74 pages • 2 hours read
Leslie Marmon SilkoCeremony
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Animals
Animals in Ceremony reflect the characters’ connections to the land and their heritage, or lack thereof. Ts’eh and the unnamed hunter (Mountain Lion) are heavily implied to be animal people, or animals that can take the form of people. These two characters have the most direct link to animals, being partly animals themselves, and their proximity to the natural world allows them to help Tayo complete his ceremony and connect with his culture. Mountain Lion assists Tayo escaping from Floyd Lee’s ranch and then leads Tayo back to Ts’eh. Mountain Lion thus guides Tayo through the most dangerous stretch of his journey: trespassing on a white man’s property and “stealing” his cattle back. Ts’eh aids Tayo in every other step of his journey after his Scalp Ceremony, appearing once Tayo has resolved to retrieve his cattle and realize his uncle’s dream of reconnecting with the land. Ts’eh and Mountain Lion symbolize Tayo’s innate connection with the land and the sacred Mount Taylor.
Tayo’s cattle also represent his ties to the land, but in a way that emphasizes its adaptability. The cattle, like Tayo, feel out of place in the environment they find themselves in; they are not from the reservation and always try to wander south, back to Mexico. Nevertheless, they do well in the environment because they are highly resistant to droughts and can live off of “rocks and sand” (82). Tayo pairs his cows with a yellow bull—the same color used to describe the reservation—that his cousin Romero rescued from an abusive rodeo. This blending of “cultures” further strengthens the animals and suggests Tayo’s own resilience as a part white Indigenous person: someone who can keep traditional Laguna Pueblo existence alive in a changed world.
The way in which characters treat animals is also important, as those infected by “witchery” (i.e., a colonialist mindset) do not recognize their connection to the natural world. When Harley’s family strips him of every other means of transportation to keep him from visiting bars along Route 66, Harley uses his burro to travel long distances. He thinks poorly of the burro and treats it just as poorly, often whipping and yanking the animal’s head when it tries to eat. Unlike Harley, Tayo understands that the burro is intelligent: Animals “persist” and become “part of the wind” (24), moving with the flow of events. Harley is unable to deal with this and resists the burro’s natural inclinations, ultimately ending up far off track because the animal wanders off its course to search for food whenever Harley’s attention wavers. Harley’s need to dominate the burro and treat it as a soulless piece of machinery reflects his witchery-inflected worldview.
Ceremonial Patterns
If The Power of Stories structures the world in Ceremony, ceremonial patterns are the language of stories. These motifs act as physical marks of the stories that Tayo uses to understand the world. Without ceremonial patterns, there would be no connection between the stories and the world around Tayo.
The ceremony that begins Tayo’s journey, the Scalp Ceremony, has patterns that guide Tayo to his next steps. Betonie uses white and black sand to draw the patterns of Mount Taylor and the constellations that guide Tayo to Ts’eh. These physical markers help Tayo navigate the world and believe in Betonie’s words. However, Tayo is alert to such patterns even before undertaking any formal ceremony. When Tayo walks home from the bar early in the novel, he uses ceremonial body painting to reconnect to past events. Crouching next to Night Swan’s old apartment, he uses the old plaster that has fallen from the building to draw “dusty white stripes across the backs of his hands, the way ceremonial dancers sometimes did” (96). Dancing was the most important thing in Night Swan’s life, so Tayo’s action enables him to connect to a significant moment in his past: his first sexual encounter with Night Swan and his first experience of an outsider being proud of their identity.
The destroyers also use ceremonial markings. Betonie explains that when the destroyers came to the Americas, they found:
[T]he rocks,
rocks with veins of green and yellow and black.
They will lay the final pattern with these rocks
they will lay it across the world
and explode everything (127).
These veins of rock are the several million tons of uranium mined by the United States government in the Mount Taylor area. This uranium was instrumental in the development of nuclear weapons and the US nuclear arsenal stockpile. These mineral veins also form “witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting” (228), which Tayo sees in the climactic scene. Tayo uses his understanding of ceremony and storytelling to parse the world-ending capabilities of the nuclear weapons used in World War II, connecting them to larger narratives about imperialism and war. Viewing the destroyers’ actions through the lens of ceremonial patterns therefore allows Tayo to understand the sociocultural crisis that Indigenous peoples find themselves in.
Drought
Drought symbolizes the effects of witchery on the environment. Ceremony depicts colonialism as detrimental not only to colonized peoples but also to the land itself because its orientation is selfish and extractive: It only recognizes individual desires and consequently overlooks the interconnectedness of all things. Ecological imbalance—drought or other extreme weather—is one result.
Drought also symbolizes Tayo’s inability to understand that witchery is the cause of his suffering. Tayo blames the wet, humid environment of the jungle for Rocky’s death and curses it with a prayer that he believes causes the drought back home. In the verse story of Hummingbird and Fly that parallels Tayo’s journey, the drought is caused by the people using “Ck’o’yo magic” taught to them by the same people who created the destroyers. Tayo’s curse similarly replicates the practices of witchery—the very thing that is ultimately responsible for the war and its attendant suffering.
The end of the drought therefore represents Tayo’s newfound understanding of the world. As Betonie teaches him, the jungle is part of the Earth’s balance. What happened in the jungle was part of the destroyers’ larger plan of imperialism and death, and once Tayo realizes this, the drought goes away. For Hummingbird and Fly, the drought likewise ends after they make amends with Corn Mother, whose role in maintaining balance they did not appreciate.
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By Leslie Marmon Silko
