Leslie Marmon Silko

What she said:

The only cure

I know

is a good ceremony,

that’s what she said.

Ceremony

Storytelling is a form of mapping: it connects the self to the self, people to people, and people to places over time. Stories live on long after we do. For indigenous people, oral storytelling roots them in landscapes over millennia—not just a couple casual generations—and for these people, stories are more than yarns told over a fire. They are profound narratives of identity. Trauma—to an individual, to a people—can dislocate personal coordinates and unravel the narratives that help us navigate the world. It can lead to depression, grief, post-traumatic stress, addictions, and ostracization. Without unifying stories, we can become disconnected from ourselves, our loved ones, our history, and our surroundings.

Composure of the self and of a culture through storytelling is at the heart of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), a twentieth-century masterpiece that distinguished her as the world’s first female Native American novelist. It tells the story of Tayo, a shell-shocked veteran trying to regain his peace of mind and place in the world after returning home from the Second World War. When first published, it especially resonated with Vietnam veterans who had lost a cohesive sense of self and citzenship. As our understanding of mental health and post-traumatic stress disorder has grown, so has Ceremony’s relevance—in particular, its depiction of how old ways of knowing our physical world can be healing and therapeutic.

Tayo, of mixed Laguna Pueblo and white ancestry, has returned home to his reservation in New Mexico, having lost his will to live after enduring the Bataan Death March and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He is alienated from his tribe, his family, and himself and filled with guilt and despair. Alcohol is an escape from self-loathing and from memories of fighting a white man’s war. In a deliberately fractured narrative that alternates between prose and poetry, myth and memories, past and present, Ceremony tells the events of Tayo’s broken life and how he slowly reconnects to plants, animals, and his Laguna Pueblo people through ancient rituals to become whole again. It’s a novel about the restorative power of stories and the vital role the natural world plays in the healing process.

“I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna,” Silko has said of her storytelling focus. Mexican, Anglo-American, and Laguna Pueblo, she infuses all her work—novels, poems, films, short stories, and essays—with legends, myths, and ancient rituals. Raised in the sparse beauty of a New Mexican plateau and a recipient of a debut MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, Silko has been at the vanguard of the Native American Renaissance—a period of significant literary expansion by Native American writers since the 1960s, generally agreed to have been sparked by N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn, a novel about the plight of a young Native American man torn between two cultures (but owing a great deal to earlier writers like Sarah Winnemucca, whose 1883 Life Among the Piutes is the first-known autobiography by a Native American woman). Before this time, outsiders often presumed to interpret unwritten Native American folktales and legends through film, books, and television. As indigenous Americans narrate their own lives, spiritualities, and diverse cultures, a rich and invigorated body of Native American literature, one that grounds and heals, has emerged.

Ceremony originated when Silko moved with her then-husband, John Silko, from New Mexico to Alaska in 1974. She left the sandstone and cottonwoods of home, where the annual rainfall was 13 inches, for the unknown Ketchikan, where it rained 160 inches a year and felt gray and claustrophobic. Separated from everything familiar, Silko struggled with feelings of deep dislocation along with migraines and nausea. “For me, writing is a way to transcend place and time,” she has said about the way describing plants and places she loved and missed in Ceremony helped her recover her sense of self. “If you are sick in Navajo country, people say, ‘You need a ceremony.’ I often tell students that I wrote that book to save my life in a sense.”

Building on the experiences of cousins who had returned from war damaged, the character of Tayo emerged. Her description of a mind lost and in distress is both haunting and beautiful.

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. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke. He had seen outlines of gray steel tables, outlines of the food they pushed into his mouth, which was only an outline too, like all the outlines he saw. They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside. He walked down floors that smelled of old wax and disinfectant, watching the outlines of his feet; as he walked, the days and seasons disappeared into a twilight at the corner of his eyes, a twilight he could catch only with a sudden motion, jerking his head to one side for a glimpse of green leaves pressed against the bars on the window. He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinitely and their own bones mark the boundaries.

Tayo’s PTSD has prevented him from connecting with ancient stories, but with the ceremonial guidance of his tribe’s medicine man, he finds a way of mapping himself back to himself, his people, and his Laguna Pueblo home. Events still occur to challenge him on the reservation, but little by little, Tayo recognizes he is part of a larger story. This reflects the more modern, less Freudian, approaches to trauma explored by literary scholar Michelle Balaev in The Nature of Trauma in American Novels (2012). She writes that, despite Western psychoanalytic talking cures, “retelling the traumatic past to another is less important than reconnecting to the land with its human, natural, and mythic histories that help the person reestablish a relationship to the social community of his home.” The seasonal rhythms of mountains, oceans, skies, and deserts help take us out of our depression, anxiety, and alienation. In her essay “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination,” Silko explains that “for Laguna Pueblo peoples, an intimate relationship between human and nonhuman is a necessary process of identity formation.”

As Tayo steps with greater empathy through the world, capable now of focusing on the welfare of even small creatures, the white smoke of his former, traumatized self begins to fade. He is no longer disembodied nor dislocated. He understands how destructive forces in the world rewrote his narrative. He inhabits his own body again, reminded through stories and rituals of his identity and place in the wider community. In a telling hitchhiking scene, his new self emerges.

He told the truck driver he didn’t need to ride any farther. The sun was behind him and a warm dry wind from the southwest was blowing enough to cool the sweat on his forehead, and to dry out the wet cloth under the arms of his shirt. He walked down the ditch beside the highway, below the shoulder of the highway. He didn’t want any more rides. He wanted to walk until he recognized himself again. Grasshoppers buzzed out of the weeds ahead of him; they were fading to a dry yellow color, from their bright green color of spring. Their wings flashed reflections of sun when they jumped. He looked down at the weeds and grass. He stepped carefully, pushing the toe of his boot into the weeds first to make sure the grasshoppers were gone before he set his foot down into the crackling leathery stalks of dead sunflowers.

Ceremony is timeless. Its invitation to appreciate ancient holistic healing is ever more relevant. Yet Silko’s sharing of sacred, valuable, and little-known Laguna stories with the outside world has not been without controversy. Professor and Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen criticized the book for revealing secret tribal knowledge not intended for nonnatives. Allen cautioned that we must resist the idea of “treating Native spiritual life as a curious artifact” and realize that “Native people are people, and that their ways are not a spectacle but simply and significantly, a way of life.” We can honor the non-Western approach to integrating the self with the natural world and should not misconstrue it as in-vogue, shallow environmental spirituality. It is a way of being.

Euroamerican culture seems to be catching up. There is growing awareness and appreciation of native knowledge as illustrated in the rise of terms such as ecotherapy, horticultural therapy, forest bathing, and biocentric living. I strongly resist categorizing the ceremonies created by Betonie the medicine man as ‘‘interventions,” but they have the similar effect of relocating a person to a place. Tayo’s newly heightened awareness of forces greater than himself—plants, animals, seasons, heritage—decreased his depression, isolation, and anxiety. In Silko’s vivid descriptions, we see Tayo’s emotions return. Read broadly, Ceremony reminds us that Tayo’s story is a microcosm of the trauma of genocide—from Native Americans and African slaves to today’s immigrants.

Ceremony is Silko’s most recognized work on storytelling as a way of mapping a person and a people to a particular place. She carried the legacy of this forward in her second book, Storyteller (1981), a compilation of old photographs, tribal tales, poetry, and songs evoking recent and distant Native American life, in which she again contrasts Native and white cultures in spare and beautiful prose.

Where Ceremony evokes empathy, Silko’s geographical novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) conjures horror. In this revision of European colonial history in America, map-knowledge is critiqued against plant-based knowledge, characters reject the legitimacy of appropriated land, and tribalism represents the egalitarian and ecocentric way to heal damage perpetrated by colonialism and racist white men obsessed with border walls. It is the imagining of a revolutionary future, decentered politics, and more ethical environmental and social practices.

Works by Leslie Marmon Silko

Novels

Ceremony (1977)

Almanac of the Dead (1991)

Gardens in the Dunes (1999)

Poetry and Short Story Collections

Laguna Women: Poems (1974)

Western Stories (1980)

Storyteller (1981)

Rain (1996)

Love Poem and Slim Canyon (1996)

Oceanstory (2011)

Other books

Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures (1993)

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir (2010)