular color of these characters' eyes is also symbolic. Hazel is green-brown color, mixed between a light color common to the eyes of whites and a dark color common to the eyes of Native Americans. We find not only light eyes on a dark face as a marker of mixed ancestry, but mixed eyes in a dark face, a doubling of the markers of mixing.

Eyes themselves have great symbolic value. Eyes are often considered the windows to the soul, and, thus, mixed color eyes would reflect a soul which truly combines the various cultures. Eyes are of course the agents of sight, of visual perception. What one sees with dictates of what one sees and how one sees it. With hazel eyes, these characters are able to see, to perceive, and to understand both the white and the Native American worlds. They perceive both worlds simultaneously as insiders and as outsiders to them, allowing them to comprehend their positive and negative aspects.

Section 8 of ceremony

Summary

The Mexican woman bore Descheeny a girl child, who she gave to Descheeny's daughters to raise. In time, the girl child bore a child of her own, Betonie, who was raised by his grandmother the Mexican woman.

Tayo feels that the ceremony has begun to cure him, but Betonie warns that in order for a true cure the ceremony will have to continue for a long time. When Tayo tries to pay Betonie, Betonie refuses the money and tells Tayo, "This has been going on for a long time now. It's up to you. Don't let them stop you. Don't let them finish off this world."

Tayo leaves Betonie's the next morning. He rides with a trucker a little way. When he gets out at a gas station to buy some food, Tayo sees white people clearly for the first time in his life. He decides to walk home, but after a few minutes Harley and Leroy drive by and stop to pick him up. They have been drinking and carry bottles of wine and beer along with a woman from another tribe, Helen Jean. At first, Tayo resists their offers of wine and leans out the window watching grasshoppers but after a while he joins in, trying to feel nothing. The go to the Y bar and continue drinking. Helen Jean begins flirting with a Mexican sitting at another table. When she leaves to join him, Tayo is the only one sober enough to notice.

Helen Jean is from Towac. She went to Gallup to find a job and make money to help out her family, but although she knows how to type, she is only offered a job cleaning a movie theater for seventy-five cents an hour and cannot even afford to pay rent for her room. Then her boss begins to expect sexual favors, and she quits. Desperately in search of someone who can loan her rent money, she goes to the bars in town she knows the Indians hang out at, and they invite her in to have a drink with them. She tries to continue looking for work but is drawn back to the bars where they guys are always happy to see her, to tell her their war stories and to help her out with a little money at the end of the night. At first she tries to hold out and not have sex with the men in return for the money, but she is not able to withstand their advances for long. She promises herself that this time with the Mexican will be different.

Tayo falls asleep at the bar and is woken when Leroy and Harley get into a fight. He puts them into the truck and drives them home. On the way, Harley throws up, and Leroy urinates. When he stops the car Tayo gags and vomits, trying to rid himself of all of his past. The scalp ceremony rids Tayo of the memories of the Japanese that have been haunting him, but not of everything to which he has been exposed. Like in an ancient story, just having touched and seen certain things can haunt you. Tayo decides to try to follow some of Betonie's advice and to figure out how to call himself back to his people.

A long poem tells of Ck'o'yo Kaup'a'ta the gambler who tricked everyone who came his way into losing his or her life. He even captured the rain clouds, which he could not kill, but which he could keep prisoner. After three years their father the sun went looking for them. He finds his grandmother Spider Woman who tells him how to outsmart the gambler, and the Sun wins back his children, the clouds.

Tayo ends up at a woman's house. He tells her he is looking for his uncle's cattle. She allows him to water his horse and invites him in for supper. She tells him he can see the stars that night. Tayo had waited all summer until September when he saw the stars Betonie had told him about. He had followed them to this place, and when he stepped out on the porch he saw them.

Analysis

Although most of the novel is focused on the particular experiences of Native American men after World War II, a few vignettes, the one in a previous section of a mother and son in Gallup, and this one of Helen Jean also consider the specifics of women's situations. While the men have to deal with the aftermath of their experience as soldiers, and often with alcoholism, the women confront abject poverty where often their only resource is their own bodies. While the men who leave the reservation may find work, albeit greatly underpaid, doing menial or hard labor, the women are not even offered that much. Most often, although they leave the reservation with the best intentions of finding a decent job and sending money back home to help, they find that the only work they can obtain is prostitution. The stories of the women are not developed in any length, but their presence in the novel shows a concern for the range of experiences of men and women, and for the ways in which femininity as well as masculinity are affected by the contact between Native American and white cultures.

Although Tayo has embarked on a ceremony, his transformation is slow and incomplete and does not separate him completely from his past life. Tayo's joining up again with Harley and Leroy is representative of the situations throughout the novel where it is often difficult to separate the good from the bad. In fact, most situations have both positive and negative aspects that cannot be separated from one another. In this case, the friendship Harley and Leroy offer Tayo is a wonderful thing, contributing to his sense of belonging in his community and to his understanding that his reaction to the war is a common one. However, Harley and Leroy are not able to move beyond their drinking to find a true cure for themselves, and they draw Tayo back into their escape mechanism. And then, as they show Tayo the end result of their resorting to alcohol—a total lack of self control—Harley and Leroy point him back onto the right path.

The story of the gambler demonstrates that no single party is to blame in the creation of a bad situation. The gambler is only able to play with those who are willing to gamble. People are shown to be willing to gamble when they feel that they have nothing left to lose. Although he kills them, in that very act the gambler shows them that they still possessed something of value. While he is powerful, the gambler is not invincible, and with the right tools he too can be tricked.

The woman at whose house Tayo spends the night is the last of the key women figures in the novel. In this scene and in the next in which she appears, she is not given a name. In this way, she acquires a more universal, symbolic value. She is not just one particular woman, but, as she is simply called "the woman," she is representative of all women and embodies all womanhood. Tayo notes her resemblance to an antelope, which again reinforces her symbolic value: she is also the spirit of female animals. Although she feeds and houses Tayo, the woman is in no way subservient to him.

Section 9 of ceremony

Summary

Hummingbird and Fly visit Caterpillar, who gives them tobacco.

Tayo and the woman make love. He dreams of the cattle. They awake before dawn, and Tayo feels happy to be alive. After feeding his horse and singing to the sunrise, he eats the breakfast the woman serves him, watching her bundle together rocks and plants. Tayo thanks her and leaves. He rides up into the mountains, where the Laguna people have always hunted, thinking of the old stories. Now only a small portion of the area belongs to the reservation. White farmers graze their cattle on most of the mountains, and Tayo rides through them. He is searching for Josiah's cattle, the cattle of his dreams, following Betonie's directions. Betonie told him to follow the stars to the woman and up the mountain to the cattle. Tayo carries the bill of sale, so he can prove the cattle are his as he drives them home to follow through with Josiah's plans.

Finally, Tayo reaches the white man Floyd Lee's enormous metal and barbed wire fence and sees Josiah's cattle. After dark, Tayo cuts through the fence, thinking about how hard it is for him to believe that a white man would steal his cattle because he has come to believe the lie that white people are better than Indians and Mexicans. Tayo looks for the cattle for hours, until he sees daybreak near and begins to lose hope and to lose faith in Betonie and in the old ways. As he falls to the ground, a mountain lion approaches him. Tayo sings to the mountain lion, who the hunter's helper. The mountain lion stops and then goes on its way. Tayo pours pollen into the mountain lion's tracks, and follows the direction it came from. He stops to watch the sun rise, and when he turns to get back on his horse, he sees Josiah's cattle. He directs them easily toward the hole in the fence. Suddenly, Tayo notices two men who patrol the land riding towards him. He tries to outrun them, but his mare stumbles on the rocky terrain. Just before he hits the ground, Tayo sees the last of the cattle exiting through the hole in the fence; the patrol men have not noticed. They take Tayo and plan to bring him back to their boss, when they notice the mountain lion tracks. Preferring to bring home a mountain lion than an Indian, the patrol men leave Tayo. Badly hurt, he rests for a day, worrying about how the white men are destroying the animals and the earth. The snow begins to fall. Tayo heads back home, relieved that the snow will cover the mountain lion's tracks, as well as the cattle's, and the hole in the fence.

As he walks, Tayo meets a hunter, singing a Laguna hunting song, although he is not Laguna. They talk and walk together back to the woman's house where the hunter and the woman perform the rituals of respect for the deer he has shot. Soon, the snow stops, and Tayo finds that his horse made her way back to the house without him. The hunter also tells him that the woman has his cattle, which she caught in an old Indian corral. Tayo is uncomfortable because he thinks the hunter must be the woman's husband. He checks his cattle, which she explains have been used in Texas roping tournaments, and heads home, promising to come back for the cattle. When Tayo returns with Robert and a cattle truck to get the cattle, they find the house abandoned, but the cattle well cared for.

A few months later, Grandma comments that Tayo is cured, and he agrees. Auntie waits, mistrusting the cure. Every night, Tayo dreams of the woman. During the days, he helps Robert in the fields and on the ranch and checks on the cattle and the sheep. In the spring, he tells them he will go to the ranch to stay, so he can look after the cattle and the new calves. As Tayo leaves, Grandma tells him the old man Ku'oosh came by and told her Tayo would soon go talk to him because he would have something to say to him.

Alone at the ranch, Tayo realizes that his nightmares after his return from the war were due to his incredible sense of loss, but that in fact nothing had been lost because the mountains and the people you love can never be lost. He goes out looking for the cattle and meets the woman, who tells him she is camped by the spring. He follows her up there, and they talk about her family; she is a Monta-o and is called Ts'eh, although her real name, which she does not tell him, is much longer.

Analysis

Just as Fly and Hummingbird come to a point where they are able to shift from searching for what they need to bringing something back to its right place, Tayo recognizes that he has found the signs of which Betonie told him. He then begins the process of bringing the cattle and himself back to his people. Here, the woman is symbolically analogous () to Caterpillar. Like Caterpillar who knows how to find the tobacco Fly and Hummingbird need, the woman finds and prepares sacred herbs.

Now that he is on the path of the ceremony and is willing to accept help, people and animals show up to help him on a regular basis. After the woman has fed him, the mountain lion shows him the way to the cattle, the snow covers his tracks, and the hunter leads him back down the mountain. Like the woman who is symbolic of all women and all female power through her lack of name, the hunter is symbolic of all Native American men and Native American masculinity, as he is only referred to as "the hunter" and speaks so many languages and embodies so many physical types that Tayo cannot tell from what tribe he is. In addition, the two acquire an even more magical or symbolic quality as Tayo perceives that they are husband and wife, and yet the hunter seems to know about the night Tayo and the woman have spent together and not mind. Even when the woman tells Tayo her name, her specification that it is not her real name leaves her identity vaguely mystical.

The contrast between Tayo's reaction to the mountain lion and the patrolmen's reaction to it is striking. Tayo honors the mountain lion and takes only what it offer him, while the patrol men set out to hunt and kill it not because they desperately need it to survive, but for the approval it will gain them in the eyes of their boss and the townspeople. For the patrol men, Tayo and the mountain lion are almost the same: both are prey for them to hunt down and bring back to their boss. They only choose the mountain lion over Tayo because the mountain lion is more rare.

Finding the cattle and returning with them allows Tayo to finally completely return home. As he carries out Josiah's plans, he becomes a full member of his family for the first time in his life. With a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and an understanding of the ways in which everything in the world is interrelated and possesses both negative and positive elements, he is cured. He has also learned to trust his dreams as providing him with signs, instead of fearing them as intruding on his life. And in that way he is able to straighten out the confusion he feels between dreams and reality, not by separating them more, but by accepting their connections. The rain, however, has not yet returned to the land, and the mystery of the woman has not yet been solved, so the ceremony, and the story, must continue.

Section 10 of Ceremony

Summary

Tayo follows the woman as she gathers plants and explains their uses to him. He watches the cattle with a bull Robert saved from the rodeo. Tayo and the woman spend the summer together. She gathers all of the plants she needs except for one, which is not ready yet. She shows it to Tayo so he can gather it for her in case she is not there any more when it is ready. At the end of the summer, Robert comes by and warns Tayo that Emo has been spreading rumors about Tayo being crazy and that the people are concerned. Tayo does not follow his suggestion to go back home. Tayo and the woman talk about the destruction and the ceremony he is performing in order to stop it. They visit an old abandoned sacred place in the area. Then she tells him that Emo and the white police are coming after him to take him back to the hospital. She tells him that if he hides for long enough the white police will give up, but Emo will be a different story. She has to leave, and Tayo helps her to pack.

Tayo goes from one hiding place to the next, evading the men who are after him. As she predicted, the whites soon give up. Tayo tries to hitchhike a ride and is picked up by Leroy and Harley. Tayo thinks they have come through for him as friends; it is almost too late when he realizes that they are only capturing him for Emo. Tayo runs off again to an abandoned uranium mine in the hills. There, he notices the patterns left from mining the uranium, and he realizes that he has come to the last station in the ceremony. If he can complete that night, the ceremony will be complete.

Soon, Emo arrives in a car with Pinkie and Leroy. Tayo watches from a hiding place as they make a bonfire and beat the car; part of the ceremony of destruction. Then they pull Harley from the trunk. Emo is punishing him for having let Tayo go and is trying to get Tayo back by torturing his friend. Tayo almost runs out to kill Emo, when a great gust of wind builds up the fire and sends Leroy and Pinkie to the ground, bringing Tayo back to his senses. Finally, the men put Harley back into the trunk and leave.

Tayo walks back home, stopping to gather and to replant the seeds that the woman needs. In the story of Hummingbird and Fly, they give Buzzard the tobacco; Buzzard purifies the town, and the rain returns. The Corn woman tells them to remember how difficult it is to fix things, so that they will be more careful next time.

Tayo sits in the kiva with Ku'oosh and the other elders and tells them the story of his ceremony. They question him, especially asking about the woman. Then they sing and chant that he has seen A'moo'ooh, the spirit of the she-elk, and that they will be blessed again. They perform a ceremony on Tayo, so that at last

"Every evil which entangled him was cut to pieces."

Harley and Leroy are found dead in a ditch and are buried with full military honors. Auntie finally treats Tayo like a full member of the family. When they hear that Emo has killed Pinkie, old Grandma says, "It seems like I already heard these stories before—only thing is, the names sound different.

A poem tells how the witchery is dead for now, and the novel ends with a short poem alone on the last page:

"Sunrise, accept this offering, Sunrise."

Analysis

Ts'eh's status as a symbolic, mythical creature is confirmed, as she predicts what will happen to Tayo and how he can avoid capture. In this, she is like the Spider Woman who explained to the Sun how to retrieve his children, the clouds, from the gambler. Then when Tayo tells Ku'oosh and the other elders of her, they explain that she is the mythical A'moo'ooh and that the hunter is the mountain lion.

Betonie had explained to Tayo that in order to cure the new illnesses, new ceremonies were needed and that since the illnesses included the influence of the whites, the ceremonies would also need to make use of objects from the whites. The uranium mine represents this element. It represents the relationship of the whites to the earth. They think that they can take possession of it, take what they need from it, and then leave it, without offering anything in return and without completing any ceremonies. As Tayo incorporates the abandoned mine into his ceremony, he reincorporates that part of land, and symbolically all of the land that he whites have claimed, into the Native American tradition and into the reservation.

Tayo is performing the ceremony not only for himself, but also for all of the men who went to the war and for all of his people who are affected by the contact between different cultures and who are afflicted by the drought. He is not, however, able to save everyone. In order to complete the ceremony, Tayo must also accept that a certain element of loss is a part of life. He must not become completely dispirited by the failure of Harley and Leroy to stand up for him in the face of Emo, and he must stand by while Harley is tortured to death. This latter is almost too much for him. But just when he is about to give in, the natural elements come to his aid, reminding him that the people and the community he now belongs to include the animals, the earth, and the elements, which will always be with him.

Although we do not see the rain return to the Laguna land, we know that it will through the parallel that has been established with the story of Hummingbird and Fly. Since they complete their ceremony and see the rain return, we know that the same will happen for Tayo. Although Tayo had to go out and meet another medicine man and make use of many things from outside of the Laguna tradition, he ends his ceremony with Ku'oosh and the elders of his home town. Everything in the novel comes full circle with this return, and the last three lines of the book repeat the first line, corresponding to Tayo's comment on the first morning he woke up with Ts'eh that "the Dawn people began and ended all their words with 'sunrise'."