Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: An Analysis

As teenagers, everyone calls who they are into questioning. Is one punk rock? Is another the classic prep? What about the jocks? These characteristics are typically pulled into play because high school gives teens the chance to throw themselves into the unknown to find who one is, who they want to be, and how they ended up there? However, Native Americans have a historical theme of struggling to find who they really are. This is because they’ve also been tossed into a mix of the unknown, at least to them, a predominantly white culture. Novels like The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko develop the backgrounds of different tribes to show their backgrounds and the culture collisions …show more content…
In the novel, Tayo is Laguna Pueblo that is also partially’ white, although his mom runs away with her new companion and leaves him behind. The true moment he is recognized in the Caucasian world is when he is wearing his uniform in Oakland. “The first day in Oakland he and Rocky walked down the street together and a big Chrysler stopped in the street and an old white woman rolled down the window and said, “God bless you, God bless you,” but it was the uniform, not them she blessed” (Silko 41). This collision of cultures in this section shows how the satire and sarcasm have blended into the everyday life, influencing the negative connotations of white culture and what they represent. However, Silko writes “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” (Silko #). This shows the direct feelings towards the white, even though they may resent their culture from the past and what they did, these aren’t the same