Week 13 and 14: beginnings, middles
Warning to the student: If you have not read past page 167 of Ceremony as assigned, return to your text, get to page 167, then return to this post and to your directions for DJP 10.
Paula Gunn Allen, a writer, poet, and scholar of indigenous ancestry, identified as a Laguna Pueblo. I turn to her to help me to urge you all to understand the gravity of Leslie Marmon Silko’s inclusion of both the ceremonies that take place in this novel and the tale, “Hummingbird and Green Fly,” that she weaves throughout the novel. In an essay titled, “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony,” Gunn Allen writes the following about her personal journey and considerations of the complications that arise when she teaches Silko’s Ceremony. She writes of the “sacred,”
The protectiveness of native people, particularly Pueblos, toward their traditions is legendary, but the reasons for that protectiveness are perhaps not so well known. Among the Pueblos, a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place. One does not tell or inquire about matters that do not directly concern one. I was raised to understand that "street smart" around Laguna meant respecting privacy and modesty, and that to step beyond the bounds of the required propriety was to put myself and others at risk. One did not inquire about or tell about matters that were not hers or his to know or discuss. As my grandmother deftly phrased the requirements, one was to mind her p's and q's as well as her own beeswax. (379)
Gunn Allen goes on to quote another scholar, “the white folklorist Barre Toelken,” who struggles ethically to represent Navajo traditions without appropriating culture, because as you will see below, for many indigenous tribes to record is to appropriate,
"The Navajos believe that language does not merely describe reality, it creates it" (p. 390). Toelken comments, and adds ‘Since words and narratives have power to heal, they may also be used to injure and kill’ (qtd. in Allen 380).
Gunn Allen then writes specifically about Ceremony and Gunn Allen’s decisions in the novel,
Ceremony is a novel that I find particularly troublesome, and I tend to non-teach it, if you can picture such a thing. I focus on the story, the plot and action. I read the novel quite differently from how it is read by many. I believe I could no more do (or sanction) the kind of ceremonial investigation of Ceremony done by some researchers than I could slit my mother's throat. Even seeing some of it published makes my skin crawl. I have yet to read one of those articles all the way through, my physical reaction is so pronounced.
I teach the novel as being about a half-breed, in the context of halfbreed literature from Cogewea on. Certainly that is how I read the novel the first time I read it--as a plea for inclusion by a writer who felt excluded and compelled to depict the potential importance of breeds to Laguna survival. The parts of the novel that set other pulses atremble largely escape me. The long poem text that runs through the center has always seemed to me to contribute little to the story or its understanding. Certainly the salvation of Laguna from drought is one of its themes, but the Tayo stories which, I surmise, form their own body of literature would have been a better choice if Silko's intentions was to clarify or support her text with traditional materials.
Tayo is the name of one of the dramatic characters around Keresland. Perhaps in some story I am unfamiliar with, he is involved with Fly or Reed Woman. But the story she lays alongside the novel is a clan story, and is not to be told outside of the clan.
I have long wondered why she did so. Certainly, being raised in greater proximity to Laguna village than I, she must have been told what I was, that we don't tell these things outside. Perhaps her desire to demonstrate the importance of breeds led her to this, or perhaps no one ever told her why the Lagunas and other Pueblos are so closed about their spiritual activities and the allied oral tradition.
Two instructive events were used as a reference to convey to me what behavior was expected with regard to passing on Laguna materials. I was told that an anthropologist, Elsie Clews Parsons, had come to Laguna to collect material for her study of Pueblo religion and social culture. They had given her information readily enough and everything seemed fine. But when Parsons published the material, Lagunas saw how she treated their practices and beliefs, and they were horrified. In accordance with her academic training, she objectified, explained, detailed and analyzed their lives as though they were simply curios, artifacts, fetishes, and discussed the supernaturals as though they were objects of interest and patronization. Her underlying attitude for the supernaturals, the sacred, and the people who honored them didn't evade notice. The Lagunas were "red-haired" as my mother would say. Coincidently (or not so coincidently) the terrible drought deepened--the same drought Silko depicts in Ceremony--and in its wake many other ills visited the Pueblo. Personal horrors and society-wide horrors ensued; the discovery of uranium on Laguna land, not far from where the giantess's head and her headless body had been flung by the War Twins, the development of nuclear weapons near Jemez, the Second World War, jackpile mine, water and land poisoned by nuclear waste, the village of Paguate all but surrounded by tailing-mesas almost as perfectly formed as the natural mesas all around. It's hardly any wonder that they shut it down. All entry by non-traditionals to dances and stories was cut off. They witnessed first-hand the appalling consequences of telling what was private for reasons that far exceed simple cultural purism.
While Silko details these horrors in Ceremony, she does not attribute them to security leaks. She is poignantly aware of the closure of village life to outsiders and depicts the pain such exclusion brings; she is aware of the discovery of the uranium used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she is aware of the devastating drought, the loss of self that the entire Pueblo suffered in those years, yet she is unaware of one small but essential bit of information: the information that telling the old stories, revealing the old ways can only lead to disaster.
Gunn Allen ends her essay in the following manner,
For make no mistake, many students come to be titillated by Indian lore, seeing--however unconsciously--native spiritual life as a curious artifact, as they've been conditioned to see all things Indian. They will find themselves disappointed, but then that's not new. Perhaps they will find themselves ever more aware that native people are people, and their ways are not a spectacle but simply and significantly, a way of life.
I offer you Paula Gunn Allen’s struggle in teaching Silko’s Ceremony to illustrate the gravity of the material and the story you are reading. Considering the tradition of the Pueblo that Gunn Allen depicts, “one was to mind her p's and q's as well as her own beeswax,” does that affect your reading of Tayo’s story at all? How do the depictions of Betonie’s ceremonies affect the story? Would this be the same story without them?
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