In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, we see a Laguna Pueblo man, Tayo, face the challenges of everyday existence on a reservation, surrounded by the ever conflicting and encroaching world of mass communication, technology and war.
Tayo is part Indian and part Euro-american, he has green eyes
from whoever his father was. His mother has supposedly dishonored
the tribe by choosing the Euro-american World over the Indian World.
When Tayo is a young boy, his mother leaves the reservation with some
men, and leaves him in the care of ‘Auntie’ (sister to his mother),
Robert (husband of ‘Auntie’), Josiah (brother to his mother) and his
‘new’ brother Rocky (son of ‘Auntie’ and Robert). Tayo is extremely
resentful of this and is faced with a future of coldness and
separation from his Auntie who values Rocky above all for his desire
to expand and join to the outside world. The ideal for Rocky is to
get out of the misery lifestyle of the reservation as quickly as
possible, while the ideal for Tayo is to grow up and help Josiah with
the rancho.
It is interesting to note that as Tayo and Rocky grow up we see
two contrasting views from two men, one, wanting to come-in to the
circle of the people on reservation and gain acceptance, the other,
wanting and waiting for the moment to come-out. Eventually Rocky
convinces Tayo to enlist in the Marines as brothers. It is here that
we see a dramatic shift in their lives, they are men now, off in
uniform meeting new men and women, they are not counting coup, but
mangling the enemy with machine guns, mortar, and jungle warfare.
The enemy is Japanese, a very formidable foe.
Within the story we see Tayo remenbering his past. He
remembers the death of Rocky, remembering that when he was carrying
Rocky’s wounded body on the stretcher he fell in the mist of the
raining jungle, he falls from exhaustion and his captors put the
blanket covering Rocky’s body over Rocky’s head, and with the butt of
the rifle break the head like the busting of a gourd. He remembers
lining up Japanese soldiers to be shot and then magically sees one
who is his Uncle Josiah. He remembers swatting away and killing many
flies in the jungle, a mistake, for it is the green bottle-nose fly
that will go on a journey, as his Uncle Josiah had told him, and ask
Grandmother Spider to return the rains and the animals for food. He
finally remembers and finds himself cursing and chanting away the
rain, something his people are not to do, for it is rain in the
southwest that has special mystical and significant meaning.
Everything that lives has thorns or horns. or is poisonous. The area
still enjoys a large number of pumas, bobcats, coyotes, guahalotes,
javalinas, deer , and the ever present varities of snakes, and in
some places the mountain lions.
Guilt and shame for his transgressions have left Tayo ill on
the reservation, his past has caught up with him. Pueblo society is
strongly and intricately webbed with a fine weaving of religion,
culture and an endless pageant of ceremonials. These ceremonies
permeate into all aspects of their society. Any activity a human
being does is strongly centered around religious systems of song,
dance, poetry, and cosmic mythology. There is no escaping it. It is
woven into the whole fabric of the universe. And with this Tayo is
stuck, in trouble, ill for the evil magic is loose in him. The magic
practiced in these rites are sun and rain for the people. The
journey transpires into a curing ceremony, but the old ceremony, as
practiced by the Medicine Man Ku’oosh is not enough. Something more
powerful has to come forth for the cure. A ceremony has to be
altered, changed and manifested for this new strong evil within to be
removed, the ceremony cannot remain constant, or the same, for it
stagnates and becomes ineffective against witchery, for witchery
learns the new turns the ceremony makes each time. Many on the
reservation who have gone on this new world order of war are sick
also, and ‘el viejito’ Ku’oosh is baffled by the sickness and its
immunity to the old ceremonial cures.
Tayo is thus sent away to the Gallup, Arizona, to see another
Medicine Man, Betonie, a Navajo living on the outskirts of the Gallup
Ceremonial on touristic highway 66. He sees many drunks inhabiting
this area; Indian people lost in a system that has forgotten them to
strong drink and fast life, Tayo questions why such a medicine man
lives here, and Betonie tells him that it is here where he is most
needed by his people.
It is Betonie that lets Tayo uncover the enemy for the first
time, he discovers that it is witchery, Ck’o'yo, and the evil magic
it has concocted with its words. The people have befallen into
witchery and stagnate because old rituals remain the same. Tayo
becomes Sun Man’s analog to retrieve the rain clouds from the evil
gambler. So with no rain, the devastation of the Laguna people sits
on Tayo’s shoulders who commits himself to the ritual quest with
Betonie and his Bear assistant.
Sitting in the center of the white corn sand painting Tayo
begins his voyage in the West, painting the hoops burried as mountain
ranges around him. Finishing blue, yellow and white bear paw prints
around Tayo, Betonie gives Tayo a basket with prayer sticks to hold.
The whirling darkeness goes to the North, East, South, West, and then
the Middle. The bear appears and Tayo is cut in the top of his
forehead, and guided and prayed into each of the bear footprints and
five hoops. He dreams of speckled cattle scattering and disappearing
into the southwest mesa, Pa’to’ch. But even though witchery begins
to leave him the ceremony is not complete. Witchery is still pulling
them southward.
The ceremony continues and the conception of witchery is still
there. As he is walking East on the way home, Harley and Leroy pick
him up as they are coming from the West with, Helen Jean an Ute
woman. He starts drinking again and it seems he is getting back to
the same old thing. But he meets the Hunter and Ts’eh on Mt. Taylor
from the Eastern direction from Gallup, and now he receives his
hunting and true warrior knowledge. He takes back the cattle which
have been stolen from some white ranchers. It is here that
old-grandfather mountain lion appears to him and gives him the
warrior strength he needs to survive. He sprinkles yellow pollen
for it to return good news for Tayo’s people.
During his return he meets the Hunter, what he believes is
Ts’eh husband, and helps to connect him to the land and Our
Grandmother, through the usage and ritual use of plants, herbs and
their respective planting.
In the South, high in the hills over the Canoncito, he realizes
that his supposed friends are not his friends, and runs into the old
uranium project mine. It is here that the major witchery of all was
created, the bomb of bombs.
To Tayo’s surprise he sees Emo, Pinkie and Leroy coming there
and burning tumbleweeds in the dark. He hears loud noises from the
trunk and realizes that they have Harley in the trunk, punishing him
for letting Tayo escape. With a screwdriver in his hand he is about
to jump out and kill Emo, when a final revelation appears to him, and
he realizes that is what witchery wants him to do.
He sees the scenario in the paper, “A Bunch Of Drunks Kill A
Drunk,” and he wakes up from committing this dishonor.
Sun Man has restored the rain clouds, he is the protector of
his children, the ‘Shiwana.’ He is home at last, loved by Ku’oosh
and Thought Woman. Emo, evil, returns West to plan his next return.
Tayo has moved through every powerful direction of the Laguna
sacred landscape. Through the Ghostway ceremony on the Navajo
reservation, he loosens witchery, which now spins back to the west.
Sun man protected the Shiwana Rain Clouds from the Gambler who
would snatch them from the mountain tops. With this realignment,
Grandmother Spider’s cycle continues, and all is well for the moment.
The circle having been completed Sun Man is back with his people and
the story will be told.
Rocky was wrong:
Indian ways are certainly the best for his people for Sunrise begins.
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