Leslie Marmon Silko- Laguna PuebloCeremony

In Silkos Ceremony the scene at the mine includes traditional songs, prayers, dances, drums, ritual
movements, and dramatic address that make it distinctly Native American. It also embraces elements of a
ceremony, particularly movement, that often have a hypnotic effect, especially through repetition. Participants
in such ceremonies can reach an altered state of consciousness in which emotions are redirected to a greater
awareness, and breath, heartbeat, thought, and emotion are all one.
Ceremonies are held for many reasons, including for changes in season, for crops, and for "purification,"
especially of war veterans. Tayo, a veteran of World War II, suffers from what contemporary readers would call
post-traumatic stress disorder; he needs help to return to his tribal ways.
The mine scene, depicts the final ceremony in his purification. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen states
that Tayo's illness is the result of separation from the land, his people, and American Indian ceremonies. He
must enter into certain rituals to heal his personal illness, the deterioration of the physical landscape, and the
disintegration of the community. The height of this cosmic ceremony occurs at the uranium pit when Tayo
hides behind a boulder and watches Emo, Leroy, and Pinkie torture Harley.
Drumming occurs in the scence as Pinkie slams a tire iron repeatedly on the hood of the car. There is
repetition, a significant four times, as Emo shouts to Harley, "We told you [...] We told you [...] We told you
[...] We told you [...]." Emo, Leroy, and Pinkie move ritually, throwing dry tumbleweed into a fire, "holding
them high over their heads and circling the fire before they let go". The fire grows higher; the drums beat on
the car hood; Harley is dragged from the car and stripped, and Tayo loses some consciousness: "his heart went
numb in his chest, and he wasn't aware of his own rapid breathing any more".
This part of the ceremony climaxes with Emo laughing and Pinkie stepping on Harley's throat. The wind
suddenly kicks up and the clouds dramatically battle the moon, shedding light and dark on the battleground in
front of Tayo. Nature is now also a participant in the ceremony. At this moment, Tayo speaks to himself and
addresses the universe. He sees the stars and suddenly understands that he is just one part of a long story taking
place under these same stars. Tayo begins to reach a greater awareness of himself and his role in life.
The sacrifice of Harley is vital for Tayo to witness and to understand as part of his purification ceremony. Until
that moment, Tayo incorrectly believed that if he had died in the war, instead of his cousin Rocky, or if he had
returned home in time to help his grandfather, Josiah, the land would have received rain and his people would
not be suffering from drought. Tayo does not yet understand death or that the death of two people cannot
influence the "prosperity of the entire tribe". This misunderstanding prevents Tayo from feeling whole and
blocks his growth as a tribesman and contributing member of his community.
Allen states that Tayo needs to learn that "the departed souls are always within and part of the people on earth,
that they are still obligated to those living on earth and come back in the form of rain regularly (when all is
well), so that death is a blessing on the people, not their destruction". By witnessing the sacrifice, Tayo begins
to understand that Harley made his own choices and that Tayo is not responsible for Harley's death or for the
deaths of Rocky and Josiah. This understanding removes a layer of punishing guilt that Tayo has felt and
allows him to embrace the natural order of life and proceed with his purification rituals.
Emo and his friends leave the scene, but the ceremony continues. Tayo begins to move, even though he is
exhausted. He is experiencing prayer, another element of the traditional ceremony. Even though "his bones and
skin are staggering behind him," he moves forward with a sense of purpose because he has achieved physical
and spiritual harmony. He also gains a sense of the "sacredness of place" as he pictures the sandy hill where he
will gather seeds for Ts'eh, and he envisions the results: "The plants would grow there like a story, strong and
translucent as the stars." As he walks, he begins to dream, even though his eyes are open. Suddenly he is no
longer walking toward the hills; he has shifted in time.
He is a baby in back of Josiah's wagon. He hears the wind and sees the rumps of the two mules pulling the
wagon. He was going home then, and Tayo realizes that he is going home now, too.
According to Allen, the ceremony is important because it integrates the person into the tribe and creates a
feeling of community within the tribe. Tayo has learned through the ceremony at the mine that he is not alone.
He has learned that he is a part of the tribe, the land, the old rituals, and the universe.
Tayo has learned that he truly wants to be part of his tribe, that he has found meaningful work to do, and that

he is able to take meaning from the tribal customs. Purified, he is now ready to join the tribe. He heads to the
elders in the village so that his tale will be added to the long story that has been in the telling since time began.
Leslie Marmon Silko's reputation rests upon her ability as a storyteller, and her output of poems has been
relatively small. Her poems are a central part of her work as a writer, however, and she often uses the forms of
poetry even in the middle of such works of prose fiction as Ceremony.
She makes little use of simile and metaphor in her verse, with image and narration being the key elements. Her
autobiographical book Storyteller is an interesting combination of old photographs, conventional short stories,
and story poems. Silko herself denies that some of her poems are poems, seeing them instead as stories placed
on the page with line breaks which help to replicate more clearly the motion of a storytelling voice.
Short Bio
The world of Silko's poetry is very much shaped by a Native American consciousness. Born in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, she was brought up at Laguna Pueblo among relatives whose roots went back many generations
in traditional ways. Though regarded as one of the most acculturated of the pueblos, Laguna still possesses a
strong sense of history and continuity. On the other hand, because Laguna adopted many European ways (and a
number of whites who married into the pueblo, Silko's "great-grandpa Marmon" among them), it is not
surprising that it has produced not only Silko but also several other significant writers whose concerns are
those of the "half-breed," the person of mixed blood.
Rather than viewing this heritage as a curse, Silko has used European literary forms to move toward the
strength of the Laguna earth and the stories of her family. These stories are both personal reminiscences and
very old myths, and at times the two blend. The boundary lines between the real world and the world of
legends and between the modern and the ancient, though continuing past are very thin in all of her work.
Indeed, her sense of time is not at all a European one.
The reader feels that in her poems all things are very much interconnected. Her world is a world of both
tremendous changes brought by Western civilization and a lastingly strong natural environment (of which the
Native American is part) in which everything is possessed of the power to be and become.
Bear Story
Changing is an important theme in Silkos work. "Bear Story" tells of how the bears can call people to them and
make them become bears themselves. There are characters in Laguna and other Southwestern Indian stories
(the stories which she grew up with and which she always returns to) who are changers, who make others
change, and who can change themselves. The coyote is a prime example. The earthy, ironic humor in the poem
"Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story" has made it one of her most often-quoted poems.
Silko is also a writer who celebrates the strength of women, and the title of her first book, Laguna Woman,
underscores her identification with her own sex. Whether it is Silko herself, the mythic Yellow Woman, or her
own grandmother, Marie Anaya Marmon, the women in Silko's poems are strong, independent, even wildly
indomitable.
Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer
In such poems as "Where Mountain Lion Lay Down with Deer" we see Silkos non-Western sense of time.
Things from past and present coexist and change each other:
I smell the wind for my ancestors
pale blue leaves
crushes wild mountain smell.
Returning
up the gray stone cliff
where I descended
a thousand years ago

Returning to faded black stone

where mountain lion lay down with deer.
The image of the mountain lion and the deer may remind one of the biblical lion and lamb, but the animals
have different roles in this place, are charged with a different mythic power. Silko says later in the same poem
that
The old ones who remember me are gone
the old songs are all forgotten
and the story of my birth.
How I danced in snow-frost moonlight
distant stars to the end of the Earth ...
Her words are not a lament, however. They do not convey a sense of loss but rather a deep continuity which
goes beyond conventional ideas of individual reality. Although she is a child of more than one culture, her
voice clearly speaks for the Native American waynot a way which is gone, but one which continues beyond
time, changing and unchanged.

References
Velie, A. R. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko,
and Gerald Visenor. 1982.
Erdrich, H. E. Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers On Community (Native Voices). 2002.
Works by Silko
Storyteller (poems and short stories) 1981
Laguna Woman (poems) 1974
Ceremony (novel) 1977
Almanac of the Dead (novel) 1991
Sacred Water (nonfiction) 1993
Yellow Woman (nonfiction) 1993