“So That the Nations May Become Genuine Indian”: Nativism and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko's (mixed-blood Laguna Pueblo) Ceremony is a powerful novel that tells the story of Tayo, a mixed-blood Pueblo war veteran who returns to Laguna mentally crippled by his wartime experiences. As Tayo struggles to overcome the alienation his military service has created, he must also face the shame of his own mixed heritage. His suffering eventually leads him off the pueblo to a Navajo healer, Betonie, who helps Tayo create a new historical paradigm based on Navajo and Laguna mythology. Betonie's fictional re-vision of history is, perhaps, the novel's most important accomplishment. Through Betonie, Silko creates an alternative understanding of history that empowers both the Native American characters in the novel and Native American readers of the novel. Ceremony becomes, at least potentially, a powerful tool for the revitalization of culture. What I will term Silko's nativistic restructuring of history offers Tayo the chance to enter and revitalize Laguna culture, and simultaneously to interpret and reject mainstream white culture.1 It also provides Silko and her readers the means to do the same thing outside the novel. Scholarship that ignores Ceremony's historical impact, or that limits interpretation to an intracultural reading of the novel, strictly as a Laguna Pueblo artifact, is unlikely to recognize the powerful cultural and political tool Silko has offered to all Native Americans. The nativistic reading of Ceremony proposed here, though problematic in some ways,2 does situate the novel historically and politically and highlights aspects of the work that are obscured when it is read as an intracultural or ahistorical document. Ceremony, popular in college classrooms, has received extensive critical treatment.3 Much of the criticism has focused on its mythic, ahistorical qualities. Paula Gunn Allen's (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux) comments on the novel in A Literary History of the American West are somewhat typical in suggesting that Ceremony, along with other Native American novels, is "achronistic," in that it functions "without regard to chronology" (1059). This is true, in the strict sense that Silko's narrative is not chronologically ordered. Allen, however, suggests a broader meaning for this term when she argues that Ceremony is ritually structured, and that its "internal rules of order have more to do with the interaction of thoughts, spirits, arcane forces and tradition than with external elements such as personality, politics or history" (1059). Certainly Silko is concerned with spirits, arcane forces, and tradition, but she is also deeply concerned with politics and history, and these aspects of the novel should not be neglected by scholars. James Ruppert's analysis of Ceremony, and particularly his understanding of the role Betonie plays in the novel, illustrate the problems inherent in an ahistorical or achronistic reading of this text. In his 1995 Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction he approaches Ceremony as a novel of "mediation," and argues, in short, that it serves as a kind of space between cultures where both white and Native American readers can begin to understand and cope with cultural differences. He suggests, further, that it represents a kind of "Bakhtinian dialogism" since it includes aspects of mainstream Western, Laguna, and Navajo cultures (78). Ruppert's use of dialogism, however, indicates a real weakness in his approach to this particular novel. In "Discourse in the Novel," only a few pages from passages Ruppert quotes in support of his theory, Bakhtin explains how novels are radically different from other, earlier, literary forms. They establish "the fundamental liberation of culturalsemantic and emotional intentions from the hegemony of a single and unitary language, and consequently the simultaneous loss of a feeling for language as myth, that is, as an absolute form of thought" (367). Novels, at least as far as Bakhtin is concerned, should include a multiplicity of voices or "languages," as Ceremony does, but they should also avoid the tendency to totalize or mythologize. …