Summary of Rice's Article

Gloria Bird’s essay discusses the decolonization of her language and culture. Before she heads into these, Bird starts off by showing the influences of colonization on native peoples, using a song she learned as a child as an example. The possession of language is then spoken about because Bird feels like she stole the native language even though she grew up only knowing English. She feels the same way about the song itself. She feels a kinship with the white man, who stole the Indian language from the children in Silko’s grandmother’s generation though missionary work and “American” schooling. Repression of the native languages, she feels, is the essence of colonization. In this, she asks: How can one become decolonized? She argues that through literature, culture, and language people can literally unlearn things. Ceremony breaks down the Native Americans’ inferiority complex to further this point, according to Bird, and is also what she calls a piece of “critical fiction”. Ceremony is written, she argues, to show that all peoples can and are slowly becoming decolonized, or should be.

Bird shows us that Tayo is striving in the dark towards finding what is holding him back from returning to his culture once more. This thing not only holds Tayo back, but also makes him feel guilty for not being white! Guilt becomes irrevocably linked to colonization. Bird then goes on to discuss Tayo’s journey towards his own person decolonization and related that to how the current Native Americans need to accept this journey.

Bird also makes a case for how Silko addresses time in Ceremony. Silko’s use, Bird claims, of nonlinear time and space helps to further decolonize the Indians, banishing the feeling of “otherness” in the culture. It also helps her to “collapse time” to show how all things are connected; usually via the landscape, only re-enforcing the point of decolonization (the fact we are all one people). She re-tells the reader ehre that repression of language is the essence of colonization. Bird ends her article on the hopeful note that perhaps Indian culture will not always be seen as “other”, rather as a sibling-type of culture to the classical, colonized, American mainstream. We must be willing to see the world differently.