Academic literature on the topic 'Silko, Leslie, 1948-. Ceremony'

This article's aim is to analyze the space, place and gender relations in Native American culture in the novel Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, and the concepts discussed by Doreen Massey, Jody Berland, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose. The novel, whose focus is on the healing process of a Native American young man, a World War II veteran, shows how the space, place and gender relations in the Native American culture differ from the ones we see in the patriarchal family structure common to the western culture. In this way, I intend to discuss this difference between the spaces and places occupied by women and man in both cultures.

The powerful novel Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko combines several uncomfortable truths from the perspective of a young Native American who has returned home after World War II: the theft of Native American land, the manipulations that set poor whites against poor Indians (among others) and the effects of these lies on the hearts of white people, who tried and still try to fill up their hollowness with money, technology and patriotic war. However, as Silko emphasizes, the lies do not work. Not only have we white folk been fooling ourselves, but we also know that we have been fooling ourselves, and the consequences of our self-deceptions continue to haunt all of us. This essay is an attempt to say more about how that collective delusion functions—in particular, to understand the emptiness that patriotism never quite fills up, the hollowness that wealth and consumerism cannot glut. In order to do this, I will offer a (not “the”) Buddhist perspective, so we begin with some basic Buddhist teachings, which are quite different from the Abrahamic (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) traditions more familiar to most of us.

This article explores the socio-political background that led to widespread Native American urban relocation in the period following World War II – a historical episode which is featured in Leslie Marmon Silko’s acclaimed novel Ceremony (1977). Through an analysis of the recycling, reinterpreting practices carried out by one of Ceremony’s memorable supporting characters, Navajo healer Betonie, Silko’s political aim to interrogate the state of things and to re-value Native traditions in a context of ongoing relations of coloniality is made most clear. In Silko’s novel, Betonie acts as an organic intellectual who is able to identify and challenge the 1950s neocolonial structure that forced Native American communities to either embrace hegemonic practices and lifestyles or else be condemned to cultural reification and abject poverty. Through his waste-collecting and recycling activities, Betonie develops alternative solutions that go beyond a merely spiritual or epistemological dimension of life and materially intervene in the social text. The margins of 1950s urban sprawl functioned as repositories of indigenous cultural and intellectual capital that was being consciously, actively transformed by Native agents such as him. Thus, through Ceremony’s medicine man, Leslie Silko criticizes disempowering attitudes of victimhood and Native self-shame while vindicating indigenous historical territories and unconventional political strategies. She also anticipates the liminal practices of material and cultural recycling we see in countless Western cities today, in the aftermath of the most recent world economic crisis.

Abstract Recently scholars have called for an Indigenous turn in medieval studies that challenges the historical assumptions of the field by actively engaging in a decolonial and anticolonial praxis. This essay argues that this turn must confront the problem of reciprocity that arises from distinct Indigenous and medieval articulations of sovereignty, which reveal the potential of this tenuous intersection despite the possibility of irreconcilable antagonisms. Tracing sovereignty—specifically through a “politics of recognition” as proposed by the Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard—in Dante’s Monarchia (and Paradiso) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony provides an analytic example of this comparative framework, since both authors challenge readers to question the imposition of authority and the logics that legitimate and justify dominant forms of governance. Yet Dante and Silko also draw on distinct articulations of sovereignty that suggest the limitations of decolonial and anticolonial praxis within a field bound to a Western episteme that underwrites colonial and imperial authority.

This paper deconstructs the Europeans’ environmental colonialism in Native America and, in that, elucidates that the rhetorical tactics and fundamental motivations, which are employed to ‘other’ people, are essentially the same as those used to ‘other’ environment and nature with all of its ecological subjects. A qualitative content analysis, the study investigates this notion in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead in the light of the joint critique of biocolonization and critical discourse analysis. Linguistically, it applies Fairclough’s approach of critical discourse analysis focusing on three scenarios of discourse: an acceptance of difference, an accentuation of difference, and an attempt to resolve difference. Through this critique of power, hegemony and identity, the research highlights the Natives’ objectification and representation by the white colonizer and the subsequent resistance by the Natives. The analysis reveals how the process of environmental colonialism, specifically biopiracy and biocolonization, is naturalized by the colonizer through discourse structure. Additionally, it deconstructs this discourse structure to attempt to resolve the difference exploited by the colonizer to exercise their colonial practice over the natives and their environment. Hence, the study discursively adds to the existing solutions to combat the environmental colonialism.

Negotiation of identity has become an important issue because its never-ending process always relates to conflicts, differences and similarities. Chinese Americans and Native Americans are two distinct diasporic communities amongst other ethnic group in the U.S. As minorities, they experience prejudice, discrimination and exclusion from mainstream American culture and society. This research aims to reveal the negotiation of identity of Chinese Americans and Native Americans which is reflected on their literature. Literature is seen as the record of diasporic experience of both ethnic groups. This research is qualitative conducted under Post-Nationalist American Studies. Post-colonial, hegemony and representation theories are used to help the process of data analysis. The primary data is taken from The Hundred Secret Senses written by Amy Tan and Ceremony written by Leslie Marmon Silko. The secondary data are taken from books, journals, and internet sources. The finding of the research shows that Chinese Americans and Native Americans negotiate their identity by choosing or combining competing values. The construction of identity is done through the reenactment of ethnic root and the adaptation to mainstream American cultural values. Sense of belongingness, history and socio-cultural background become the determining factors of identity negotiation. In brief, they construct hybrid identity to survive and to counter American hegemony. Compared to Native Americans, Chinese Americans are more blending to mainstream American culture. However, both novels depict their hybrid identity. Keywords: identity negotiation, diasporic literature, diaspora communities, hegemony, hybrid identity

There there is so notable partly because it validates and documents the urban indian experience and complicates the back-to-the-land narratives of such classics as Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee): “Being Indian,” the narrator says, “has never been about returning to the land” (Orange 11). In place of this conventional narrative, There There embraces and authenticates the experience of Natives who have grown up in the city and are more at home there than in the countryside. Two key terms here need clarification already. First, we write “countryside” rather than “community” because Orange challenges the conventional opposition between urban Indians and those from “community,” as though community were the sole privilege of rural existence. In fact, Orange's novel locates community—all Native community—in the contemporary interpenetration of the urban and the technological. Second, for Orange the term urban doesn't just refer to those living in the city. Instead, the urban is a function of the contemporary world, in which access to the Internet effaces the place-based spatial logics that have long aligned authenticity with location in traditional—inevitably rural—settings: “Plenty of us are urban now. If not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet” (9). The urban is connectedness in the midst of displacement, of the placelessness of online existence. Those who live in cities are ipso facto urban; those who do not are virtually urban, regardless of locale.

The dominant white culture in the United States of America has always assumed the role of supremacy that victimizes other ethnicities and minorities and looked upon them as inferiors and unworthy of the privileges white people enjoy. Although the maltreatment of the Other-the non-white- differs from one ethnicity or minority to the other, it has always had sheer negative impacts on individuals as well as communities. This paper aims to show the victimization of African Americans as a community in America represented by the atrocity of Bigger and the victimization of Native Americans represented by trauma of Tayo. This paper will tackle the issue of victimization of the two communities-African American and native American-in general through the tough life journeys of the two protagonists of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and will try to show two different faces of maltreatment by the mainstream culture, but eventually same negative effects on both communities, African Americans and Native Americans. Thus, many Native Americans are subject to the mainstream culture instrumental policies that convince underprivileged ethnicities that they are integral part of the texture of the American society in time of national need. The irony is that such attitude is only meant to recruit non-whites to fight for the interest of the white supremacist apparatus. Silko eloquently displays patriotism and loyalty as the citizen who is eager and willing to fight and die for his people and country, and in that sense many Native Americans enlisted in the military so as to assert their masculinity. This, in fact, shows the negative effects of the pressure of white supremacist ideologies practiced against non-whites that they choose to act against their desires and choices in the hope that they will be accepted within the American social fabric. Finally, this paper explores some of the solutions available for the victimization and the atrocities of ethnic Americans, such as the communal support and the reconnection to one’s heritage and cultural roots to heal the damaged self-image and psyches of ethnic Americans.

The role of Native American women has been extensively debated. Much has been said about their relationship with men and their relevance within the tribe. One of the most important tasks they had was that of storytellers. Storytelling is one of the pillars of Native American culture since it helped to transmit their values and folklore and keep them alive and that is why women’s role as storytellers is fundamental for the survival of the tribe. Although this role has often been shared with men, it seems that the relationship of women with storytelling is more complex, valuable and relevant than that of men. This is shown in their characterization in traditional Native American myths or in the fact that old traditional Native American women and storytellers became the source of inspiration of many contemporary writers, such as Silko, Erdrich or Allen, who took them as models for their novels. Silko exemplifies with her novels Almanac of the Dead and Ceremony this fundamental role of Native Women and the influence they had on her life and writing.Keywords: Native American women, storytelling, storytellers, Leslie Marmon Silko.

La présente recherche a pour but de procéder à une étude comparative du processus régénératif au cœur de deux romans phares de la fiction autochtone contemporaine, soit Ceremony de Leslie Marmon Silko et Green Grass, Running Water de Thomas King. Trois volets principaux sont examinés : le rôle de la nature en tant que référent culturel dans le processus de régénération des personnages principaux de chaque roman, l’évolution de la quête identitaire dans un environnement post-contact, ainsi que les répercussions de la réactualisation de l’identité de chaque protagoniste sur la communauté à laquelle il appartient. Cette comparaison entre les procédés employés par Silko et King permettront, en un premier temps, d’identifier des éléments de continuité entre les deux auteurs. Ces similarités incluent la centralité de la nature dans la reconnexion des protagonistes avec leur culture et leur identité ainsi que l’emphase sur la nécessité d’une identité hybride dans un environnement post-contact. De plus, la comparaison entre ces deux auteurs issus de deux contextes socio-historiques distincts permet d’isoler certains éléments du contexte propre à chaque roman afin de déterminer le rôle de la réalité autochtone sur la fiction produite à chaque époque. De façon plus spécifique, il sera entre autres question de l’influence de la montée du mouvement environnementaliste euro-américain sur la valeur symbolique du retour à la nature, ainsi que de l’importance grandissante de la classe moyenne autochtone éduquée et de la façon dont ce nouveau phénomène est exprimé dans l’œuvre de King.
La présente recherche a pour but de procéder à une étude comparative du processus régénératif au cœur de deux romans phares de la fiction autochtone contemporaine, soit Ceremony de Leslie Marmon Silko et Green Grass, Running Water de Thomas King. Trois volets principaux sont examinés : le rôle de la nature en tant que référent culturel dans le processus de régénération des personnages principaux de chaque roman, l’évolution de la quête identitaire dans un environnement post-contact, ainsi que les répercussions de la réactualisation de l’identité de chaque protagoniste sur la communauté à laquelle il appartient. Cette comparaison entre les procédés employés par Silko et King permettront, en un premier temps, d’identifier des éléments de continuité entre les deux auteurs. Ces similarités incluent la centralité de la nature dans la reconnexion des protagonistes avec leur culture et leur identité ainsi que l’emphase sur la nécessité d’une identité hybride dans un environnement post-contact. De plus, la comparaison entre ces deux auteurs issus de deux contextes socio-historiques distincts permet d’isoler certains éléments du contexte propre à chaque roman afin de déterminer le rôle de la réalité autochtone sur la fiction produite à chaque époque. De façon plus spécifique, il sera entre autres question de l’influence de la montée du mouvement environnementaliste euro-américain sur la valeur symbolique du retour à la nature, ainsi que de l’importance grandissante de la classe moyenne autochtone éduquée et de la façon dont ce nouveau phénomène est exprimé dans l’œuvre de King.
This thesis compares the regenerative processes at the heart of two milestone novels of contemporary Native American literature, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. My comparative study will be divided into three main sections: the role of nature as a cultural referent in the main characters’ regenerative processes in each novel, the evolution of the identity quest in a post-contact environment, and finally, the repercussions of the protagonists’ re-actualization of identity on the rest of their community. Through the comparative study of the processes employed by Silko and King with respect to one’s relationship to nature, cultural identity and social relations, I will be able to identify several similarities shared by the two novels, which demonstrate that they belong to the same Native artistic continuum. These resemblances include the central role of nature in reconnecting the protagonists to their identity, as well as a predominant emphasis on the emergence of a hybridized identity in a post-contact environment. Moreover, the comparison of two novels emerging from two different eras of Native American Literature –that of the 1970s and of the 1990s- will allow me to isolate the influence of the cultural context to which each particular work belongs. In doing so, it becomes possible to determine the influence of some transformations in Native lifestyle on the fiction produced at a given time. More specifically, the modifications I chose to focus on include the rise of Euro-American environmentalism on the symbolic value of returning to nature for Natives as well as the increasing presence of middle-class, educated Natives and their representation, mostly present in King’s fiction.
This thesis compares the regenerative processes at the heart of two milestone novels of contemporary Native American literature, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. My comparative study will be divided into three main sections: the role of nature as a cultural referent in the main characters’ regenerative processes in each novel, the evolution of the identity quest in a post-contact environment, and finally, the repercussions of the protagonists’ re-actualization of identity on the rest of their community. Through the comparative study of the processes employed by Silko and King with respect to one’s relationship to nature, cultural identity and social relations, I will be able to identify several similarities shared by the two novels, which demonstrate that they belong to the same Native artistic continuum. These resemblances include the central role of nature in reconnecting the protagonists to their identity, as well as a predominant emphasis on the emergence of a hybridized identity in a post-contact environment. Moreover, the comparison of two novels emerging from two different eras of Native American Literature –that of the 1970s and of the 1990s- will allow me to isolate the influence of the cultural context to which each particular work belongs. In doing so, it becomes possible to determine the influence of some transformations in Native lifestyle on the fiction produced at a given time. More specifically, the modifications I chose to focus on include the rise of Euro-American environmentalism on the symbolic value of returning to nature for Natives as well as the increasing presence of middle-class, educated Natives and their representation, mostly present in King’s fiction.

In order to fully understand contemporary Native American literature like the works written by Leslie Marmon Silko, one must have a sufficient knowledge of the Native American worldviews expressed in their oral stories that have been handed down for unremembered generations. The study has to include what the oral tradition has meant to the indigenous people and their communities, how it has been kept and passed down, and what it can do to the tribal peoples for securing their identity and power to cope with contemporary issues. Indigenous people have different worldviews from other culture groups; theirs are different in the conception of time and space, the importance of land, of the spirit beings, and the relationships with all the beings in Nature and in the universe. This study examines how Silko weaves tradition of oral storytelling and worldviews in her writing to pass invaluable messages across the boundaries of culture. Silko has a skill and knowledge ingrained in her blood to write from her tradition, and her works are not only compatible with the worldviews of the Native Americans but also she ingeniously expresses her messages in her works, including Ceremony. Silko makes her efforts to convey it to a wider readership. This makes Ceremony one of the most significant novels written in the twentieth century.

Thesis (M.A.)--East Tennessee State University, 2003.
Title from electronic submission form. ETSU ETD database URN: etd-0713103-222427. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via Internet at the UMI web site.

This essay discusses the perceived case of post-traumatic stress disorder in Leslie Marmon Silko's character Tayo from the novel Ceremony, using personal accounts of actual PTSD-suffering war veterans as a point of reference. The goal is to fathom the influence that culture may have in the development and healing of PTSD, and to identify possible trans-cultural aspects. The main focus of the analysis is therefore on personal background, interpersonal relationships, post-war experiences, and experienced symptoms.

xi, 233 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation argues that a fundamental paradox underlies U.S. environmentalism: even as it functions as a critique of dominant social and economic practices, environmentalism simultaneously reinforces many social hierarchies, especially with regard to race, immigration, and disability, despite its claims to recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. This project addresses the related questions: In what ways does environmentalism--as a code of behavioral imperatives and as a set of rhetorical strategies--ironically play a role in the exploitation of land and communities? Along what lines--class, race, ability, gender, nationality, age, and even "sense of place"--do these environmental codes and discourses delineate good and bad environmental behavior? I contend that environmentalism emerged in part to help legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions and support racialized and patriarchal conceptions of national identity. Concern about "the environment" made anxieties about communities of color more palatable than overt racism. Furthermore, "environmentalism's hidden attachments" to whiteness and Manifest Destiny historically aligned the movement with other repressive ideologies, such as eugenics and strict anti-immigration. These "hidden attachments" exist today, yet few have analyzed their contemporary implications, a gap this project fills. In three chapters, I detail nineteenth-century environmentalism's influence on contemporary environmental thought. Each of these three illustrative chapters investigates a distinct category of environmentalism's "ecological others": Native Americans, people with disabilities, and undocumented immigrants. I argue that environmentalism defines these groups as "ecological others" because they are viewed as threats to nature and to the American national body politic. The first illustrative chapter analyzes Native American land claims in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead . The second illustrative chapter examines the importance of the fit body in environmental literature and U.S. adventure culture. In the third illustrative chapter, I integrate literary analysis with geographical theories and methods to investigate national security, wilderness protection, and undocumented immigration in the borderland. In a concluding fourth chapter, I analyze works of members of the excluded groups discussed in the first three chapters to show how they transform mainstream environmentalism to bridge social justice and ecological concerns. This dissertation contains previously published material.
Committee in charge: Shari Huhndorf, Chairperson, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; David Vazquez, Member, English; Juanita Sundberg, Member, Not from U of 0 Susan Hardwick, Outside Member, Geography

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-226). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

Cette étude comparative de la littérature amérindienne, aborigène et post-coloniale montre les stratégies subversives utilisées pour la survie de la voix amérindienne et aborigène. D'abord, sur un plan pantibal, nous étudions le réseau complexe des relations entre la terre, les contes et les peuples dans les oeuvres écrites par les écrivains amérindiens. Ensuite, sur un plan aborigène, nous étudions comment certains personnages servent à faire le lien entre le "réalisme" et les éléments mythiques dans Ceremony de Leslie Marmon Silko et Potiki de Patricia Grace, liant en même temps le présent au passé et à un présent mythique. Nous nous intéressons au trickster subversif chez Gerald Vizenor et Louise Erdrich pour montrer comment la chance et la bonne-fortune sont interprétées par deux écrivains anishinaabe. Enfin, sur un plan post-colonial, nous nous proposons d'élargir notre comparaison afin d'étudier les interrelations entre histoire, fiction et mythe concernant le personnage de Billy the Kid dans The Ancient Child de N. Scott Momaday et dans Billy the Kid de Michael Ondaatje
A comparative study of Native American, aboriginal and post-colonial literature demonstrating the subversive strategies employed by these authors for the survival of their voice and their community. On a pan-tribal level, the study examines the complex interrelationship between the land, the stories and the people which forms the base of Native American literature. On an aboriginal level, in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and Potiki by Patricia Grace, certain characters serve as the link between realism and myth, tying the present both to the past and to a mythical present. In works by two Anishinaabe authors, Gerald Vizenor and Louise Erdrich, the trickster plays an integral part in the interpretation of chance and luck by each author. Finally, on a post-colonial level, the interrelation between history, fiction and myth are explored through two interpretations of Billy the Kid in The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday and Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Focusing on the novels Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, and The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, Chapter 2 uses trauma theory to explore how histories of imperial domination refuse to be confined to the past. These two novels invite readers to identify to varying degrees with their traumatized protagonists, holding out the possibility of a resistant and revisionary “history from below.” Ultimately, however, a careful analysis of these two works reveals how literary trauma theorists, in their eagerness to give voice to the voiceless, are too readily taken in by the imaginative construct of the third-person narrator. While individual characters in these novels may suffer the cognitive distortions of trauma, the fragmentary, non-linear account that their readers receive is, in both cases, mediated by the presence of a narrator whose choices are conscious, volitional, and strategic.