“So That the Nations May Become Genuine Indian”: Nativism and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

The “Lie” of the Land: Native Sovereignty, Indian Literary Nationalism, and Early Indigenism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s <i>Ceremony</i>

“…As Dennis Cutchins points out, the emphasis on Ceremony's "mythic, ahistorical qualities" generated by both recent and past critical perspectives on place has played a part in subsuming the material and historical impact of colonialism and the land-related issues inherent in the text. 8 It is beyond the scope of this article to conduct anything but a glancing engagement with Ceremony's critical history, which is complexly bound up in the emergence of Native American literary studies in the academy in the 1970s and early 1980s. Certain early critical approaches that incorporated intracultural and ethnographic readings concentrated on the geosacred relationship of landscape to the various Keres myths and oral narratives and the more formal structures of ceremonial processes (i.e., the hoop ceremony of the Diné [Navajo]) and emphasized the healing and culturally restorative properties of such traditional spiritual-religious activities.…”