Work record

Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko

1977 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel · English

Copyrightedhigh medical relevanceFive-minute digest

Portrait of Leslie Marmon Silko. Source · CC BY-SA 2.0

Summary

Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him. In the jungle Tayo also saw a Japanese soldier executed whose face seemed to be that of his uncle Josiah, who died at home while Tayo was away. Tayo cursed the incessant jungle rain and believes his curse caused the drought now afflicting Laguna. After treatment in a Veterans Administration hospital in Los Angeles, where white doctors call his condition battle fatigue and he feels himself turned into invisible white smoke, he comes home vomiting, unable to eat or sleep, flooded by memories. The narrative moves non-chronologically between present and past, interwoven with poems retelling Laguna stories of drought, of the witchery that invented white people and their destruction, and of the restoration of balance. Tayo's fellow veterans, Harley, Leroy, Pinkie and the menacing Emo, drink in bars and tell stories of wartime glory, when their uniforms briefly earned them white respect. The traditional medicine man Ku'oosh tries to help, but the old ceremonies cannot reach this new kind of sickness. Tayo is sent to Betonie, a mixed-ancestry Navajo healer in Gallup whose hogan is full of calendars, phone books and old cardboard, and who teaches that ceremonies must change to remain alive. Betonie performs a ceremony and gives Tayo a vision of stars, spotted cattle, a mountain and a woman that he must fulfil. Tayo sets out to recover Josiah's lost spotted Mexican cattle, stolen by a white rancher; on the mountain he meets Ts'eh, a mysterious woman associated with the land, who becomes his lover and guide. The witchery reaches its climax at an abandoned uranium mine near Laguna, close to the source of materials for the first atomic bombs, where Emo and his companions torture Harley. Tayo, hidden, resists the impulse to intervene with a screwdriver, recognising that violence would complete the witchery's story. With dawn the ceremony is complete. Tayo tells his story to the elders in the kiva, the drought breaks, and Emo leaves for California.

Plot or Argument

Return and sickness
Tayo is home from the war and the VA hospital, nauseated, sleepless and haunted; flashbacks reveal Bataan, Rocky's death and Josiah's loss.
Veterans and the bars
Tayo drinks with Harley, Leroy and Emo; the narrative reveals his violent outburst against Emo and his alienation from the community.
Ku'oosh and Betonie
The traditional healer's ceremony fails; Betonie in Gallup performs a changed ceremony and gives Tayo a pattern to complete.
The cattle and Ts'eh
Tayo recovers Josiah's spotted cattle from a white rancher's land and finds love and healing with Ts'eh on the mountain.
The uranium mine
At the mine Emo and others torture Harley; Tayo resists violence, completing the ceremony.
Return to the community
Tayo tells his story to the elders, rain returns, and the witchery is turned back for now.

Characters

Tayo, protagonist
Mixed-ancestry Laguna veteran seeking healing from war trauma and loss.
Rocky, Tayo's cousin
Athletic, assimilation-minded favourite son who dies during the Bataan march.
Josiah, Tayo's uncle
Loving uncle and cattle-raiser whose death and lost cattle haunt Tayo.
Auntie, Tayo's aunt
Rocky's mother, who raised Tayo with resentment over his mother's shame.
Betonie, medicine man
Navajo-Mexican healer in Gallup who adapts ceremonies to new conditions.
Ku'oosh, Laguna medicine man
Elder healer whose traditional ceremony cannot cure Tayo.
Ts'eh, Tayo's lover
Mysterious woman of the mountain linked to the land and its renewal.
Emo, antagonist
Violent fellow veteran who embodies the witchery's destructiveness.
Harley, veteran friend
Tayo's drinking companion, later tortured at the mine.
Night Swan, Josiah's lover
Mexican dancer who encourages Josiah's cattle project and recognises Tayo's role.

Lessons

Healing must fit the illness
Tayo's sickness comes from a new world of war, racial prejudice and atomic weapons, and old remedies do not reach it. Betonie insists that ceremonies, like medicine, must evolve to remain effective.
- Why does Ku'oosh's ceremony fail?
- What makes Betonie's approach work?
- How might Betonie's view apply to Western psychiatry?
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Stories make the world
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- What role do the poems play in the novel?
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- How does the land's condition mirror Tayo's?
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Context

Thousands of Native Americans served in the Second World War, including New Mexico troops captured in the Philippines and forced on the Bataan Death March (1942). Returning veterans faced poverty, discrimination and alcohol problems. Uranium mining on and near Laguna and Navajo lands from the 1950s, and the nearby Trinity test site, link the novel's landscape to the atomic age.

Composition

Silko wrote much of the novel while living in Ketchikan, Alaska, in the mid-1970s, and later said she wrote it partly to cope with her own homesickness and depression there. It was published by Viking in 1977.

Reception

Ceremony was widely praised and became a central text of Native American literature and of courses on trauma and literature. It is frequently cited in discussions of narrative and culturally grounded approaches to healing war trauma.

War Violence Illness / Body Madness / Mind Language / Storytelling Identity Self Nature / Landscape Colonialism Empire Faith / Religion

Comparisons

testament-of-youth
Both explore the aftermath of world war and survivor guilt, but Silko places healing in collective ceremony rather than personal testimony.
the-odyssey
Both are stories of a veteran's difficult homecoming in which the return requires trials, guidance and recognition.
the-iliad
Achilles' grief for Patroclus and Tayo's for Rocky both show how war bonds and losses shape a soldier's despair.
the-bhagavad-gita
Both are framed by a warrior's crisis and a teacher who places action within a larger cosmic order; Tayo's teaching ends in refusing violence.
heart-of-darkness
Silko inverts imperial narratives: the witchery story imagines white conquest as a product of evil, answering European myths of the 'savage'.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

The poems set into the prose, beginning before the first page of narrative with Thought-Woman thinking the story into being. Track the story of Reed Woman and Corn Woman and the drought it causes, and the story of the witches' contest in which one witch tells into existence the destroyers from across the ocean.
The broken order of Tayo's memories. The jungle rain he cursed, Rocky's death on the march, the Japanese soldier with Josiah's face, and the VA hospital in Los Angeles surface out of sequence, and the reader assembles them as Tayo does.
The two healers. Ku'oosh's careful traditional ceremony helps the other veterans but not Tayo, while Betonie in his hogan above Gallup, stacked with calendars, phone books, and old boxes, insists that ceremonies must change to stay alive.
The four signs Betonie gives Tayo: stars, spotted cattle, a mountain, and a woman. Notice how each is fulfilled on the mountain with Ts'eh and in the recovery of Josiah's cattle.
The night at the abandoned uranium mine, where Tayo realizes how the threads of the story have come together and chooses not to attack Emo with the screwdriver in his hand.

Key terms and names

Laguna Pueblo: Tayo's home community in New Mexico, where the story and its drought take place. Tayo's mixed parentage and his mother's disgrace make him an outsider in his own aunt's house.
Witchery: The novel's name for a destructive force that works by turning people against one another and against the land. Its power depends on human participation, which is why Tayo's refusal of violence at the end matters so much.
Ceremony: A ritual of healing that restores a person to right relation with the community, the land, and the stories. Betonie teaches that a ceremony must grow to meet new illnesses, and Tayo's whole journey becomes one.
Bataan Death March: The 1942 forced march of American and Filipino prisoners by the Japanese army in the Philippines. Rocky, badly wounded, dies on the march despite Tayo's efforts to carry him, and Tayo curses the rain that bogs them down.
Betonie: The Navajo healer of mixed Mexican descent who lives above Gallup. His grandfather's story, the old medicine man Descheeny and a green-eyed Mexican woman, explains how his ceremony came to be.
Ts'eh: The woman Tayo meets on the mountain, who gathers plants and seems to belong to the land itself. She teaches him, warns him of the danger from Emo, and fulfills Betonie's sign of the woman.
Josiah's spotted cattle: Mexican cattle Josiah bought on Night Swan's encouragement because they could survive drought. Their loss and Tayo's recovery of them from a white rancher's fenced land carry on Josiah's hope after his death.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What happened to Tayo and Rocky in the Philippines, and why does Tayo believe he is responsible for the drought at Laguna?
Comprehension Why does Ku'oosh's ceremony fail to heal Tayo, and how does Betonie's hogan differ from what Tayo expects of a medicine man?
Comprehension How does Tayo find and recover Josiah's cattle, and what happens when the patrol riders catch him on the rancher's land?
Interpretation Emo and the other veterans drink and retell the war as the time they were respected. Why does Tayo's sickness give him a truer understanding of the war than their stories do?
Interpretation Betonie argues that ceremonies must change in order to stay alive. Is this a betrayal of tradition or a deeper faithfulness to it, and how does Ku'oosh's failure support his argument?
Interpretation Why does Silko place the climax at a uranium mine near the source of material for the first atomic bomb? What does Tayo understand there about how his private suffering connects to the wider world?
Interpretation Tayo holds a screwdriver while Emo tortures Harley and chooses not to act. Why would violence have completed the witchery's story rather than ended it?
Big Question Ceremony claims that a person cannot be healed apart from the healing of his people and land. Is healing ever purely individual, or is every wound also a wound in a community?

Faith Connections

Romans 12:17-21 (Scripture)
Paul commands believers not to repay evil for evil but to overcome evil with good. Tayo's refusal at the uranium mine to strike Emo rests on different beliefs, but it reaches a similar insight: answering violence with violence would hand the victory to the evil that provoked it.
Joel 2:21-25 (Scripture)
God promises a land stricken by drought and locusts that the rains will return and the years the locust ate will be restored. The ending of Ceremony, where Tayo tells his story in the kiva and the rain comes, shares the hope that a damaged land and people can be made whole again.
Psalm 137:1-4 (Scripture)
The exiles in Babylon weep and ask how they can sing the Lord's song in a strange land. Tayo and the other veterans return home strangers, unable to live in either the white world that used them or the old ways, and the novel asks the psalm's question of how a people keeps its songs.
Augustine, City of God XII.6-7 (Great Conversation)
Augustine argues that an evil will has no efficient cause, only a deficient one, since evil is a falling away from the good rather than a thing in itself. Silko's witchery seems to act with intent of its own, yet it gains power only when people consent to it, and the two accounts make a rich conversation about where evil comes from.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Tayo's sickness is not only in his body or mind but in his relation to his people, his land, and the stories that order them; a sickness of that kind cannot be cured by hospital treatment alone or by an unchanging ritual; therefore healing requires a ceremony that grows to meet new evils, and it is completed only when Tayo refuses to take part in the witchery's violence and returns his story to the community.

Rhetorical device: embedded narrative. Traditional stories in verse, such as Reed Woman's departure and the drought it causes, break into the prose at intervals and quietly mirror Tayo's situation. The reader learns to read Tayo's life against these older stories, which is exactly the healing Betonie asks of him.

Debate: Resolved: Betonie is right that traditions must change in order to remain alive.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Silko never tells Tayo's story in order. Trace three moments where a memory from the war breaks into the present, such as the jungle rain, the Japanese soldier with Josiah's face, or the VA hospital, and argue how the novel's broken structure is itself part of the illness and of the cure.

Comparison with The Odyssey: Both Odysseus and Tayo come home from war long after it ends and find their households and lands in disorder. Odysseus restores order by killing the suitors, while Tayo completes his ceremony by refusing to kill Emo. Compare the two homecomings and argue what each poem or novel thinks a returning warrior must do to be whole again.

Medical Lens

One of the essential novels of war trauma. Tayo's nausea, vomiting, inability to eat or sleep, intrusive memories, dissociative feeling of being 'white smoke' and survivor guilt are described with great specificity; contemporaries would have called it battle fatigue (the term the VA doctors use), and modern readers often discuss it in relation to PTSD and moral injury, while noting that the novel itself frames the illness in Laguna terms. The book contrasts the VA hospital's biomedical approach with Laguna and Navajo healing, and Betonie's insistence that ceremonies must change has been taken up in discussions of culturally adapted mental-health care. Alcohol use among the veterans is portrayed as both self-medication and a vehicle of violence. The uranium mine adds a theme of environmental and radiation harm.

Trauma Shell Shock WAR Wounds Alcohol Asylum Institution Physicians Doctors Grief Ancient Medicine Mind Body Starvation Nutrition Sleep Insomnia Philosophy AS Therapy

Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
Trauma Shell Shock Sleep Insomnia Asylum Institution Physicians Doctors Mind Body
Flashbacks to the Philippines
The Bataan march, Rocky's wounds and death, and the execution of Japanese prisoners.
WAR Wounds Grief Trauma Shell Shock
Bar scenes with Harley, Leroy and Emo
Veterans' drinking, boasting and the outbreak of violence; Tayo's attack on Emo.
Alcohol Trauma Shell Shock
Ku'oosh's visit
The elder's traditional ceremony and his recognition that some war sicknesses are beyond it.
Ancient Medicine
Betonie's hogan, Gallup
Betonie's ceremony, sand painting and teaching that ceremonies must change.
Ancient Medicine Philosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

Essay
Compare the symptoms Tayo describes with historical diagnoses of shell shock and battle fatigue, and discuss what is lost when his illness is translated into a DSM category.
Fiction
Write a scene in the VA hospital from the point of view of a nurse who notices Tayo.
Classroom
Map the novel's non-chronological structure: where does each flashback fall, and how does the order affect our understanding of Tayo's illness?