"Ceremony" Summary/Analysis

Author: Leslie Marmon Silko is of mixed Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white ancestry. Ceremony was well received by many critics, although Native Americans criticized it for revealing too much of their rituals. Her work tends to focus on cultural interactions.

Setting: Most of the action takes place in the reservation and the surrounding areas, with some flashbacks to the jungles in the Philippines during WWII.

Plot: Note: Tayo's story is woven into the greater mythos of the Laguna people by paralleling it with older Laguna stories throughout the book.

Tayo comes home to the Laguna Pueblo reservation from a Veterans' Hospital after WWII. The war resulted in him having what we might call PTSD. He must cure himself of his mental pain as well as bring rain back to the reservation. The trauma is a result of Tayo being convinced that he saw his favorite uncle, Josiah, in a crowd of Japanese soldiers he was ordered to shoot and watching his cousin Rocky die. The Veterans' Hospital makes him well enough to go home, but does not cure him.

Tayo's family consists of his grandmother and his aunt and her husband, Robert. They also raised him, since his mother abandoned him when he was 4 and his father is an unknown white man. Everyone grieves for Rocky, but Tayo also continues to grieve for Josiah. He is also convinced that when he prayed for the rain in the jungle in the Philippines to end, it brought the six-year drought to the reservation.

As he recovers, Tayo realizes that his friends Harley, Leroy, Emo, and Pinkie are also contending with post-traumatic stress from the war and frequently drink away their sorrows. However, they are not very comforting, as they reminisce about how great the war was and how respected they were in uniform. Tayo is upset by the discrimination they receive at the hands of whites, whom they still admire. Tayo wishes he could return to the VA Hospital, but his grandmother calls the medicine man, Ku'oosh, who performs a ceremony for warriors who have killed in battle. However, both Tayo and Ku'oosh worry that the ancient ceremonies won't cure these modern problems.

The ceremony helps Tayo, but it doesn't cure him. Tayo recalls his childhood and the summer before he joined the army. Auntie tried to separate Tayo and Rocky, but they became close friends and enlisted in the army together after graduating from high school. Josiah fell in love with Night Swan that summer. She convinced him to invest in a herd of Mexican cattle, which Tayo helped care for. There is a drought that summer and Tayo goes to a spring and invents a rain ceremony to end it. The rain helps the crops and cattle, but Josiah is unable to visit Night Swan. Tayo takes a letter to her instead, but is also seduced by her.

Ku'oosh sends Tayo to a nearby town, Gallup, to see another medicine man, Betonie. Betonie knows more about the interaction between Native American and white culture and the problems it causes. Tayo tells him what's wrong, though he has doubts due to Betonie's strange ways and connection with the white world. Betonie says they must invent and create a new ceremony. Betonie tells Tayo about old ceremonies while performing them. Then he tells Tayo stories about his grandfather, Descheeny, and the start of a new ceremony to stop the destruction that the whites (invented by Native American witchery) are causing.

Betonie sends Tayo back home, though he reminds him that the ceremony is not complete. Tayo meets Harley and Leroy on the way home, but manages to escape their lifestyle and leaves. He pays attention to the signs Betonie gave him while he searches for Josiah's cattle. The stars lead him to a woman's home. (Her name is Ts'eh.) Tayo spends a night with her, then enters the mountains. Josiah's cattle are fenced in a white man's pasture. Tayo breaks in, but the cattle run to the far end and he must look for them all night.

Tayo is about to give up at dawn, but a mountain lion approaches him. He blesses the mountain lion, whose tracks lead him to the cattle. As he herds the cattle out, two white patrolmen find him. They don't know Tayo has taken the cattle, but know he is trespassing and arrest him. However, they release him instead of taking him to town because they see the mountain lion tracks and release Tayo so he can hunt it. When Tayo leaves, it starts to snow, covering his and the animals' tracks, hindering the patrolmen. As he descends the mountain, he meets a hunter who lives with Ts'eh. She has corralled the cattle at her house and waits for Tayo and Robert to come with a cattle truck to pick them up.

Tayo feels cured as he returns with the cattle, but the drought continues and he knows the ceremony is incomplete. He takes the cattle to the family ranch, where he meets Ts'eh. They spend the summer together, but near the end, Robert visits and warns Tayo that Emo has been spreading rumors about him. A little later, Ts'eh tells Tayo that Emo and white police are coming for him. Before leaving, she tells Tayo how to evade them.

As per her instructions, Tayo avoids the police. However, he is still being chased by Emo. He meets Harley and Leroy, but realizes in the nick of time that they are working with Emo. Tayo escapes into an abandoned uranium mine. He realizes this is the last point of the ceremony, the element of white culture, the uranium mine. He just needs to spend the night there. Emo and Pinkie arrive and torture Harley to death as Tayo watches. Tayo must restrain himself from killing Emo, but does survive the night. He returns to Ku'oosh in the morning and tells him about the ceremony. Ku'oosh says Ts'eh was actually A'moo'ooh, who gave her blessings to Tayo and to the ceremony. The drought and the whites' destruction is over. Tayo spends the night in Ku'oosh's house to finish the ceremony and then goes home.

Characters:

• Tayo: He is revealed to represent/be the Sun Father. As he is half-Laguna and half-white, he spends the plot coming to terms with his mixed heritage and the problems it causes. In particular, it led him to enlist in the Army, which resulted in his PTSD and the drought at the reservation. 
• Rocky: Tayo's older cousin, he acts as a brother to Tayo (despite Auntie's best attempts to keep them apart). He accepted the white way of life and white traditions, giving up Laguna beliefs, but remained a role model that Tayo looked up to. He was killed in WWII after enlisting with Tayo.
• Josiah: Tayo's favorite uncle. He acted as a father to Tayo during Tayo's childhood and was the one who taught Tayo many of the old traditions. The summer before Tayo leaves for WWII, he has an affair with Night Swan. He also buys a herd of Mexican cattle which are important later on. His death is traumatic for Tayo, leaving him without a father figure and resulting in hallucinations later.
• Night Swan: A Yellow Woman and Josiah's lover. She convinces Josiah to buy the cattle. When Tayo takes a letter to her on Josiah's behalf, she seduces him, but also accepts him (both as a person and into the world).
• Auntie: Tayo's mother's sister. She is reluctant to raise Tayo and tries to keep him apart from Rocky. She is proud of her acceptance of American traditions and of being the only family on the reservation to go to church. Likewise, she is proud of Rocky and treats him preferentially whenever she can. She is more concerned with her own salvation and public image than she is with Tayo.
• Grandma: She represents Grandma Spider and is Auntie's and Josiah's mother. Though she is old and doesn't talk much, she weaves the web that brings about the changes in Tayo's life.
• Robert: Auntie's husband. Though he is quiet, he takes over the farm and acts as a father figure to Tayo after Josiah's death. Though he and Tayo never interacted much when Tayo was young, he treats Tayo kindly after the war.
• Ku'oosh: The medicine man on the reservation. He knows the old ceremonies, but is afraid (correctly) that they will not have much effect on the new problems being caused by the interaction between the Laguna and white cultures. He only managed to stop Tayo's vomiting attacks, but then sent him to Betonie.
• Betonie: A more modern medicine man, he has close ties to the white community and understands the problems caused by the meeting of the two cultures. He is also mixed race and sees that ceremonies need to change as the times do. He and Tayo invent the new ceremony that cures Tayo and ends the drought.
• Ts'eh: Revealed to be A'moo'ooh, she is a Yellow Woman and Tayo's lover. She lives in the mountains. She gives Tayo and his cattle her blessing, which allows him to complete his ceremony.
• Emo: Like Tayo, Harley, Pinkie, and Leroy, he is a war veteran. Like them, he tries to drown his PTSD in alcohol. However, unlike Tayo, he and the others miss the war, since they felt respected and accepted by whites. He has been Tayo's rival since childhood. Because he believes in white dominance, he hates Tayo for being part white and tries to betray him. He embodies evil.

Style: The story is told from a third-person perspective. The narrator seems to be distant, like a future Laguna storyteller telling Tayo's story. There are several discontinuities in it, particularly Tayo's flashbacks and the pauses in Tayo's story to include other Laguna stories. While this allows the parallel stories to be included where they are relevant, the rather sudden cuts between them seems to reflect Tayo's state of mind. Figurative language and imagery are used heavily.

Tone: The tone seems to vary between two extremes. On one hand, it is extremely (even depressingly) critical and pessimistic regarding the effects whites have had on Native Americans and their culture and how the former have treated the latter. On the other hand, there is a note of hope for some sort of compromise between them, reflected both by Tayo's and Betonie's success as well as in Silko's own life.

Imagery: An integral part of the work. Extensive descriptions of scenes are at least as prominent as the action of the work. In particular, colors are emphasized, as they have symbolic meaning. The narrator also includes smells and sounds, as if telling the story to a group of people (supporting the earlier statement about the narrative voice and style). Imagery is also used to focus on nature, as it is important in the Native American culture.

Symbolism:

• Colors: Each color has a different meaning to the Laguna people. Blue is featured in scenes with characters who are not just powerful, but also who turn out to be helpful to Tayo. It is also connected with (Blue) Corn Mother. Likewise, yellow is connected with the Sun Father, who in turn is represented by Tayo.
• Cattle: The Mexican cattle represent Native Americans in a few ways. They are looked down upon by whites, who consider them weak and skinny. However, they turn out to be strong, hardy animals who always seem to escape the cages in which they are placed. In particular, Tayo frees them from the white man's fences as part of the ceremony meant to relieve the destruction whites are wreaking on the Laguna.

Quotes:

• "Nothing was all good or all bad either; it all depended."
  This quote embodies what Tayo initially fails to understand in the jungles in the Philippines. Rain is considered good on the reservation, but he considers it bad in the jungle. Rain on its own is neither - it depends on the situation. Tayo's attempt to pray the rain away - to remove it from its natural place - brings on the drought back home.
• "Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war. They blamed themselves for losing the new feeling; they never talked about it, but they blamed themselves just like they blamed themselves for losing the land the white people took. They never thought to blame the white people for any of it; they wanted white people for their friends. They never saw that it was the white people who gave them that feeling and it was the white people who took it away again when the war was over."
  This paragraph demonstrates the paradoxical view Tayo's friends have of the whites. They miss the war because they felt respected by the whites, whom they admire. Yet it is the whites that are causing so much destruction to Native American cultures. Rather than being content with their way of life, they desire to belong in America, to be part of its traditions rather than their own. They don't understand that they were used during the war.
• "'It seems like I already heard these stories before—only thing is, the names sound different.'"
  This quote from Grandma embodies a central idea of the work. The world is Spider Grandma's web of stories. The events of Ceremony parallel ancient stories from the Laguna mythos. In fact, Tayo himself represents the Sun Father, and other characters, such as Ts'eh, are revealed to be spirits.

Theme: As the world evolves and white and Native American cultures meet, they must learn to coexist and accept the mixing between them.

The problems of the book are caused by clashes between the two cultures. First of all, the Laguna people live on a reservation. The war, in which Native American soldiers enlisted (trying to be accepted by whites) were used by America, resulted in Tayo's PTSD and the drought that plagues the reservation. However, Betonie, of mixed race himself, recognizes that as times change, ceremonies must change to accept the mixing of the two cultures. Tayo's ceremony includes elements of white culture, seemingly a break from Laguna tradition, but does solve the problems that have been plaguing him and the reservation. It is understandable that Silko, who is of mixed race, supports the idea that both cultures must accept some degree of assimilation and mixing of customs.