The Theme Of Justice And Healing In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

Justice and Healing in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Amanda Hinds
Native American Studies 209: Indigenous Education
May 8, 2023

Ceremony was Leslie Marmon Silko’s debut novel, though she was an established short story author. Her choice to write from a male veteran’s perspective was bold, but as a subject of disorder, coping with trauma, and healing, there is obviously much to explore. Throughout the novel, Tayo deals with the things he saw and did in World War Two and how those things affect his homecoming to the Laguna reservation and his family. The military hospital fails to address the issue and so does the initial traditional ceremony Tayo’s family arranges for him. It is only once Tayo participates in a ceremony

Tayo returns to the reservation to discover his uncle Joseph has died and with him have disappeared the cattle in which he had invested. The cattle have been stolen by a white rancher and cloistered within fenced land: “a thousand dollars a mile to keep Indians and Mexicans out; a thousand dollars a mile to lock the mountain in steel wire, to make the land his” (174). The theft of resources and simultaneous exclusion of the occupants is connected to overarching coloniality. Tayo’s journey to find and rescue the cattle brings with it doubt and fear. He struggles with ideas of rights and his own ability to stand up to white thieves in the face of their strength; he spends hours cutting through the thick fence and trying to avoid the men patrolling the land. But mostly he struggles with the very fact of the theft of the cattle by a white man. “Why did he hesitate to accuse a white man of stealing but not a Mexican or an Indian?... He knew then that he had learned the lie by heart–the lie which they had wanted them to learn: only brown people were thieves; white people didn’t steal.” This lie is only one aspect of the larger falsehoods meant to obstruct the reality of colonization and its effects. Within the novel, colonization and white supremacy are contextualized as ‘witchery’. It is a good metaphor based on indigenous understandings of evil; it also establishes that colonization is neither natural nor passive. It

Practitioners say “much of what they do involves sorting out the jumble of disorder that they find in and around the patient." This is exactly what Betonie does. Throughout the ceremony, he directs Tayo to reflect on his feelings of guilt and coaches him into realizing what is in his control and what is not. Living life properly is the cornerstone of indigenous health. The resoration of balance in the case of an infraction is paramount. Retribution involves not only consideration of the act itself, but “also the external forces that caused the imbalance.” In Tayo’s case, his illness is both part and product of witchery, so correcting it involves combatting it holistically. This means resisting the colonization of his