1. Could one say Ceremony is a reinterpretation of the old legends? Well, no, it’s not a
reinterpretation. I think their spirit is unbroken because of the oral tradition. If you think, 500 years,
that is how long Europeans are in the Americas, is not a very long time. Because for 18,000 years
there is eveidence, and perhaps longer, of the Pueblo people being in that land. . . The interpretation
of the old stories remains the same because of the oral tradition. It goes backthrough time so that the
immediacy is now. It is very important how time is seen. The Pueblo people and the indigenous
people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an
ociean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, where as
something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away. Think of time as an ocean
always moving. . . . the passage of [500 years] . . . does not mean the same thing to us as it might
mean in a culture where the people stretch the string out and say Oh! This was a long time ago. That
is not the way my people experience time. (Leslie Marmon Silko, interview)
2. We are the land, and the land is mother to us all. There is not a symbol in [Ceremony] that is not in
some way connected with womanness, that does not in some way relate back to T’she and through
her to the universal feminine principle of creation: Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought Woman, Grandmother
Spider, Old Spider Woman. All tales are born in the mind of Spider Woman, and all creation exists
as a result of her naming.
We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea that permeates
American Indian life; the land (Mother) and the people (mothers) are the same. As Luther Standing
Bear has said of the Lakota people, “we are of the soil and the soil is of us.” The earth is the source
and the being of the people, and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place,
separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies; the witchery makes us
believe that false idea. (Paula Gunn Allen, “The Feminine Landscape of Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony”)
3. Tayo is a hero, like the legendary Sun Man who, with Spider Woman’s help, retrieved the storm
clouds from the Gambler. He has succeeded, with T’seh’s help, in retrieving the mixed-breed cattle
annd once again brought life-restoring moisture to his homeland. But Tayo becomes a hero in yet
another sense not readily apparent from the novel alone. This sense of heroism is implicit in the
book, though, and comes to the surface once one knows about the importance Puebolo cultures place
on androgyny. Pueblo village chiefs, nearly always men, are sometimes addressed as “Our Father
and Our Mother.” This form of address expresses respect for their presumed wisdom, a kind of
wisdom that must come from an integration of opposites, which is not possible if one is only male or
only female. The chief must be able to perform male-associated tasks such as discerning when to fight
or go to war; but the chief is expected to embody values that are traditionally considered female as
well: he must protect and look after the village people as a nurturer as well as a warrior. (Jude Todd,
“Knotted Bellies and Fragile Webs”)
4. All summer the people watch the west horizon, scanning the sky from south to north for rain clouds.
Corn must have moisture at the time the tassels form. Otherwise, pollination will be incomplete, and
the ears will be stunted and shriveled. An inadequate harvest may bring some disaster. Stories told at
Hopi, Zuni and at Acoma and Laguna describe drought and starvation as recently as 1900. . . [Yet]
the ancient Pueblo people not only survived in this environment, but in many years they thrived. In
A.D. 1100 the people at Chaco Canyon had built cities with apartment buildings of stone five stories
high. Their sophistication as sky-watchers was surpassed only by Mayan and Inca astronomers. Yet
this vast complex of knowledge and belief, amassed for thousands of years, was never recorded in
writing.
Instead, the ancient Pueblo people depended upon collective memory through successive generations
to maintain and transmit an entire culture, a world view complete with proven strategies for survival.
The oral narrative, or “story,” became the medium in which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and
belief was maintained. Whatevedr the event or the subject, the ancient people perceived the world
and themselves within that world as part of an ancient and continuous story composed of innumerable
bundles of other stories.
The ancient Pueblo vision of the world was inclusive. The impulse was to leave nothing out. Pueblo
oral tradition necessarily embraced all levels of human experience. Otherwise, the collective
knowledge and beliefs comprising ancient Pueblo culture would have been incomplete. Thus stories
about the Creation and Emergence of human beings and animals into this World continue to be told
each year for four days and four nights during the winter solstice. The “humma-hah” stories related
events from the time long ago when human beings were still able to communicate with animals and
other living things. But beyond these two preceding categories, the Pueblo oral tradition knew no
boundaries. Accounts of the appearance of the first Europeans in Pueblo country or of the treagic
encounters between Pueblo people and Apache raiders were no more and no less important than
stories about the biggest mule deer ever taken or adulterous couples surprised in cornfields and
chicken coops. Whatever happened, the ancient people instinctively sorted events and details into a
loose narrative structure. Everything became a story. (Silko, “Landscape, History and the Pueblo
Imagination”)
5. Pueblo potters, the creators of the petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing
themselves from the earth (Corn Mother) and sky (Sun Father or Sun Sister). So long as the human
consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs and the plants, clouds and sky, the term
landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. “A portion of territory the eye can
comprehend in a single view” does not correctly describe the relationship between the human being
and his or her surroundings. This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the
territory he or she surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.
jThere is no high mesa edge or mountain peak where one can stand and not immediately be part of all
that surrounds. Human identity is linked with all the elements of Creation through the clan: you
might belong to the Sun Clan or the Lizard Clan or the Corn Clan or the Clay Clan. Standing deep
within the natural world, the ancient Pueblo understood the thing as it was – the squash blossom,
grasshopper or rabbit itself could never be created by the human hand. Ancient Pueblos took the
modest view that the thing itself (the landscape) could not be improved upon. The ancients did not
presume to tamper with what had already been created. Thus realism, as we now recognize it in
painting and sculpture, did not catch the imaginations of Pueblo people until recently.
The squash blossom is one thing: itself. So the ancient Pueblo potter abstracted what she saw to the
be the key elements of the squash blossom – the four symmetrical petals, with four symmetrical
stamens in the center. These key elements, while suggesting the squash flower, also link it with the
four cardinal directions. By representing only its intrinsic form, the squash flower is released from a
limited meaning or restricted identity. Even in the most sophisticated abstract form, a squash flower
or a could or a lightning bolt became intricately connected with a complex system of relationships the
Pueblo people maintained with each other, and with the populous natural world they lived within. . . .
Pictographs and petrogylphs of constellations or elk or antelope draw their magic in part from the
process wherein the focus of all prayer and concentration is upon the thing itself, which, in its turn,
guides the hunter’s hand. Connection with the spirit dimensions requires a figure or form which is
all-inclusive. A “lifelike” rendering of an elk is too restrictive. Only the elk is itself. A realistic
rendering of ann elk would be only one particular elk anyway. The purpose of the hunt rituals and
magic is to make contact with all the spirits of the elk. (Silko, “Landscape, History and the Pueblo
Imagination”)