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Friday
A recent NPR article by Lesley McClurg about how Medicaid will start covering traditional Native American healing practices in four western states coincides nicely with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, which I’m currently teaching in my “Post-colonial Anglophone Literature” class. The news item backs up Silko’s major contention that Western medicine by itself is not enough to provide Indians with the therapy they need. Indeed, Whites may need these medical breakthroughs as much as Indians do.
The article begins with the story of a young Navajo man—Emery Tahy—who was entangled in depression, alcoholism, and drug-related seizures. As he was contemplating suicide, his family intervened and a court sent him to a psychiatric ward. While there, he learned of a Native-led recovery program in San Francisco, which he attended upon release. The new therapy was life-changing:
A traditional practitioner did prayers for me. They shared some songs with me. They put me in the sweat lodge and I could identify with those ceremonies. And from that day moving forward, I was able to reconnect to my spiritual and cultural upbringing.
McClurg writes that the program, which is currently in a two-year pilot phase, is desperately needed as Native American communities suffer from some of the highest rates of addiction and overdose deaths in the country. Health experts observe that Western medicine cannot handle all the problems.
I have included Ceremony in my course because I want the students to see the process of literary hybridization at work. As in agriculture, hybridization occurs when two different entities join to form a third. Silko has merged Laguna Pueblo folk tales, myths, and accounts of tribal ceremonial practices—all of which have been part of an oral culture—with the novel form and with lyric poetry. The result is something altogether new.
Hybridizing provides Ceremony not only with its form but also with its content, which has mixing as a major theme. Instances include the mixed bloodline of the protagonist (Tayo is half Indian, half White); crossbreeding in cattle (Tayo’s uncle crossbreeds Mexican cattle, which can live in desert conditions, with American cattle, which produce more meat); and intersections between Indian and White culture. This hybridization preserves Indian culture from the assault of White culture, which threatens erasure through assimilation.
Returning to the question of mental health, Silko’s novel indicates that a hybrid approach to psychological issues may be more effective than either Western or Indian medicine alone. In the novel we see Tayo undergo treatment from three medical professionals: a doctor at a military hospital, the local Laguna medicine man, and a Navajo medicine man who lives on the border between the Indian reservation and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. Only the third treatment provides a lasting cure.
To dramatize what Tayo is up against, I listed for the class everything that is messing with his head. These include:
–trauma from having been abandoned by his mother, who leaves him with her siblings on the reservation;
–shaming from his aunt for what her sister has done;
–bullying from his Indian classmates for being mixed blood
–PTSD from having been captured by the Japanese in World War II and seeing them kill his cousin and best friend;
–survivor guilt from having returned when his cousin didn’t (both he and his Aunt believe that he is the one who should have died);
–guilt over having (as he sees it) abandoned his uncle, the man who raised him, to go off to war; Josiah is dead by the time Tayo returns home;
–guilt for having cursed the rain while in the Philippine jungles, thereby (so he believes) causing the region’s six-year drought;
–low self-esteem caused by White racism and White superiority, which has led him to look down upon himself and his people;
–trauma caused by the destruction that White culture is visiting upon the earth, which includes bother environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear war,.
The question that Silko puts to herself, I told the students, is whether a healing ceremony can address all of this.
The White doctor can’t do much with a practically comatose Tayo, but he does get him talking and he takes him off the drugs that have plunged him into a white fog.
The second doctor is the local medicine man, Ku’oosh, who gets him on his feet again using age-old methods. But Ku’oosh admits that there are parts of Tayo and the other Indian veterans that he can’t reach. The old scalp ceremonies no longer work given the new forms that warfare has taken. Launching mortar shells and dropping bombs has made death anonymous in ways that Ku’oosh can’t understand.
The final medicine man, Betonie, lives between the two worlds and so understands both. After using a version of Freud’s talking cure, which he combines with traditional ceremonies such as sand painting, chanting, dancing, and dream vision, he sends Tayo on a grail quest. Tayo is to follow the stars, search for a mountain and a woman, and retrieve Josiah’s cattle.
In the process, like the man featured in the NPR article, Tayo reconnects with his spiritual and cultural upbringing. He is also able to bring that reconnection back to the elders, who themselves are renewed as they see the next generation carrying on the tribe’s identity.
To be sure, the process is not exactly like it was in the old days, which some see as a problem:
“There are some things I have to tell you,” Betonie began softly. “The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed.”
Betonie explains, however, that a changing world requires changed ceremonies:
At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.
The medicine man concludes that “things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.”
Silko is like Betonie in that she lived on the edge of a reservation when she was young and is of White American, Native American, and Mexican descent. According to her Wikipedia entry, her one eighth Laguna blood prevented her from participating in various Laguna rituals. Yet she has used this mixed identity to her advantage, creating a hybridized Ceremony that speaks to White readers as well as Indian readers. Western culture, which has become alienated from the land and obsessed with dead things, stands to gain much from Indian healing ceremonies.
And as for Emery Tahy, he appears to be doing well. The NPR article reports that
he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since starting therapy at Friendship House. He now holds a full-time job as an evaluator for the native American Health Center in San Francisco. Soon he will complete a master’s degree in American Indian studies. And, a few months ago, he completed the San Francisco marathon.
