Summary/Application Assignment #1 (Revised)

Summary:

Gloria Bird’s essay discusses the decolonization of her language and culture. Bird starts off by showing the influences of colonization on native peoples. The possession of language is then spoken about from a personal perspective. Repression of native languages, she feels, is the essence of colonization. She argues that through literature, culture, and language people can literally unlearn things and become decolonized. Ceremony breaks down the Native Americans’ inferiority complex to further. Ceremony 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.

Bird also argues for a sense of racial and identity confusion. She states that mixed-blood Indians become aimless when their identities come into question. These Indians must learn to reconcile with both identities. Tayo must come to terms with his own identity. Tayo’s ceremony is, in part, a struggle to re-gain his identity. Lack of identity brings pain and can make people disconnect from the world. This searching for identity and self-awareness is a common theme and Tayo is the only character who has a positive outcome of this search. Everyone else ends up ignoring this search for identity completely and/or becoming a drunk. These characters end up having no options and become trapped through their lack of self-awareness. Tayo’s urban experience almost loses him everything, including his progress on his journey to re-gain his identity.

Witchery is a common theme in this article. Witchery is, in short summary, a Euro-American cultural colonization and style. Witchery promotes disrespect of the earth and cultural alienation between peoples. This is because this type of culture does not take care of how it treats the earth or even consider how they are transforming it. Though this culture is the root of the problem, whites are not to blame. They are also victims in the witchery. Change is also another theme in Silko’s Ceremony. The ceremonies change as the world changes and Betonie understands this. He changes the way he lives to better suit the ever-shifting world. Josiah reacts to change by diversifying his cattle herd. A worldview must shift for positive change to typically occur. Change must be managed or it can destroy everything, Bird asserts.

Bird shows us that Tayo is striving towards finding what is holding him back from returning to his culture. This thing also makes him feel guilty for not being white! Guilt becomes irrevocably linked to colonization. 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. Bird ends her article on the note that perhaps Indian culture will not always be seen as “other”, rather as a sibling-type of culture to the colonized, American mainstream. We must be willing to see the world differently.


Application:

Bird’s essay was unique for me in its approach to how Ceremony should be looked at. It was critical, of course, but was also always finding new ways to see the novel differently. Bird gives the reader a great feel for how Ceremony tries to decolonize by questioning the fabric of the colonization model. The process of decolonization threatens not just Native American views and teachings of language and culture, but also the fact that the whites have been using the Indians somewhat as scapegoats. This process may also one day make Native American morals mesh with Americanized, colonial moralities. Bird invites Native Americans to look at their culture in this new way as well in an attempt to regain what they have lost.

Examining the characters who do not focus on fit into this colonized society (Auntie and Emo are decent examples here) is a good way to examine the new culture. As for attempting to regain what they have lost, some characters take an individual approach (Bentonie is a good example here) and try to make their own way. I feel neither Silko nor Bird discusses this situation well. When Tayo is about to be labeled a “thief” (Bird 6), he begins to struggle out of this colonialization on his own, breaking out of the box the white man has built for the Indian. He begins to look at his culture in a new way, not as simply being “Indian”. He realizes that the white man is just like the Indian and that not much separates them. He can now focus on healing. As he frees the cattle, he frees himself from the white-imposed box and sees that all mean are equal in this way; no more or less. All people pretty much can be labeled as “thieves”.

Racism is the hurdle in the way of achieving decolonization and dispelling the feeling and stigma of being “other”. Racism is a product of colonization, not on the Native American’s side, but on the colonials’ side. Perhaps it is born of fear, because the Indians are so much more different than them or perhaps it is born because the status quo for the whites is much better now than it’s ever been and they don’t want to shake up the status quo, per se. This explains why when the Tayo, Rocky, and the others put a uniform on and fight in the war, they are no longer the subject of any racism; their hair is cut and they are not immediately recognized as being a Native American, they are simply a soldier first. Racism no longer plays a role into what people perceive about these men.


Works Cited:

Bird, Gloria. "Towards a Decolonization of the Mind and Text 1: Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony"" Wicazo Sa Review, Vol 9, No. 2 Autumn 1993. University of Minnesota Press. 04 Jan. 2009 .

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). New York: Penguin Books, 2006.