Ceremony

CEREMONY
BY LESLIE MARMON SILKO
(PLOT CONSTRUCTION)

SOME EARLY THOUGHTS:
 The ceremony is a reminiscence .
 And reminiscence can never be shared with out telling stories.
“He turned . everywhere he looked , he saw a world of stories , as
old grandma called them.”
 It’s about recalling the past.
 Nostalgia .
 Celebrating the rich Native American culture.
 Celebrating the old traditions deeply bathed in the religious and
cultural rituals of the Native American.

SOME EARLY THOUGHTS:
 Through a persuasive and powerful story telling Silko establishes a
world of her own , Laguna pueblo , where she took refuge to purge
herself from the white materialistic world.
 Her own quest manifested in the quest of her protagonist , Tayo , in
the novel , who through some healing rituals and ceremonies
reaches to his nirvana.
 And lastly it’s about the change as night swan relates it in one of the
novel’s pivotal line , “they are afraid, Tayo.”
 “Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change.”

CEREMONY PLOT’S FEATURES:
 Circular design of the plot
-the plot of ceremony follows the circular pattern.
-There is no single line story , there are many memories , flashbacks
and stories within story. But it will all make sense eventually.
 Novel is not divided into chapters
-Ceremony is not divided into chapters : the lack of easily identifiable
section divisions in the story is a physical, formal reflection of the
themes of interconnection between all things, repetition, and of the
unclear lines between dream, myth, memory, and reality.

CEREMONY PLOT’S FEATURES:
 Interspersion of plot & poetry
-Silko combines prose and poetry. She ignores standard generic (of
genre) divisions.
-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.

NATIVE AMERICAN MYTHS & CEREMONY
 Myths: which are almost always connected with religious rituals ,
explain the world the people live in and their traditions.
 Provide the idea that spiritual forces can be sensed through the
natural world.
Example: as during the course of the novel , Tayo continuously get
directed by the messages provided by the spiritual forces.
 Ceremony follows the standard native American myth pattern
-Thus, the mythic narrative (text) itself is figural and symbolic.
- Novel uses the hero-quest as a framework , which establishes
prototype ceremonial procedure for curing rituals called chantways.

VISION-
QUEST
SEPARATIO
N
INITIATION
RETURN

ABOUT LAGUNA
 Oral tradition: oral culture transmits sacred stories
 Importance of tradition/continuity: passing down old ways
 Matriarchal culture: women serve as the leaders of the extended
family unit
 Land is sacred: the land is a part of the people; it is to be treated
with the utmost respect
 Cardinal directions hold meaning: north = logic/intellect; south =
emotion/connection; east = beginnings (think sunrise); west =
closure (think sunset)

ABOUT LAGUNA
 Supernatural/godlike visitors: can appear in human or animal
form; they can transform or come and go at will
 Rituals: used for healing – medicine men/women
 Time isn’t linear: the present is the only “real” time. Things can
repeat, or come back, or occur out of sequence

CEREMONY PLOT SUMMARY
 The novel opens with a set of three poems.
 This first poem tells about the creation of the universe— “this
world/ and the four worlds below.”
 The poem ends with the lines: "I'm telling you the story she is
thinking."
 Since we know a bit about silko's heritage, we can guess that this is
a Laguna Pueblo story.

 Note:
( Silko mixes up both poetry and prose in the text. The lines in the
text that look like poetry indicate a self-reflexive and consciously
western form, yet they serve to carry across the traditional
communal and mythic discourse of Laguna.)
 The second poem is entitled "ceremony" and focuses on the power of
stories.
 Third poem, "what she said" simply reads:
“The only cure I know is a good ceremony, that's what she said.”

MEANING OF CEREMONY
ORAL TRADITION OF
LAGUNA PUEBLO CULTURE
CEREMONY AS CURE &
PREVENTIVE MEDICINE
A LOT OF STORIES:
THERE IS NO BOUNDARY B/W STORY AND CEREMONY
OFFICIAL LAGUNA AND NAVAJO
CEREMONIES IN THE NOVEL
MEDICINE MEN OLD KU'OOSH AND BETONIE’S
CEREMONIES WERE NOTHIG BUT STORIES
THE CENTRAL CEREMONY OF TAYO’S RECENTERING OF
HIMSELF ACCORDING TO THE NEW CHANGED UNIVERSE.

“Sunrise"
 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.
“loud voices rolling him over and over again like debris caught
in a flood.” (P.18)
 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.
“And if he could hold that image of the deer in his mind long
enough, his stomach might shiver less and let him sleep for a
while.” (P.19)
 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.

 The scene shifts to reservation where 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.
“They said it had been that way for the past six years while he was
gone. And all this time they had watched the sky expectantly for the
rainclouds to come.”(P.22)

 “And there was no more rain then. Everything dried up all
the plants the corn the beans they all dried up and started
blowing away in the wind……
The people and the animals were thirsty. They were
starving…..” (P.24)
 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 an enormous flood tore the sheet
from their hands and nearly killed them.

 He began to understand Josiah words , “Nothing was all good or
all bad either ; it all depended.” (P.22)
 Tayo believes that the six years of drought are the result of his
prayer to stop the rain in the Philippines’ jungle.
 He damned the rain until the words were a chant. ... He wanted
the words to make a cloudless blue sky, pale with a summer sun
pressing across wide and empty horizons“ (P.23)
 “So he had prayed the rain away, and for the sixth year it was dry;
the grass turned yellow and it did not grow. Wherever he looked,
Tayo could see the consequences of his praying . . . and he cried for
all of them, and for what he had done..” (P.24)

 These comments are part of the native American belief system
that if someone disrespects nature or animals, they haunt back in
shape of human miseries or destruction.
 In the veterans' hospital in Los Angels where he went after the
war, Tayo felt like white smoke: invisible, unconscious, unable to
communicate.
 “For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that
until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no
consciousness of itself.” (P.24)
 He thinks of himself as dying "the way smoke dies, drifting away
in currents of air, twisting in thin swirls, fading until it exists no
more"

 He cries so much he makes himself vomit, but he slowly gets well
enough to be released from the hospital.
 At the loss angels 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.
 “A child stared back at him, holding a hand…The little boy was
wearing an army hat that was too big for him.” (P.26)

He thinks about the Indian stories from his childhood
which, despite his teachers having told him they were
nonsense, he still believes.
“He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the
teachers at Indian School taught him not to believe in that
kind of "nonsense." But they had been wrong. Josiah had
been there, in the jungle; he had come. Tayo had watched
him die, and he had done nothing to save him.” (P.28)

 His memories of childhood, memories he has attempted to reject, serve
to open him to the understanding that will prepare him for healing.
(Memories are part of the healing ceremony).
 Tayo's friend Harley stops by on an old burro (mule) to visit. Harley
was also a soldier, at wake island.
 Tayo wonders how unchanged Harley really is. Harley went to help his
family move their sheep to the Montano. 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.
 “But it didn’t seem as if the war had changed Harley.”
 “Harley didn’t use to like beer at all, and maybe this was something
that was different about him now, after the war.”__(P.29)

 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.
 “There was a peaceful silence beneath the sounds of the wind; it was
a silence with no trace of people. It was the silence of hard dry clay
and old juniper wood bleached white.”__(P.29).
 Tayo, being the representative of the whole humanity, is actively
seeking to harmonize himself with the natural world and specifically
with land ; so that what has been lost during the war could be

“You pointed out a very important dimension of the
Land and the pueblo people's relation to the land
When you said it was as if the land was telling
stories
In the novel. That is it exactly, but it is so difficult
To convey this relationship without sounding
Like Margaret fuller or some other
transcendentalist.
When I was writing ceremony I was so terribly
Devastated by being away from the Laguna
country
That the writing was my way of re-making that
Place, the Laguna country, for myself.”
— Leslie Marmon Silko,
The delicacy and strength of lace

 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.
 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 neighbours and
friends for her burdens and hardships, raised Tayo alongside her own
son, Rocky.
 Recovering from his illness in her house, Tayo realizes that she still
changes the sheets on Rocky and Josiah's beds weekly, as if there were
still alive.

 “They both knew then she would keep him and take care of him all
the months he would lie in a bed too weak to walk. This time she
would keep him because he was all she had left.”___(P.36)
 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.
 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.
 Grandma says he needs a medicine man. “She sat down on the
edge of the bed and she reached out for him. She held his head in
her lap and she cried with him, saying “A’moo’oh, a’moo’ohh” over
and over again.”
 “I’ve been thinking,” she said, wiping her eyes on the edge of her
apron, “all this time, while I was sitting in my chair. Those white
doctors haven’t helped you at all. Maybe we had better send for
someone else.” (P.38)

 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.
“ The old man gestured to the northeast, and Tayo turned his head
that way and remembered the wide round hole, so deep that even
lying on his belly beside Rocky, he had never been able to see
bottom.” (P.39)
 He spends a long time explaining to Tayo how the world is
fragile and intricate.

“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile.”
“The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the
intricacies of a continuing process, …….It took a long time to
explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone,
and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with
a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the
responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said,
the story behind each word must be told so there could be no
mistake in the meaning of what had been said;”(P.40)

( Central to silko's poetry and fiction is the role of orature, of the
power of the story itself to heal the people.
Kenneth Lincoln suggests, "silko's novel is a word ceremony. It tells
Tayo's story as a curative act.
So the solutions to Tayo's dilemmas reside somewhere in the verbal,
oral traditions of Laguna culture.
In ku'oosh’s explanation of the word ‘fragile’ the power and
importance of language and story is reinforced. )
 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.
“The atomic heat-flash outlines, where human bodies had
evaporated”

 “There are some things we can’t cure like we used to,” he
said, “not since the white people came. The others who
had the scalp ceremony, some of them are not better
either.” (P.41)
 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.
 “Liquor was medicine for the anger that made them hurt, for the
pain of the loss, medicine for tight bellies and choked-up throats. He
was beginning to feel a comfortable place inside himself, close to his
own beating heart, near his own warm belly; he crawled inside and
watched the storm swirling on the outside and he was safe there;
the winds of rage could not touch him.” (P.42)

 “White women never looked at me until I put on that
uniform, and then by God I was a U.S. Marine and they
came crowding around. All during the war they’d say to me,
“Hey soldier, you sure are handsome. All that black thick
hair.” “Dance with me,” the blond girl said. You know Los
Angeles was the biggest city I ever saw. All those streets and
tall buildings. Lights at night everywhere. I never saw so
many bars and juke boxes—all the people coming from
everywhere, dancing and laughing. They never asked me if I
was Indian; ……

 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.
 They don’t know he is crying for them. They don’t know that he doesn’t
hate the Japanese, not even the Japanese soldiers who were grim-faced
watching Tayo and the corporal stumble with the stretcher…(P.45)

 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 remembers his childhood with Josiah during the drought when
he was a boy.

“there are some things worth more than money.” He pointed his chin
at the springs and around at the narrow canyon. “This is where we
come from, see. This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the
wildflowers. This earth keeps us going.” (P.47)
 Josiah understood the importance of the conjunction between the
right place and the right time. Such respect for place and its
relation to time is an important element in learning how to
experience mythic knowledge , important for the event experience.
 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.

 “Nothing can stop you now except one thing: don’t let the people at
home hold you back.”(P.50)
 Both Rocky and Auntie were ready to sacrifice the old ways, which
they saw as the only way to succeed in the white world.
 When they returned to the village, there would be more ceremonies,
which Rocky would avoid, disapprovingly.
 “ They sprinkled the cornmeal on the nose and fed the deer’s spirit.
They had to show their love and respect, their appreciation;
otherwise, the deer would be offended, and they would not come to
die for them the following year.”(P.51)
 Harley keeps feeding Tayo beer, remembering somewhat nervously
what happened the last time …..When Tayo jumped up, broke a
bottle, and shoved it into Emo's stomach upon his bothering the
Tayo with ARMY jocks.

 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.
 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.

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.
“It might have been possible if the girl had not been
ashamed of herself. Shamed by what they taught her in
school about the deplorable ways of the Indian people; holy
missionary white people who wanted only good for the
Indians, white people who dedicated their lives to helping
the Indians, these people urged her to break away from her
home.” (P.61)

“what happened to the girl did not happen to her alone, it happened
to all of them.” (P.62)
 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.
 “There had been a picture of her once, and he had carried the tin
frame to bed with him at night, and whispered to it. But one
evening, when he carried it with him, there were visitors in the
kitchen, and she grabbed it away from him…….

….. He cried for it and Josiah came to comfort him…So he held onto
Josiah tightly, and pressed his face into the flannel shirt and smelled
woodsmoke and sheep’s wool and sweat (P.63)
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.

 “Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land
for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they lose something.”
(P.66)
 white men raise stupid Herefords that are ill adapted to desert
terrain and available food supplies, then fence and corral them so that
they cannot run free.
 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.
“The problem was the books were written by white people who did not
think about drought or winter blizzards or dry thistles, which the cattle
had to live with.” (P.66)

 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 more. Auntie mistrusted
the idea because it was connected to the Mexican girlfriend.
 A week later, the cattle are delivered to the Laguna
reservation.
 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 tired to keep track of the cattle, but the animals
continue to move slowly south and are very difficult to round
up.

“They rode south with the sun climbing up in the east,
making the sky bright, almost blinding. There were no
clouds and the air still smelled cool. He wanted to
remember the morning, bright and clear as the leaves on
the little green plants which grew low and close to the
sandy ground. It had the clarity of the sky after a
summer rainstorm, when the dust was washed away, and
the colors of the hills and the shadows of the mesas had
an intensity which made everything he saw accessible, as
if he could touch all of it, even the little green rabbit
weed growing close to the sand, its tiny leaves clustered
like stars.”

 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.
 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.

 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.
 “I was always happy he didn’t get married,” she said grimly, “but
now, worse things are happening. The way he goes off every night
reminds me of our old dog, Pepper. That dog was the same way
every time a female dog was in heat. Just like that. I try to tell
him to stay with our own kind; but he doesn’t listen to me. That
woman is after anything she can get now.” (P.81)
 Tayo remembers how Josiah comforted him at his mother's
funeral.

“He never forgot that sound and the sand, stinging his face
at the graveyard while he stood close to Josiah. He kept his
head down, staring at small round pebbles uncovered by the
wind. Josiah held his hand as they walked away from the
graveyard. He lifted him into the front seat of the truck and
gave him a candy cane left over from Christmas. He told
him not to cry any more.” (P.82)
 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 had picked flowers along the path, flowers with yellow long
petals the color of the sunlight. He shook the pollen from them
gently and sprinkled it over the water; he laid the blossoms
beside the pool and waited. He heard the water, flowing into the
pool, drop by drop from the big crack in the side of the cliff. The
things he did seemed right, as he imagined with his heart the
rituals the cloud priests performed during a drought.”
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.
 “I have been watching you for a long time,” she said. “I saw the color of
your eyes.” (P.85)
 Night Swan teaches Tayo about himself and his part in the larger
ceremony.
 What she has seen are the tell tale hazel eyes of the mixed blood a
hybrid color that results from the melding of blue and yellow, colors
associated with rain and pollen.

 Like other mixed bloods in Native American fiction, Tayo feels
displaced. "I always wished I had dark eyes like other people," he
tells Night Swan.
 She replies: "Indians or Mexicans or whites most people are afraid of
change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin,
the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing. . . . They are fools.
They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don't
have to think about what has happened inside themselves" (P.87)
 Finally, she says, "You don't have to understand what is happening.
But remember this day. You will recognize it later. You are part of it
now"

 When Tayo leaves the Night Swan's room, he sees that "the sacred
mountain was a dusty, dry blue color" (P.87).
 Through Night Swan, Silko lays out her rationale for the power of
the mixed blood to introduce a new vitality into the Indian world.
 And in Night Swan's words, Silko makes it clear that the evolution
of Indian people and culture is a part of this cosmic ceremony
designed to ensure both spiritual and physical survival

 Her message responds to the facts of contemporary Indian life that
James Welch underscored in a 1986 interview: "The people are
going to be getting further and further away from their culture, so
actually the reservation will be just a place to live. There will
always be Indians, but they won't be very traditional, I don't think,
on these small reservations.“
 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.
 Teacher had taught Tayo to kill flies because "they are bad and carry
sickness" (P.89)
 Tayo as a boy had one day proudly killed and collected piles of flies on
the kitchen floor for Josiah to see. Josiah had then informed Tayo that
it was a fly who a long time before had asked forgiveness for the
people and so saved them from death: "Since that time the people
have been grateful for what the fly did for us“ (P.89)

 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 to Army.
 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.

 “He picked up a fragment of fallen plaster and drew dusty white
stripes across the backs of his hands, the way ceremonial dancers
sometimes did, except they used white clay, and not old plaster. It
was soothing to rub the dust over his hands; he rubbed it carefully
across his light brown skin, the stark white gypsum dust making a
spotted pattern, and then he knew why it was done by the dancers: it
connected them to the earth.” (P.91)
 “He became aware of the place then, of where he was.”
 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 visits Gallup with Robert, a town , for the purpose of taking
help from another medicine man Betoine.
 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.
 Pueblo medicine man leads Tayo to a more arcane healer, Old
Betonie, the contemporary Navajo/Mexican breed. Betonie also is
known by hazel eyes, and he lives above the Gallup dump in an
ancient Hogan dug halfway into the foothill.

 Betonie collects times and places, calendars and phone books, from
his travels among Indians all over America: "all the names in them.
Keeping track of things"
 "All these things have stories alive in them," Betonie claims . (P.104)
 Tayo recognizes calendar pictures from 1939 and 1940, predating his
war sickness. The scene implies that healing involves the right
triggering of memory, a health within things, natural to body and
mind.

 Tayo 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. “You’ve been doing something all along.
All this time, and now you are at an important place in this story.”
(P.106)
 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.
 Betonie teaches Tayo about himself and change: "The people nowadays
have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be
performed exactly as they have always been done. . . . But long ago
when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began. . . .
Things which don't shift and grow are dead things"

 Tayo tells Betonie about his obsession of shooting Josiah with
Japs.
 “My uncle Josiah was there that day. Yet I know he couldn’t have
been there.”
 “The Japanese,” the medicine man went on, as though he were
trying to remember something. “It isn’t surprising you saw him
with them. You saw who they were. Thirty thousand years ago
they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done: you saw
the witchery ranging as wide as this world.”
 “When did he die?” BETONIE ASKED.

 “While we were gone. He died because there was no one to help him
search for the cattle after they were stolen.”
 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, 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 actually arrived there.

 “He had been watching the sky before she came, the planets and
constellations wheeling and shifting the patterns of the old stories.
He saw the transition, and he was ready”.
 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.
 Central to Tayo's ceremonial healing is a story-poem that the
healer Betonie recounts to Tayo about Indian sorcerers' creation of
white people as implements of destruction who believe themselves to
be separate from nature and who thus ravage everything and
everyone associated with the natural world.

 Within this poem, the social and political power that the Indians have
lost during the white conquest of America is effectively restored, as
Betonie tells Tayo: "We can deal with white people, with their
machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people"
 “Then they grow away from the earth
Then they grow away from the sun
Then they grow away from the plants and animals.
They see no life when they look they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them the trees and rivers are not alive.
The deer and bear are objects they see no life.” (P.113)

 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 favours, 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.

 Helen Jean, An example of what must have gone wrong with Tayo's
mother, Helen Jean is a long way from her tribal home, displaced and
confused, drinking with drunken Indians in a battered pickup. When
Harley says about Tayo, "Hey Leroy, this guy says he's sick! We Know
how to cure him, don't we Helen Jean?" (156), and then repeats,
"We'll give you a cure!" (158), we are given a sense of the inversions
that constitute witchery in the novel.
 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.

 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 have been haunting him, but not of everything to which he
has been exposed.
 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.

 To make Tayo's role as questing hero still more obvious as he
prepares to go into the mountains seeking the cattle, Silko interjects
the traditional Pueblo story of Sun Man's journey into the
mountains to rescue the storm clouds from the Gambler. Like the
other stories, this one is about the restoration of proper order and a
coming home to harmony and balance: "Come on out," Sun Man says
to the storm clouds. "Come home again. / Your mother, the earth is
crying for you. / Come home, children, come home“.

At the foot of the sacred mountain (Tse-pi'na, the home of the
keres rain deity), Tayo meets his second helper, Ts'eh Montano.
Ts'eh's eyes are ocher, her skirt is yellow (the color associated with
the north), and silver rainbirds decorate her moccasins.
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.

 On her blanket in four colors are patterns of storm clouds and black
lightning. The constellations Betonie has foreseen revolve in the sky
above her cabin. Dominating the imagery surrounding her are the
colors yellow and blue, the colors of north and west, pollen and rain.
So closely is Ts'eh identified with water that even the love making
between her and Tayo is described in water imagery, culminating in a
"downpour." And when she folds up the storm blanket to stop the
snow, it is very obvious that Ts'eh is a supernatural being, a Holy
Person.
 Tayo and the woman make love. He dreams of the cattle. They awake
before dawn, and Tayo feels happy to be alive.

"He breathed deeply, and each breath had a distinct
smell of snow from the north, of ponderosa pine on the
rim rock above; finally he smelled horses from the
direction of the corral, and he smiled. Being alive was
all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long
time...."

 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.
 A mountain lion approaches him. Tayo sings to the mountain lion,
who the hunter's helper.
 Mountain lion appears, "moving like mountain clouds with the wind,
changing substance and color in rhythm with the contours of the
mountain peaks"
 Tayo offers a prayer and yellow pollen to mountain lion, the hunter,
"the hunter's helper."

 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.
 "The magnetism of the center spread over him smoothly like rainwater
down his neck and shoulders.... It was pulling him back, close to the
earth"

 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.

 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.
 lone 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.

 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 rumours about Tayo being crazy and that the people
are concerned.
 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.
 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

 "The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright
and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines with the yellow,
making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone“.
 "But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and
they had laid them in a monstrous design"
 Tayo cries "at the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way
all the stories fit together ... to become the story that was still being
told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen
and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions
through all distances and time"

 Just before the scene in which Emo brutally sacrifices Harley as
Tayo watches, Silko reintroduces the story/poem about witchery.
This time, however, Arrowboy watches as the witches attempt to
complete their ceremony, and by watching he prevents the
completion. "Something is wrong," the witchman exclaims. "Ck'o'yo
magic won't work / if someone is watching us"
 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.”

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

Ceremony

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