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The Desert as a Repertoire of Resistance for the Indians in Leslie Marmon
Silko's Ceremony
Farhat Ben Amor
Assistant professor, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Kairouan, Tunisia
[email protected]
Abstract
Silko's novel, Ceremony, (1977) documents aspects of life in the Reservation where the
Native Americans (also known as 'the Indians') had to face the oppression of the white AngloAmerican invaders, on the one hand, and the hard climate of the desert, on the other. While
grappling with these two forces, the novel demonstrates how the Indians tend to incorporate
them in a larger story that has to do with the Indian rites which, in their essence, delineate the
Indian cultural heritage. As a matter of fact, the symbolic ending of the novel, in which Silko
dramatizes the Indian celebration of the restoration of rain and the eradication of the Whites,
may offer the reader a poetic panorama of the Indians' ritual practices which lead them,
ultimately, to enact their symbiotic bond to their land so that their desert becomes,
paradoxically, a fertile space endowing them with more strength to resist all dispossessors, be
they incarnated in persons like Whites, or, in nature such as the drought.
My aim, in this article, is to uncover the intimacy between the Indians and their fertile
desert. Through studying characterization, recurrent symbols and motifs, and narration in
Ceremony, I will foreground the association of the desert symbolically with the basic
connotations attached to fertility such as abundance, generosity, multiplicity, generative
power, birth and femaleness. I will evidence that the desert assumes an inspirational role of
power for the Indians so that they grow able to withstand all kinds of hardship, whether
emanating from the Whites or from drought. As a matter of fact, my ultimate objective is to
highlight the rhetorical aspect of rain, the long-waited and solemnly celebrated boon by Tayo,
the protagonist of the novel, and his whole Indian community in the Laguna desert. Rather
than construed of denotatively, I will argue that rain, in Ceremony, should be understood
connotatively in relation with the metaphorical transformation of the desert into a repertoire
of resistance for the Indians.
Keywords: artistic chronotope, ceremony, circularity, drought/rain, grazing, hybridity,
identity.
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Noticeable in the American political scene of the 1960s and 1970s was the radical
activism of minority groups who engaged in reclaiming their rights from the hegemony of the
White Anglo-Americans. As a case in point, the Indians, the real inhabitants of America who
are, actually, referred to as ‘the Natives,’ faced different forms of subjugation. This included,
mainly, their being brutally killed whenever come across, and severely impoverished by the
dispossession of their fertile lands across the north-western mountainous rich pastures, which
culminated in their being cramped in reservations in the arid climate of the west-southern
deserts of America where grazing (the Indians’ basic activity) was very difficult due to the
rarity of rain. Therefore, the ‘radical activism’ of the Indians in the 1960s-70s involved “a
counter-discourse” (Currie 23), designed to subvert the White Anglo-American discourse
which has been built, since the first contact with the Indians (as a pamphlet, written in 1609 in
Jamestown, revealed), on the premise that the latter ones “are savage and incredibly rude […],
having no Arts, nor science, nor trade to imploy (sic) themselves.” (qtd.in Debo 40-1)
Constituting a counter-discourse, L. M. Silko’s publication of her novel Ceremony in
1977 must have helped sustain militancy against the Whites’ supremacy through refuting that
premise. Moreover, rather than attributing all these traits – which have negative connotations
– to her Indian community, Silko attaches them, ironically, to the Whites themselves, who
“grow away from the earth, from the sun, from the plants and animals.” (Ceremony135) By
implication, the so-supposed ‘non-savageness’ and ‘refined’ character of the Whites, along
with their ‘Arts, science and trade,’ turn out to distance them further from the world of nature
in its fauna and flora. In contrast, the Indians’ ‘savageness’ and ‘rudeness’ are, paradoxically,
implied to bring them closer to nature. Indeed, Silko sets out to give voice to the Indian ‘Arts,
science and trade,’ which are implicated in nature, through revealing the Indians’ superb
adaptability to the desert. That desert, in Ceremony, seems to assume a symbolic fertility,
from which the Indians derive much ethical and aesthetic values that buttress their courage to
withstand the Whites’ infringement not only of their (the Indians’) rights, but also of the
balance of nature in itself.
Perhaps, both ethics and aesthetics, in Ceremony, converge on one point which
consists in dramatizing the Indians’ establishment of symbiosis with their desert that provides
them with a symbolic repertoire of resistance. As the narrative unfolds, the desert gains a
metonymical significance of belonging to the land which has been dispossessed from the
Indians by the Whites. This is what could be gathered from Josiah’s speaking to his nephew,
Tayo, the protagonist of the novel, when he says in an emotively-loaded statement: “there are
some things worth more than money. This where we come from, see: this sand, this stone,
these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. This earth keeps us going.” (Ceremony 45) The
marked use of the deictic ‘this’ in Josiah’s assertion does not seem to be limited to a particular
landscape in a particular time. Rather, the time and space of the statement is suggested to be
stretched in magnitude and, ultimately, to construct what Bakhtin calls ‘an artistic
chronotope,’ where “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out,
concrete whole. Time, as it were, takes on flesh, artistically, visible; likewise, space becomes
charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” (53) Reading Josiah’s
statement in terms of ‘an artistic chronotope,’ in addition to highlighting its combination of
the ethical and aesthetic sides, may present the act of uttering it as exceeding the confines of
Josiah’s individuality as to be spread to the whole Indian community.
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In one way or another, the cluster of characters who people Ceremony typify that
‘artistic chronotope’ which confers substantiality on the time and space of their lives.
Actually, the circle of the ceremony which Tayo performs is widened considerably throughout
the novel as to assume an all-inclusive proportion that embraces all the Indians of the Laguna
Reservation, where Tayo lives. Indeed, Tayo himself unveils much awareness of the
dialectical interdependence between his fate and his community’s own, just as his community
uncovers its consciousness, too, that whatever happens to Tayo affects them directly. There
are many examples that could substantiate that dialectics which exists between Tayo and the
other characters in Ceremony. To begin with Tayo, he, explicitly, relates his commitment of a
blasphemy against nature, through cursing rain while he had been a soldier in the Philippines,
to the severe years of drought that plague his community in the desert to which he returned
afterwards. As the narrator tells us, “So he had prayed the rain away, and for the sixth year it
was dry; the grass turned yellow and it did not grow. Whenever he looked, Tayo could see the
consequences of his praying.” (14) Tayo’s perpetration of that sin, then, takes on a centrifugal
aspect inasmuch as it is suggested to move away from the center of its committer (Tayo) and
to be expanded into his community as a whole. The pervasiveness of the repercussions of
Tayo’s sin on the Laguna Reservation was not only limited to people, but reached, also, the
animals like “the gray mule [which] grew gaunt, and the goat and kid [which] had to wander
farther and farther each day to find weeds or dry shrubs to eat.” (14)
In reality, that eventual all-inclusiveness of destructiveness brought to the whole
Laguna Reservation, whether to its people or its animals, precipitates Tayo’s elaboration of a
communal spirit through which he does not see himself separated from his Indian community.
Therefore, while seeking to atone for his sin, Tayo links that aim with rescuing his community
from drought. For Tayo, only his performance of “a good ceremony” (3) can save him and his
community from such inconveniences as droughts, for, as he came to realize, “his sickness
[that is both physical and mental] was only part of something larger, and his cure could be
found only in something great and inclusive of everything.” (125-6) By the end of the novel,
the achievement of such a ‘great and inclusive of everything cure’ is widely acclaimed by all
the Laguna community who ritualistically celebrate Tayo’s consummation of ‘a good
ceremony.’ All “started crying ‘A’moo’ooh! A’moo’ooh!’ […] We will be blessed again.”
(257) The use of the future tense, here, if read in connection with the precepts of ‘the artistic
chronotope,’ would not lessen the immediacy of the emotive fervor created out of the
expectation of ‘being blessed again’ in the present time of the Indians. In fact, the narrator
opts for distorting the significance of time through the use of the simple past in describing the
merry air that accompanies the bringing of rain to the Laguna Reservation (“The storm clouds
returned, the grass and plants started growing again. There was food and the people were
happy again” (256)). Such a distortion of time may pertain to the narrator’s bending of time to
the Indian circular conception of life, which is derived, essentially, from the circularity of
their relationship with each other throughout their successive generations.
Perhaps the dialectical tie that binds Tayo to his community per se may symbolically
evidence the circularity of the Indian relations. In line with Tayo’s centrifugal movement that
begins with his own person and stretches to his whole Laguna community and even to the
Indians at large, there is implied a centripetal movement of the latter ones towards him, as a
symbolic center of blessing for them. While helping him conduct the “pilgrimage” (Chavkin
12) of his ‘messianic’ ceremony, the old Indian medicine man, Ku’oosh, underlines the
Indians’ dependency on Tayo’s fate: “You understand, don’t you? It is important to all of us.
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Not only for your sake, but for this fragile world.” (Ceremony 36) So, because it concerns ‘all
of the Indians,’ Tayo’s ceremony is backed, in its essence, on a communal, rather than on a
personal, effort in order to succeed in achieving its purpose. For instance, Betonie, another
medicine man, gives Tayo signs to follow the stars to get access to Tse’h, a spirit in the form
of a woman, who helps him, among other things, to bring rain to the arid desert of his
community. Using the modal ‘would,’ seemingly to refer to “habits or repeated actions in the
past” (O.A.L.D), the narrator tells us how:
He [Tayo] would go back there now, where she had shown him the
plant. He would gather the seeds for her and plant them with great
care in places near sandy hills. The rainwater would seep down
gently and the delicate membranes would not be crushed or broken
before the emergence of tiny fingers, roots, and leaves pressing out
in all directions. The plants would grow there like the story, strong
and translucent as the stars. (254)
To make all these actions ‘habits in the past,’ the presence of Tayo, as a character in
Ceremony, is implied to be dissipated into the many ‘Tayos’ that appear throughout the
successive Indian generations. This comes as no surprise, with regard to the fact that “Tayo’s
quest has long been established in the oral traditions of the Indians.” (Owens 108)
Metaphorically speaking, Tayo assumes the same reiterative generation as the ‘plants’ which
are, actually, likened to the ‘story’ that represents a major component in the ceremony he
performs. Actually, collateral with bringing rain to his Laguna Reservation, Tayo comes to
learn “the way stories fit together – the old stories, the war stories, their stories – to become
the story that was still being told.” (Ceremony 246) Yet, these stories, which are
metaphorically linked with Tayo and plants, seem to be paradoxical in nature, given their
amalgamation of ‘strength’ and ‘translucence’ at the same time. Translucence, which denotes
“allowing light to pass through but not being transparent” (O.A.L.D), may connote ‘fragility’
which Ku’oosh evokes while underlining the dialectical interdependence between Tayo and
his community. Probably, the symbolism attached to ‘fragility’ has to do with the idea of
circularity which serves as a metaphor of the sense of “sharing the same consciousness”
(Ceremony 68) developed among the Indians, who create a web of relations with each other
that is, to a great extent, necessary for their survival (as is implied in the symbolic
significance of Tayo’s ceremony for his community).
Like a web, the high sense of collectivity, which reveals that the destiny of each Indian
individual is spun round that of others, remains fragile. Once one thread of filament is pulled
out of the web, the whole web (which stands for the Indian community) collapses. Therefore,
the presence of characters like Emo, Rocky, and Harley, in Ceremony, is likely to undo that
closely-knit web of collectivity because their contact with the Whites makes them disparage
their Indian belonging. By extension, they are likely to cause rain to stop in the Laguna
Reservation despite their disaffiliation of themselves from it through their negative attitude
they bear against their own community. This postulation might be affirmed on putting in mind
that “the cultural identity of the Laguna people was predicated on their constructing ‘a viable
relationship’ with the natural surroundings.” (Stein 118) The transgression of that
‘relationship with the natural surroundings’ is inevitably to take place with the dissolution of
the Indian community’s web. With the above-mentioned characters disaffiliating from the
‘cultural identity of the Laguna,’ it is likely that there occurs the same violation of nature as
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Tayo’s own blasphemous damnation of rain which resulted in severe years of drought
afflicting his community. Yet, because they do not follow Tayo’s own atonement for the
blasphemy (as they never accommodate themselves to their Indian community till the end of
the novel), they are suggested to deter rain and, therefore, to abort the effects of Tayo’s
ceremony that is indicated to bring rain to his community after the hard six years of drought.
Upon a close scrutiny, the paradigm of rain / drought seems to represent a motif in
Ceremony whose plot is, to large extent, governed symbolically by the ebbs and flows of
fertility. In contrast to what might be expected, Silko does not introduce rain and drought
conventionally, as opposites to each other; in the sense of presenting rain auxiliary to fertility,
while drought retards it. Rather, she suggests a kind of overlap whereby both rain and drought
become apt to assume a metaphorical role related to the different connotations of fertility such
as superfluous generosity, constant regeneration and reproduction, which, all, might have to
do symbolically with the narrator’s idealization of the Indians’ potentiality to resist hardships
that may emanate, even, from disaffiliates from their own community. In a way, that overlap
between rain and drought may match the circularity of the Indian community’s web of
relationship with each other, which might foreground the ‘strength,’ rather than the ‘fragile’
exposure of the Indians’ sense of collectivity to the threat of dissolution. In fact, the Indians’
peculiarity in adapting themselves to droughts in the desert is highlighted in the novel.
Chiefly, the drought seems to be re-conceptualized by the Indians as to incorporate it
in their life, instead of viewing it symbolically as a curse inflicted on them. This is what
Josiah seeks to inculcate in his nephew’s mind when he tells Tayo: “These dry years you hear
some people complaining, you know, about the dust and the wind, and how dry it is. But the
wind and dust, they are part of life too, like the sun and the sky. […] The old people used to
say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave.” (46) Clearly, Josiah,
here, is refuting the contention of ‘old people’ in his Indian community, for whom drought is
the penalty of misbehavior. With reference to the novel, the terms of such a so-called
‘misbehavior’ revolves around the Indians’ intermarriage with other races, including the
Whites themselves. Therefore, Tayo’s “hazel-green eyes” (124-5) turn into icons of disgrace,
for both Auntie and Grandma, because they constantly remind them of his mixed origin, as
one whose father is white and his mother is Indian. In Auntie’s words, “he is not full blood
anyway.” (33) Also, Josiah’s lover, Night Swan, forms part of “mixed bred characters” (Stein
204) in Ceremony. Descheeny, the grandfather of Tayo’s medicine man, Betonie, had
married, too, a Mexican woman. Miscegenation, then, defines the identities of the most
prominent characters that are, really, instrumental in bringing rain to their Indian community;
no matter how much metaphorical that rain may be. It seems as if Silko wanted to make
hybridized characters the most suitable ones who could preserve the survival of the Indians in
America. As Betonie puts it, while explaining to Tayo the rationale behind miscegenation,
“we must have power from everywhere. Even the power we get from the Whites.” (150)
Having Josiah incorporated droughts in the Indian life and Betonie imbibed power
‘even from the Whites,’ Tayo is symbolically invited to direct his ceremony towards
achieving accommodation of his community to new ways of life in the desert. This means that
the nature of the Indian ceremonies themselves ought to be changed: from being confined to
calling rain in its denotative sense to seeking for rain as connotatively related to the everregenerative power which the Indians need to possess. Centralizing the dynamicity of
ceremonies in accordance with change, Betonie asserts, “after the white people came,
elements in the world began to shift, and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I
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have made changes in the rituals.” (126) Cattle breeding might represent a primordial symbol
of change because it reveals the Indians’ (those who endorse hybridization, in particular)
aptitude to seek for those animals which can survive the desert where grazing seems to be
difficult due to the shortage of rain. Those Indians, like Tayo and his uncle, Josiah, challenge
the drought through launching “cattle business” (74) in the desert, since, as Josiah notices,
“cattle prices are way down now because of dry spell. Everybody [in the Indian Laguna
Reservation] is afraid to buy, [which] gives us [Josiah and Tayo] the chance.” (74)
Interestingly, that decision to launch ‘cattle business’ in the desert is not based on a
rash plan on Josiah’s part. On the contrary, he opts for Ulibarri, “the descendants of
generations of desert cattle, born in dry sand and scrubby mesquites” (74), rather than for the
older Herefords type of cattle which “grew thin and died from eating thistle and burned-off
cactuses during the drought” (74) In reality, it is Josiah’s hybridized beloved, Night Swan,
who, as Auntie reports, “encouraged him to buy them [the Ulibarri cattle].” (124) Actually,
the ability of these Ulibarri cattle to survive in the desert may allegorize to the hybridized
characters in the novel (including, in addition to Night Swan, Tayo, Betonie and Descheeny,
along with Josiah who symbolically reveals acceptance of racial intermarriage through
befriending Night Swan). Being “hybrid Mexican wild cattle” (Stein 204), Ulibarri do not
show, at first, readiness not to transcend the despicable fences that the Whites made to
separate the Indian reservations from what came to be known ‘the American land.’ Once
crossing the fences, “they still ran if the men on the horseback [the White patrolmen] tried to
get close; and if they were pushed into a corner where fences intersected, they lunged through
the wire without hesitation and trotted away to a safe distance, where they stood in a
semicircle to watch those horsemen.” (80)
Despite their raising of pathos out of their struggle to escape the attack of the
horsemen, the actions of the cattle may possess a high measure of irony directed against the
white patrolmen who cannot catch them. The ‘semicircle,’ which they form, might be
construed of symbolically in connection to the circularity of the Indian communal sense of
collectivity. That circularity is inferred to turn into a ‘semi-circularity,’ given the existence of
Indians who either seek to disaffiliate themselves from their community (like Emo, Rocky,
and Harley), or blindly cling to worn-out and inefficient shibboleths of their Indian ancestors
(such as Auntie and Grandma). So, in order to complete the circle, those hybridized characters
– embodied chiefly in the person of Tayo, who is conducting the ‘new’ ceremony – need to
remodel the mentality of the negatively-introduced two categories of the Indians. In the same
way, the circle of the Ulibarri cattle remains incomplete because it does not include animals
which are not predisposed to evade being attacked by the patrolmen. Indeed, while
highlighting Grandma’s inability to accommodate to the changing circumstances, Tayo likens
her to the blind mule: “They were the same – the mule and old Grandma. […] She was as
blind as the gray mule and just as persistent.” (27) So, Tayo’s pursuit of a ‘new’ ceremony,
which is implied to be metaphorically designed to complete the circle, seems to take on a
symbolic search for a corrective Indian identity that is neither closed to itself, nor dissolved in
the hegemonic culture of the Whites.
Tayo’s subsequent commitment of himself to finding the Ulibarri cattle, which
penetrate the fences, could stand for the search for his hybrid identity that is claiming space
not only in the Laguna Reservation, but also throughout the American continent, to which the
Indians belong. Fluidity might best typify that hybrid identity which cannot acknowledge the
boundaries the Whites set against them and their cattle. Unlike the White dispossessors, that
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desire for borderlessness does not emanate from a ravenous greed for conquest. As the
narrator tells us, Tayo “was never crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard
the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.”
(246) Such an amplitude, however, is hardly known by the Whites, who are always
“swarming like larva out of crashed ant hill” (136) as to cause “drought [and] starvation [to]
people.” (136) Therefore, Tayo feels a great urge to “scream to all of them that they were
trespassers and thieves. He wanted to follow them as they hunted the mountain lion, to shoot
them and their howling dogs with their own guns. The destroyers had sent them [the
patrolmen] to ruin this world, and day by day they were doing it.” (204)
Notwithstanding such a stark destruction the Whites have brought to the Laguna
Reservation’s desert, the Indians can content themselves with the severely stripped pieces of
lands that still belong to them. Thus, they resemble the Ulibarri cattle, which, after being
brought back to Indian lands by Tayo, stop crossing the fences as to be satisfied with “grazing
in a dry lake below the ridge, running southeast [towards] the Mexican desert where they
were born, in the direction he [Tayo] wanted them to go.” (196-7) That movement of the
cattle to the ‘dry desert’ may emblemize Tayo’s quest-framework that generates a circular
design in the narrative [which] establishes a circuit comprising three phases: “separation,
initiation and return.” (Bell 23) Indeed, Tayo’s journey involves the three steps of ‘separation’
from his desert, while being a soldier in the Philippines, ‘initiation’ to accommodate to the
desert of his Laguna Reservation, and ‘return’ to it that takes on a symbiotic undertone,
similar to the reunion of the child to its mother. As a consequence, that ‘dry desert,’ to which
Tayo, like the Ulibarri cattle, returns is made, paradoxically, a fertile space incarnating
immanence and amplitude which the Whites do not esteem. The sweetness of the physical
sensation the desert grants to Tayo is conveyed within an idyllic scene, in which that
sensation is infused within a dream of Ts’eh, a spirit in the form of woman: “He felt the warm
sand on his toes and knees; he felt her [Ts’eh] body, and it was as warm as the sand, and he
couldn’t feel where her body ended and the sand began.” (222)
The narrative strategy of Ceremony in itself may be telling of that fluid interspersion
that makes the Indians’ ‘return’ to their desert assume a circular pattern matching the
circularity of their communal sense of collectivity. In fact, the narrative is framed by poems,
which are, also, found within it, dealing with stories that are known outside the context of the
novel. We can mention, for example, the poem which tells the story of the mythical figure,
Pa’caya’nyi, the magician who is notorious for beguiling the Indian community with his fake
power. As he manages to dupe them into believing his capacity to bring them rain, the Mother
Corn, Nau’ts’ity’i, becomes angry and takes plants and grass from the Laguna tribes, along
with rain clouds. (46-9) This might imply the existence of allegorical allusion to the story of
the Indians’ contact with the Whites in the prose narrative. With respect to the beguilement,
we might be reminded of Tayo’s urge to “scream at Indians like Harley and Emo that the
white things they admired and desired – the bright city lights and loud music, the soft sweet
food and cars – all these had been stolen, torn out of Indian land.” (204) So, just as Tayo sets
out to make the Indians symbiotically ‘return’ to their desert in the prose narrative, the poems
introduce Hummingbird and Fly as messengers to the Corn Mother to ask her to dissipate
magic and restore rain. Like Tayo, too, these messengers commit themselves to a whole
ritualistic process that takes them to “the fourth world below [where] everything [is]
blooming.” (82) This ‘world below’ may resemble in magnitude and superfluity the idyllic
realms that Ts’eh offers to Tayo’s dream.
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However, whether it takes the form of dream (in the prose narrative), or a mythical
grandeur (in the poems), that measure of idyllicism is bound to face the reality of the desert in
the Laguna Reservation, characterized by droughts and Whites’ abuse of man and nature.
Notwithstanding that ineluctable confrontation, both prose and verse reveal the Indians’
clinging to their own dreams and myths in the same way they attach to their desert. Moreover,
once they envision an ideal picture of reality, they are able to color their reality with it. In
other words, the Indians are endowed with the capability of transforming a non-existent ideal
vision into an existent reality around which they concoct a story, whose regenerative power
resembles the ever-widening circle that connects the whole Indian community together
throughout their successive generations. As verbalized by Trin Min-Ha, “my story, no doubt,
is me; but it is also, no doubt, older than me, younger than me, unnamable, uncontainable, so
immense that it exceeds all attempts at humanizing.” (301) Perhaps, the remark that Grandma
says, which closes the prose narrative of the novel (“It seems like I already heard these stories
before . . . only one thing is, the names sound different” (260)), bespeaks Silko’s fusion of the
prose narrative with the pieces of verse throughout the novel into one single whole that aims
at symbolically completing the ever-widening circle which defines the story of the Indians’
bold existence in the desert.
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References
Primary Source:
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986. Print.
Secondary Source:
Backhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holiquist. Trans. Carlyl Emerson and
Michael Holiquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print.
Bell, Roger C. “Circular Design in Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Ed. Allan
Chavkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 23-39. Print.
Chavkin, Allan. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Print.
Currie, Mark. “Narratology, Death and Afterlife.” Introduction. Postmodern Narrative
Theory. By Currie. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998. 1-14. Print.
Debo, Angie. A History of the Indians of the United Stated. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1970. Print.
Min-Ha, Trin. “Grandma’s Story.” The Narrative Reader. Ed. Martin Mcquillan. London:
Routledge, 2000. Print.
Owens, Louis. “The Very Essence of our Lives: Leslie Silko’s Webs of Identity.” Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Cerermony. Ed. Allan Chavkin. Oxford. Oxford University Press,
2002. 91 - 116. Print.
Stein, Rachel. “Contested Ground: Nature, Narrative, and Native American Identity in Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Ed. Allan Chavkin
Oxford: oxford university press, 2002. 193 – 211. Print.
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