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Contrasting notions of victimhood and perpetration in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: the psychological legacy of

Euro-American colonialism

Both Silko and Spiegelman’s texts present victims of genocide remembering their people’s

destruction and viewing the perpetrators of that destruction. There are several contextual

differences to first acknowledge before viewing contrasting victim/perpetrator paradigms in

Ceremony and Maus to demonstrate the psychological legacy of modern-day Euro-American

colonialism.

The first difference is the narratives’ historical timeframes compared with when their

respective genocides occurred. Spiegelman’s frame narrative and his father’s recount of his

Holocaust experience takes place in 1978 and 1979 and only 34 years after the event itself.

Silko’s characters remember the Native American Holocaust that took place, militaristically

at least, centuries before they were born. Notions of victimhood and perpetration in Maus

(1991) originate from first-hand experience and surviving a militaristic genocide. Ceremony’s

(1977) characters however recall a historical genocide and its victim/perpetrator paradigm

through a lense that, despite tribal attempts, has for centuries been conditioned by the

perpetrators.

Secondly, Vladek remembers and presents his Holocaust experience from a historical

context where it has ended. Spiegelman produces his text and victim/perpetrator paradigm

from an identical context. Silko’s Native characters are however still colonised by the federal

government and their Euro-American worldview. The genocide continues not militaristically

but culturally. She produces her text and victim/perpetrator paradigm from a similar, and in

comparison to Spiegelman, less secure colonial, and crucially not post-colonial, context.

The final fundamental contextual difference is in the historical metanarratives

surrounding the genocides. This has two distinct aspects. Firstly, the global metanarrative of

the Jewish Holocaust recognises it as one of the worst, if not the worst, war crimes ever

committed and an example genocide at its most inhumane. The Native American Holocaust

however suffers from a ‘lack of validation from the world community and its failure to offer

an escape route’ (Fogelson 66) as it continues. The dynamics of experience are similar in

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both Holocausts (Duran 62. Cook-Lynn 190/191) ‘with the crucial exception that the world

has not acknowledged the Holocaust of native people within’ the North-Western

hemisphere (Fogelson 30). Secondly, the acceptance of responsibility for the genocide by

the perpetrators differs and is vital. The German state and, aside from a tiny minority, the

German people have widely and publically accepted German guilt for the Holocaust (Barkan

15). Since Adenauer, reparation has been viewed ‘as a moral, legal and political

commitment’ despite the fact that ‘the enormity of the ethical and moral crimes made a

comprehensive restitution impossible’ (Barkan 27). Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (the

struggle to come to terms with the Nazi past) and Wiedergutmachung (literally ‘the making

of good again’ but meaning reparations for the Holocaust) are creative compound nouns

revealing that the active process of accepting responsibility permeates even the people’s

language. The American government and people have neither admitted nor recognised the

‘unexamined crimes at the core of a great nation developed since 1776 on the provocative

principles of capitalist democracy’ (Cook-Lynn 187) as criminal (Cook-Lynn 52, 93, 94, 194.

Silko 76). This difference is clearest in the countries’ capitals. Washington’s main monument

commemorates the federal government’s first president, that government’s establishment

and by extension the genocide that it required. Berlin’s equivalent is ‘The Monument to the

murdered Jews of Europe’. By erecting the visibly striking monument in its centre, the

German state publically accepts its role as perpetrator and literally sets its guilt in stone.

This affords Spiegelman a perpetrator/victim paradigm that is, ideologically speaking,

officially unavailable to Silko.

A brief history of Native American injustices should substantiate the claim that

Native Americans are victims of various forms of genocide. Genocidal violence by European

settlers is well documented from first contact to the closing of the frontier and Wounded

Knee Massacre in 1890. The concept of reservations gained popularity after 1790 (Janke

157) and led to the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and forceful relocations westwards in The

Trail of Tears. What followed can only be described as governmental administrative policy

implemented to systematically eradicate Native American culture and consequently the

Native American. The General Allotment Act of 1887 assimilated Indians by means of

individualising them and destroying their collective tribal identity (Janke 158. Porter 53). 86

million acres of Indian land was lost over the next forty seven years (Janke 159) as a tribal

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cosmology considering land to be used by all and owned by nobody (Fogelson 48) was

replaced. Reservations where Indians ‘could be confined, controlled, civilized, and

Christianized’ (Fogelson 50) were never adequate for economic and cultural survival (Porter

52). Three quarters of tribally owned land is hot desert (Janke 159, 160) and classified as

‘arid or semi-arid’ (Janke 161). Indian Boarding schools formed ‘part of a pattern of erosion

of Indian family life’ (Porter 50). The forced Euro-American assimilation of children aimed to

eradicate Native American culture internally as future generations would be unwilling, if not

unable, to preserve it. The Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 marginally empowered Native

Americans but ‘between 1945 and 1950, federal policy was in a period of transition from the

old policy of Indian self-determination to the new policy of termination’ (Ronald 165). House

Concurrent Resolution 108 saw criminal and civil law override tribal law (Ronald 165). The

post-war Native American population movements from reservations to urban areas (Ronald

165) proved traumatically disastrous (Janke 167) and ‘between 1952 and 1962, sixty-one

tribes, groups, bands, and communities were stripped of federal services and protection’

(Porter 57). The government denying responsibility for Native American issues continued

under Reagenomics. Spending on both Native health care services and funding for Indian

higher education were halved and the Bureau of Indian Affairs budget suffered an $80

million dollar cut (Janke 156). This policy ‘pushed tribes towards relationships with multi-

national corporations seeking to extract resources from reservation lands’ (Porter 61).

American policy towards Native Americans ‘has moved from the absence of programs for

changing Indian culture to a program of replacement’ (Janke 170) as their cosmology is seen

as incompatible and largely valueless within a Euro-American free market economic

structure.

I therefore view Ceremony as a colonial text with its Native Americans continuing to

exist under and in opposition to a colonial power and its ‘conditions of politically sustained

subalternity’ (Krupat 73). Ceremony focuses on the Laguna Pueblo and despite the colossal

variations between tribes, their individual histories, cultures and interactions with

Europeans, this essay’s focus is relevant to most modern Native Americans regardless of

geographical location and tribal background.

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Firstly, Silko’s characters present notions of victimhood and perpetration that

contrast Spiegelman’s. They appropriate perpetration, responsibility and guilt for their

genocide to themselves as Natives and to their Native cosmology and indicate the

psychological impact of their successful colonisation in accordance with Duran and Duran.

Maus features less prominently because it is a text that despite framing its narrative in the

United States largely concerns a historical event featuring Europeans and taking place in

Europe. It initiates to present a clear yet problematic victim/perpetrator paradigm and

demonstrate the contrasting psychological clarity that comes with a post-genocidal

historical metanarrative of absolute victimhood and perpetration. What further complicates

Native American notions of victimhood and perpetration then is that European settlers

were, unlike the Third Reich, incredibly and unwaveringly successful in their imperialistic

takeover. They are thus unrecognised as colonisers and criminals.

Secondly, the invading force remains and reminders of total colonial subjugation are

constant through visual reminders of how Europeans use the novel’s natural environment.

This conflicting use of space furthers psychological complications as Native American

cosmology is constantly undermined and proven to be incompatible with the Euro-American

culture that dominates it.

Third and finally, Silko attempts to reclaim tribal identity within a colonial and post-

tribal context through her text’s overarching form, chronology, and structure. Ceremony’s

hybridity of Native American and European literary traditions replicates the colonial

experience for the benefit and understanding of readers outside of it. They must culturally

assimilate themselves to understand the text and complete Silko’s ceremony. Rather than

acknowledge a victim/perpetrator paradigm based on Native/European binary opposition,

Silko, her text and her characters rely on and adopt aspects of European culture. The reason

for this is that under the post-tribal context of 20th century Euro-American colonialism and

with the available historical metanarrative, there is no other choice.

Art Spiegelman presents his father’s memory of his Holocaust experience as well as

his own memory of textual construction in Maus through strikingly visual and iconic,

colourless imagery. The focus here is how Spiegelman the author and not the character

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portrays Germans and Jews to reflect notions of victimhood and perpetration from a Jewish

perspective.

All characters in Maus are visually anthropomorphised. Germans are cats and Jews

are mice. Spiegelman’s victim/perpetrator paradigm is straightforward. He invokes an iconic

and natural predator and prey relationship that is well known even amongst children. It

characterises Germans as active, predators and perpetrators and Jews as passive, prey and

victims. It is unambiguously emphatic and, whether disregarding or using historical context,

creates predisposed sympathy and opposition within the reader. It creates an explicit and

absolute victim/perpetrator paradigm between Jews and Germans that is easily available to

Spiegelman because of the Holocaust’s historical metanarrative. This contrasts Silko’s in its

simplicity and Manichean and binary nature.

Allocating victim status to Jews who died in or survived the Holocaust is undebatable

and it is with Maus’s portrayal of Germans that problems arise. Spiegelman presents victim

and perpetrator as fundamentally dissimilar and, more importantly, two homogenous

groups. This is so important when focusing on perpetrator status, and therefore

responsibility and guilt, because the German people are without exception and regardless of

their role in the Holocaust’s orchestration all cats. In its homogenous totality, the symbolism

attaches an equal degree of predatoriness, perpetrator status and responsibility and guilt

for the Holocaust regardless of situational circumstance.

As Vladek stumbles upon a garage (Spiegelman 269) he meets a non-uniformed

civilian, perhaps the owner, who is portrayed as a cat. Shortly after he encounters a non-

uniformed woman, also represented by a cat (Spiegelman 273). Female civilians then are

given the exact same perpetrator status as the Auschwitz guards, the Wehrmacht and the

SS. Whether these civilians are direct or indirect perpetrators of genocide through either

collaboration or compliancy with a genocidal regime is irrelevant here. What is vital is that

no differentiation in the nature or extent of their perpetration and that of Germans directly

involved in the extermination process is made. Homogenously allocating guilt and

responsibility to an entire nation regardless of individual participation and circumstance

seems at best careless and at worst deceptive. Spiegelman’s victim/perpetrator paradigm

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ignores masses of discourse surrounding civilians and the allocation of responsibility, the

degree to which individual guilt differed amongst Germans, forced participation and the

relationship between responsibility and autonomy under the Nazi state. It is an absolutely

unhelpful and inaccurate way in which view the relationship between every German and

every Jew during the Holocaust. With his masks (138-157), Spiegelman has a device that

would allow him to implicate individuality and role performing within homogenous groups.

It therefore appears either deliberate or careless to characterise all Germans as absolute

perpetrators without differentiation and simply because they are German. The German

housewife should not be viewed as equally responsible for the Holocaust as the SS soldier or

Kommandant.

Spiegelman’s victim/perpetrator paradigm then reveals in its flawed simplicity how

available an absolute historical metanarrative is to victims of this particular genocide. It can

be argued that Spiegelman simply portrays Germans and Jews according to his father’s

stereotypes. He nonetheless has a responsibility to clarify this or present history and the

individuals acting within it accurately. He uses the historical metanarrative available to

create a paradigm where Germans hold perpetrator status not based on their actions and

circumstance but their German nationality. Maus perpetuates the inaccurate and damaging

stereotype that Germans and Germanism and Nazis and Nazism are synonymous. As a

graphic novel this is incredibly problematic. The form is highly accessible and more likely

than others to be read by children and viewed as an objective representation of the

Holocaust’s perpetrators.

Maus’s, Vladek’s and Spiegelman’s notions of victimhood and perpetration are

directly contrasted in Ceremony. Silko’s characters homogenously impose genocidal

responsibility, guilt and perpetrator status on themselves rather than the perpetrators. The

text operates under a context where the perpetrator of its respective genocide is victorious

rather than defeated, internationally supported rather than detested and continues to

impose its imperialism. What results is a completely different type of victim/perpetrator

paradigm that is more accurate than Spiegelman’s in its psychologically complexity.

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In criticising and providing alternatives to therapy based on Western European

psychological healing practices, Duran and Duran in Native American Postcolonial

Psychology (1995) highlight psychological results of the colonisation process.

Ceremony’s characters’ reflections on Native Americans and Native culture and Europeans

and Euro-American culture emanate internalized oppression. Unlike Spiegelman’s

dissimilarity between two homogenous groups, they express a desire to emulate the

perpetrators and their culture. Duran and Duran state that, following a continuous

genocidal assault and its success, ‘with the complete loss of power comes despair, and the

psyche reacts by internalizing what appears to be genuine power – the power of the

oppressor’ (Duran 29). Self-worth also sinks ‘to a level of despair tantamount to self-hatred’.

(Duran 29). Native Americans then adopt facets of Euro-American culture and aggressively

reject tribal culture and cosmology. This blurs the distinctions between perpetrator and

victim from victim’s perspective.

This colonial despair sees Rocky emulate the Euro-American to harness his power in

displays of self-hatred. Academically successful and athletically talented, he is told that only

the Natives on the reservation will limit his success (Silko 47). Auntie sees his and her own

success bound to him being ‘what white people wanted in an Indian’ (Silko 47). The

consequences of forced acculturation and the constant ‘pressure to assimilate to the

lifeworld of the perpetrators of the Holocaust’ (Duran 32) resonate through his

embarrassment at Indian hunting rituals (Silko 47) and advocation of scientific objectivism at

the expense of tribal custom (Silko 48). His scientifically logical concern for biological

contamination of meat overpowers the century long traditions of the tribal preparation

process. Adopting a scientifically objective and post-Enlightenment European world view

over tribal cosmology extends to cattle rearing. He scorns at Tayo and Robert’s amusement

at potentially contributing to the official body of knowledge surrounding cattle rearing from

an Indian perspective and praises science as omniscient (Silko 69). For Rocky, ignorance is

‘the trouble with the way people around here (the reservation) have always done things –

they never knew what they were doing’ (Silko 69/70). Rocky’s self-hatred manifests itself in

the aggressive rejection of Native cosmology and adoption of a Euro-American worldview as

he emulates the perpetrators of forced acculturation and genocide.

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Emo also rejects Native cosmology when considering the reservation’s drought and

mocking the Native American creatrix as an ‘old dried-up thing!’ ( Silko 23). ‘Thing’ here is

vital. Emo objectifies the natural world. He therefore adopts the Euro-American view of the

natural world as inanimate rather than an animate organism intertwined with the existence

of man (Duran 15, 17, 33). He effectively kills the Creatrix, demeans Native cosmology and

adopts the dominant Euro-American culture in an act of self-hatred.

Self-hatred is externalised by Emo and Leroy as they torture Harley. Duran states

that Native on Native violence often ‘serves a dual purpose’ (29). It achieves momentary

catharsis for an attacker whilst they simultaneously destroy a part of themselves that

reminds them of their helplessness and lack of hope within the colonial context (29). ‘In

essence, the individual attacks his or her own projection in a person close by’ (29) without

realising that ‘he/she would really like to vent this rage on the oppressor.’ (29). Emo

attempts to goad his original target by calling Tayo a ‘white son of a bitch’ (Silko 234). He

does so whilst torturing Harley and reminding him of his Nativism through forced alcohol

consumption (Silko 234). He utilises the drunken Indian stereotype whilst reflecting how

problems plaguing the Native community ‘have become part of the Native American

heritage’ (Duran 35) and also reveals the externalised self-hatred behind the aggression. He

attacks Harley whilst reminding him of his Nativism in order to attack Tayo for his Euro-

American hybridity.

Forced cultural assimilation here has created perspectives associating success with

the Euro-American and his world view and irrelevance and failure with Nativism. This self-

hatred blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator from the characters’ perspectives as

they internalise the oppression of the coloniser because of his omnipotence. Maus’s notions

of victimhood and perpetration are contrastingly clear concepts that are attributed to

groups homogenously in accordance with a concretely Manichean historical metanarrative.

Certain Natives in Ceremony are unable to view themselves, other Natives and Nativism in

terms of absolute victimhood and Euro-Americans as responsible for their people’s

genocide. This is because the genocide was and is seen as inevitable and unstoppable and is

therefore unacknowledged. Spiegelman’s paradigm is simple because the way in which his

genocidal victims and perpetrators are viewed and view each other is fairly uncontested.

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Such a Manichean paradigm is unavailable both to Silko and her characters who experience

a colonial and imperialistic process that remains unacknowledged as one.

This lack of recognition leads to Native American inability to construct a

victim/perpetrator paradigm and is juxtaposed against constant visual reminders of

colonialism that manifest themselves in Euro-American use of the natural world and

reservation land. Such use is a continuous visual reminder that America’s dominant culture

acts ideologically and spiritually in opposition to Native cosmology and, in its unwavering

presence, that this tension cannot be challenged.

The world ‘existing for the purpose of human domination and exploitation – the core

of most Western ideology – is a notion that is absent in most Native American thinking’

(Duran 15) and results in the Soul Wound (Duran 24) or the spiritual damage caused to

Native Americans through the colonisation process. ‘Judeo-Christian belief systems include

notions of the Creator putting humans in charge of all creations’ (Duran 17). This creates ‘a

narcissistic worldview that decreates and destroys much of what is known as culture’ within

Native cosmology (Duran 17).

Josiah telling a young Tayo ‘this is where we come from, see. This sand, this stone,

these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers’ (Silko 42) reflects Native comsology’s

interconnectedness between man and nature and reflects how reservation land is the ‘site

of origination in narratives of ethnogenesis’ (Fogelson 48). Character descriptions based on

natural imagery function similarly to connect man and nature. Tayo’s ‘belly was smooth and

soft, following the contours of the hills and holding the silence of the snow’ (Silko 191) and

Betonie’s ‘cheekbones were like the wings of a hawk soaring away from his broad nose

(Silko 109).

As Tayo penetrates Night Swan, he feels how ‘the warmth closed around him like river sand,

softly giving way under foot, then closing firmly around the ankle in cloudy warm water’

(Silko 168). This sensually natural simile indicates Native American psychology towards the

natural world. Tayo’s sexual encounter with the ambiguous Night Swan who resembles the

Earth Mother connects the creative processes of humans and nature. Intercourse is as

fundamentally necessary for the creation of human life as water, along with sunlight, is for

new life in nature. The two processes are interconnected throughout Ceremony as the

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Laguna Pueblo will ultimately become extinct and unable to retain their culture if the

drought continues. This spiritual rather than sexual encounter then reminds the reader of

tribal holism by relating human and natural life and death.

Silko provides Tayo with a narrative perspective that is incredibly connected to the

functioning of natural life forces. Tayo observes how a spider ‘drank from the edge of the

pool, careful to keep the delicate eggs sacs on her abdomen out of the water’ (Silko 87) and

‘shiny black water beetles pushed across the bottom of the pool, leaving trails of tiny air

bubbles twisting to the surface’ (Silko 206). Tayo’s perspective is hyper-observant of natural

life and its functions. He not only recognises the presence of miniscule life but also its

microscopic processes at an imperceptible level. He must therefore sense rather than

observe what is happening underwater on the pool’s bottom and the specific cautions of

the spider. He shares a consciousness with the natural world.

The difference between the Euro-American and Native view on man’s relationship

and interconnectedness with nature is exemplified with the mountain lion. Tayo respects

the mountain lion and performs a ritualistic offering as he laces its footprints with yellow

pollen (Silko 182). The white hunters hunt the lion (Silko 188), probably for its fur or status

as a trophy because they comment on its size. It is non-coincidently the footprints that the

hunters notice and that lead to their decision to hunt. Silko then presents an obvious

cultural contrast as Tayo and the white hunters react absolutely antithetically to the same

stimulus. Tayo offers something symbolically to the mountain lion and pragmatically to the

natural world through the eventual distribution of pollen. He reaffirms the connections and

symbiosis between himself, the animal and the pollen and its germination process. The

hunters however simply take and alter the natural world with no regard for contribution or

sustainability.

Through this ideological difference, the Euro-American physical imposition on the

land equates to a psychological imposition on Native Americans (Duran 25) and constant

visual reminder of their colonised status. Tayo admits how Native Americans had seen ‘the

cities, the tall buildings, the house and the lights, the power of their weapons and machines.

They were never the same after that: they had seen what the white people had made from

the stolen land’ (Silko 156) and now ‘every day they had to look at the land, from horizon to

horizon, and every day the loss was with them; it was the dead unburied, and the mourning

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of the lost going on forever’ (Silko 157). Gallup’s railroad functions similarly as its sight

forces Betonie to recall that ‘when the railroaders came and the white people began to

build their town, the Navajos had to move’ (Silko 108). Land ownership is a direct reminder

of colonisation. Floyd Lee’s fence, erected to ‘lock the mountain in steel wire, to make the

land his’ (Silko 174) is as ideologically restrictive and imposing as it is physically. Tayo cuts

‘into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone,

white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able

to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other’ (Silko 177). The

physical barrier is a reminder of the Euro-American colonialism dominating the landscape

and Native psychology. Tayo recognises colonial internalisation and the culturally dominant

view or ‘lie’ of how to interact with the nature and rejects them both in cutting the wire. An

artificial spacial boundary then permanently reminds how Euro-American culture dominates

and undermines Native cosmology. The legitimacy of this dominance and the genocide it

required and still requires is the ‘lie’ that Tayo challenges.

The Jack-pile site best represents the tension Euro-American colonial presence

creates with Native American cosmology. ‘Tayo traces the connections between the siting of

Trinity atomic test site on colonised Native lands and the vast human costs of the bombs

exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki’ (Tillett 61) and the government’s occupation when

extracting uranium (Silko 226). Grandmother’s reaction to the tests however presents

greater tension. The light resulting from the release of atomic energy was ‘so big, so bright

even my (her) clouded-up eyes could see it’ (Silko 227). She thought she ‘was seeing the sun

rise again‘ (Silko 227). Silko aligns sunrise and the unnaturalness of atomic energy as ‘the

ultimate expression of deliberate unbalancing of natural forces (atomic energy is released

when the nucleus of a heavy atom is split – not a naturally occurring phenomenon on earth)’

(Rainwater 132). She juxtaposes the utterly destructive, Frankenstein-esque perversion of

nature with the natural world’s regular function that provides life, rather than death, to its

organisms. Sunrise is vital in Ceremony and Laguna Pueblo culture. The word opens and

closes the text’s orally poetic frame and forces the reader to recognise and in completing

the text pay homage to Native American storytelling. By comparing and replacing natural

sunrise with the release of atomic energy, Silko makes abundantly clear the contrast in how

the Laguna Pueblo and the federal government use and view natural resources and the

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sacredness of nature’s energetic processes. The flash and the Jackpile mine’s sight causing

Tayo to ‘trace the connections’ reflects how Euro-American use of space in the novel is not

only antithetical to Native American cosmology but culturally destructive in what it

symbolises. It acts as a psychological attack based on ideological incompatibility to remind

Native Americans of their helplessness and their coloniser’s omnipotence.

Ceremony then is rich in examples of the difference and resulting tension between

how Euro-American culture and Native cosmology view the natural world through Euro and

Native Americans use of the novel’s space. This difference is visible to Native Americans

through physical changes to the land in numerous forms that, in their constant and

unchallenged presence, remind Natives that they are colonial subjects to a coloniser and his

antithetical world view that cannot be challenged. This ultimately leads to a greater sense of

hopelessness and self-hatred as Native American cosmology is undermined as valueless. The

desire to emulate the Euro-American and rejection of Native cosmology increases as a

result. The colonisation of externally natural space then results in the colonisation of

internally psychological space and makes creating a clear victim/perpetrator paradigm even

more difficult. Natives fail to see their culture as having value in the country they live in and

fail to see themselves as victims of genocide. Maus’s victim/perpetrator paradigm is simpler

because Vladek reflects on his Holocaust experience from within a space that is not visually

shaped according the antithetical values of his genocide’s perpetrators. Indeed, it can be

argued that Americanism and Nazism are seen by Vladek as Spiegelman as as polar as Jews

and Germans in Americans’ representation as dogs (Spiegelman 272). Natives see their

continuing subjugation in a use of the natural world that contradicts and undermines their

cosmology. This forces them to reject their tribal identity because it has no place in a society

shaped by the Euro-American coloniser and makes constructing an accurate

victim/perpetrator paradigm impossible.

Unlike Maus, Ceremony suggests a Manichean victim/perpetrator paradigm based

on Euro-Americanness and Nativism is impossible. Instead Silko forces her reader to

understand the psychological legacy of Euro-American colonialism by imposing Native

cosmology on readers familiar with European literary tradition to mimic colonialism. She

creates and legitimises cultural hybridity to present Native American cosmology as

meaningful within the dominant Euro-American society.

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Her and her characters’ position is what Giorgio Mariani terms post-tribal. She is

able to ‘acknowledge that the cultural universe of their (her) ancestors has only imperfectly

survived’ (Mariani 2) and ‘indicates the advent of a neo-colonial power whose existence has

affected and will inevitably continue to affect, the destinies of what once was an

independent Native American tribalism’ (Mariani 16). The effort to retain a pre-capitalist,

non-individualistic, communally-orientated culture ‘has been dealt a severe blow by the

encounter with the dominant society, and no longer holds’ (Mariani 17). She mimics the

colonial process by imposing a Native cosmological view on her reader who then recognises

that it can still generate meaning and value. This process is Silko’s real ceremony and is

achieved by nativising chronology, form and structure.

Ceremony’s chronology is based on a ‘temporality that is not, as with Euro-American

concepts, strictly linear’ (Tillet 58). Silko’s novel regularly flits between the pre- and post-

war periods, the war itself, Tayo’s childhood and the mythically ancient chronological

setting of the analogous stories. Transitions are often unmarked in terms of chronological

setting and are thus chronologically ambiguous. Silko utilises that ‘Western thought

conceptualizes history in a linear temporal sequence, whereas most Native American

thinking conceptualizes history in a spatial pattern’ (Duran 14) to create a sense of unease

within her reader who cannot deduce when the passage they are reading takes place.

Where, rather than when, events take place is important. Ceremony’s unlinear

understanding of time also ‘speaks not just to a history of the past but to a consciousness

that is ongoing’ (Porter 42). As with the Native American view on nature, holism connects

different points and people in the past with those in the present. Chronological ambiguity

heightens this interconnectedness. It contrasts Euro-American notions of time and mimics

the colonial process within the reader who feels anxiously unacquainted with an opposing

world view that is forced upon them through the text’s chronology.

A reader unfamiliar with Native cosmology must culturally assimilate themselves to

fully understand the novel. Silko taps into what Taylor calls the ‘Eurocentric strategy for

possessing what cannot be understood if not mastered, and not mastered as long as it is not

understood’ (25) to force the reader to view the text through a Native lense to understand

and ‘complete’ or ‘conquer’ it. Ceremony has no chapters but a series of ‘natural’ breaks

that emulate the pauses of oral storytelling (Tillett 58). Absent chapters reaffirm holistic

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interconnectedness in the avoidance of the traditional method of dividing narrative into

clear and individual sections. Silko’s visually-clear chapterlessness and lack of chronological

clarity creates a ‘chronologically and geographically confusing’ (Nelson 249) narrative that

forces readers to confront an overpowering and dissimilar world view.

The defining form and structure of English prose interspersed with Native poetic

narrative however is more indicative of Native interconnectedness and Silko’s attempt to

mimic the colonial processs. The novel opens and closes with poetry from the Laguna

Pueblo oral tradition. Native poetry framing a European invention ‘antithetical to a tribal

vision of the world’ (Mariani 2) in the novel reflects its overarching importance in

understanding the story. Tribal poetry breaks up prose and the transitions in form are clear.

Stanzas replace prose and Silko’s characters and plot are analogised with stories and

characters from tribal cosmology. It is the reader’s task to create meaning from the mythical

stories to find comparisons between Ceremony and tribal myth to explain why events

happen the way that they do and what they mean. Understanding that Tayo and the other

characters’ rejection of the legitimacy of Native cosmology and the fascination with Kygo

magic in the story parallel one another is vital to understand the drought and Tayo’s loss of

tribal identity. That understanding the tribal poetry is vital in making sense of the text

legitimises tribal cosmology in a 20th century Euro-American context. Tayo and the reader

must realise the value still carried in Native myth. This is Silko’s ceremony. Tayo embraces

his tribal identity and avoids witchcraft whereas the reader accepts the meaning in the

mythic poetry and applies it to the historically ‘real’ narrative. ‘Just as Tayo is assisted by

Ku’oosh and Betonie, so is the reader assisted by the text’ (Rainwater 131). Ceremony seems

to have a European and a tribal narrative, and it is Silko’s requirement of the reader to blur

the lines between both to legitimise Native cosmology. And from her post-tribal position,

legitimisation is all Silko can do. Simply through its ability to generate meaning, Native

cosmology becomes meaningful and of value within the 20th century Euro-American colonial

context. In the text’s hybridity, Silko recognises that Native superiority is an irrelevant

concept against the omnipotence of the Euro-American world view. The semiotics of the

hybridity reflect Silko’s call for the necessity of assimilation between both the Euro-

American worldview and Native world view. That Silko realises the necessity for assimilation

reflects the difficulty with which Native Americans create victim/perpetrator paradigms. She

15 Connor Neilson

rejects the notion of a Euro-American/Native perpetrator/victim paradigm because the

psychological legacy of 20th century Euro-American colonialism would make it pointless to

do so.

‘ ”Nothing is that simple,” he said, “you don’t write off all the white people, just like

you don’t trust all the Indians” ’ (Silko 118). Betonie’s advice to Tayo exemplifies the

contrast between how Silko and Spiegelman choose to present homogenous notions of

genocidal victimhood and perpetration. As a result of differing authorial context and

historical metanarrative, Silko and her characters’ ability to form binary oppositions

between themselves and their genocidal perpetrators is hugely more complex than in Maus.

The psychological legacy of 20th century Euro-American colonialism differs from that of the

European Holocaust because imperialistic subjugation continues under the guise of America

as ‘‘the great democratizer, the great assimilator, all-knowing and all-powerful, organizer of

the world’ (Cook-Lynn 154). Silko must embrace the world view of the genocidal

perpetrator. Spiegelman must not. As a result, Ceremony’s notions of victimhood and

perpetration cannot be binary because of lacking psychological clarity.

16 Connor Neilson

Works cited

Primary texts

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2006. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003. Print.

Secondary literature

Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices.

Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. Print.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Print.

Duran, Bonnie and Eduardo Duran. Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1995. Print.

Fogelson, Raymond D.. Perspectives on Native American Identity. Studying Native America:

Problems and Prospects. Ed. Russell Thornton. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,

1998. 40-59. Print.

Janke, Ronald A.. Population, Reservations, and Federal Indian Policy. Handbook of Native

American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. 155-173.

Print.

Krupat, Arnold. Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature. Post-colonial

Theory and the United States – Race, Ethnicity and Literature. Eds. Schmidt, Peter and

Amritjit Singh. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 73-94. Print.

Mariani, Giorgio. Post-Tribal Epics – The Native American Novel Between Tradition and

Modernity: Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd., 1996. Print.

17 Connor Neilson

Porter, Joy. Historical and cultural contexts to Native American Literature. The Cambridge

Companion to Native American Literature. Eds. Porter, Joy and Kenneth M. Roemer.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 39-69. Print.

Rainwater, Catherine. The Semiotics of Dwelling in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Leslie

Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook. Ed. Allan Chavkin. New York: Oxford University

Press ,Inc., 2002. Print.

Tillett, Rebecca. Contemporary Native American Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

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18 Connor Neilson

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20 Connor Neilson

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22 Connor Neilson