Some silly things I considered

The healing that occupies Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony unfolds through the story of Tayo, a young man from Laguna Pueblo, after his return to New Mexico in the years immediately following the Second World War. Having been interred by Japanese forces on “some nameless Pacific island,” Tayo returns home overcome by malarial hallucinations, and suffering from what his doctors refer to, dismissively, as “battle fatigue.” After suffering the dank humidity of the sweltering Pacific, with rain that “grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching to the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands,” Tayo becomes convinced that his prayers are the cause of the drought that now plagues Laguna Pueblo. “Wherever he looked, Tayo could see the consequences of his praying; the gray mule grew gaunt, and the goat and kid had to wander farther and farther each day to find weeds or dry shrubs to eat.” Meanwhile, Tayo perceives himself as “white smoke,” an invisible being without form, body or consciousness, vulnerable to the capricious whims of the atmosphere. “It [takes] a great deal of energy to be a human being,” Silko’s narrator relates, “and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.” As indicated, in the novel, Tayo’s illness occurs within a larger ecosystem of disease and death, one that infects both the land and its people, underscoring the condition of their mutuality. Neither this condition nor this disease should be taken as figurative or metaphorical; they are substantive, insofar as they treat the materiality of an embattled indigenous sovereignty, and the iterative virality of settler counter-sovereignty. In the novel, this virality composes the substance of a new mode of relationality, one that reconstitutes intimacies among multifarious forms of life across multiple dimensions of space and time. While initially addressing the symptoms of Tayo’s disease within the argot of mid-twentieth century medicine, Silko herself is far more interested in producing an epidemiology that encompasses these substantive materialities, tracing the forms of “witchery” by which “human beings were [made] one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things…” This clan, she writes, has been “united by a circle of death that [has] devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.” Throughout the novel, Silko describes the conditions of this intimacy as an entanglement, one that snares Tayo’s thoughts, as well as the meaning of words and names. “But the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants…[N]ow the feelings were twisted, tangled roots, and all the names for the source of this growth were buried under English words, out of reach. And the people would have no peace and…no rest until the entanglement had been unwound to the source.” Here, “fifth world” names the unfolding present of Pueblo cosmology, the terrain of the still-becoming, and the domain of the witchery of colonial encounter. As above, the entanglement of Tayo’s thoughts is coextensive with the entanglement of these different worlds, and their different words; this is referenced, throughout the novel, as Tayo hears Spanish words bleed into Laguna and English bleed into Japanese, one language growing into another like a formidable banyan, the dead words of others taunting him across time and space. The realization that these entanglements are inextricable—part of the unbearable becoming of a new mode of planetary intimacy—is ultimately the condition of Tayo’s recovery. “He cried at the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.” Gathering these stories “into a single prayer bundle that would bring peace to all of them” Tayo concludes his ceremony. “He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.” Staged at an abandoned uranium mine near Laguna Pueblo, this scene situates the manifestation of Tayo’s disease—as well as the conditions of his recovery—within a chronotope of ruin and restoration that encompasses a multitude of interlocking temporalities and scales. Rendering the expression of settler counter-sovereignty within a constellation that includes the ongoing desecration of Native places and conditions of debility, the inconceivable desolation of nuclear test sites at Los Alamos and Bikini Atoll, and the radioactive debris of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ceremony sketches an irregular figure that nonetheless describes the nuclear permutations of colonialism after empire. Here, nuclear should be taken as a description of those manifestations of colonialism that embrace both the distended spatiotemporal forms wrought by the use of atomic weapons, as well as those that inhere in the less spectacular realm of the subatomic; the ways, in other words, in which colonial processes significantly contribute to the reconstitution of matter as a system of mutually-constitutive dependencies. The novel describes such dependencies during an early encounter Tayo and the healer Ku’oosh, who tells him, simply, “[t]his world is fragile,” before going on to evoke the implication of word and thought and matter as elements in a larger contest over the manifestation of worlds. The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists along, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said in this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. Here, Silko further develops the trope of entanglement, while gesturing at the material filaments which, in the Laguna account of creation, manifest and sustain the relations that constitute the substance of matter. Throughout her oeuvre, here and in later works, Silko sustains the conceit that matter itself is resistant and resisting, defiant of the categorical impositions placed upon it, as well as corresponding alterations of innate geophysical processes. Indeed, throughout Ceremony, Silko pulls upon Pueblo stories of Creation, weaving them into Tayo’s narrative, and revealing them to be cosubstantial with the realization of thought, form, and matter. “Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears….Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now. I’m telling you the story she is thinking.” While Tayo’s illness is one symptom of an underlying disease that eats away at what Paula Gunn Allen has characterized as the mathematical identity between the people and the land as manifestations of the same substance, here, Silko draws upon Laguna Pueblo cosmology to compose a braided ontology, one in which people, place, and narrative are condensed into a single figure, each term inextricable from the other. In constellating otherwise distinct spatiotemporal manifestations of colonialism, Silko’s narrative evokes such a figure, activating their potentiality as evental sites, zones from which to contest the hegemony of the imperial nomos, unfolding a new story from within the material fragments of empire; a story in which all are bound together as “a single prayer bundle [bringing] peace to all…” Taken from this perspective, one might read Ceremony as an instance of what Gerald Vizenor has called a “landfill meditation,” the conscientious refusal of the notion of refuse, and of re-connecting the fact of refuse in capitalism to the ontology of the refuser. “Once upon a time taking out the garbage was an event in our lives, a state of being connected to action. We were part of the rituals connecting us to the earth, from the places food grew, through the house and our bodies, and then back to the earth. Garbage was real, part of creation, not an objective invasion of cans and cartons. “Refuse meditation turns the mind back to the earth through the visions of real waste….We are the garbage, the waste, we make it and dump it, to be separated from it is a cancer causing delusion….We cannot separate ourselves, clean and perfect, from the trash we dump out back in the can. Clean is a vision of internal trash, not a mere separation.” Here, Vizenor develops the notion of landfill meditation to promote a mode of being-in-relation that abjures disposability as a condition of the culture of capitalism, a culture that necessarily produces both objects and people as disposable items, the condition Michelle Yates has referred to as the “human-as-waste.” For Vizenor, “human-as-waste” might as well name the figure of the Indian as a subject constituted in relation to overlapping colonial discourses; both terms designate the subject of a necropolitics that is less interested in spectacular acts of killing than in the slow deterioration of bodily capacity, the destruction of physical substance as a matter of social neglect. The existence of refuse as trash, the production of trash as an integral component of the reproduction and expansion of capital, is here categorically implicated in what Sylvia Wynter has characterized as the negligent refusal of the earth, the body and the flesh, in favor of the deracinated intellect, with spirit understood to be constituted through transcendence of the material. Vizenor’s landfill meditations are meant to reconfigure our relation to disposability, to recall disposability as part of a larger sense of the sacred or the ceremonial, in which the spiritual is experienced in and through the integrity of the material. In rhetorically gesturing at notions of material entanglement, these works draw upon and extend a mode of being in relation that Elizabeth Povinelli has described as geontological: that is, a mode of being through relation to terrestrial substance as a living archive of kinship and community, one that must be perpetually served and renewed, and through which people organize their relations to multiple worlds. Geontology, in this sense, gestures at an ecological rendering of geology, one that perceives in geology a planetary metabolic that embraces entanglements between multiple forms of life, as well as the terrestrial substance which preserves and sustains them. Silko’s many references to Pueblo creation myths, from this perspective, should not be taken as instances of mere intertexual citation, but rather as coextensive with ongoing processes of terrestrial renewal and sedimentation in and through narration. Here, of most immediate relevance, is that moment in the Acoma Pueblo creation myth where Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman and Spider, directs the making of the mountains. "She told them to remember the words she was going to say. They were to say ‘Kaweshtima kot (North Mountain), appear in the north, and we will always know you to be in that direction. Tsichtinako [sic] also pointed out an article in the basket that she named ya’oni (stone) and instructed them to throw the stone to the North direction as they spoke the words. When they did so, a big mountain appeared in the North. After they did this, Tsichtinako instructed them to do the same thing in the West, but to name this montain Tsipina kot, and in the South, naming it Da’otyuma kot, and in the East, naming it G’uchana kot." In the Acoma creation myth, the making of the mountains dramatizes the relations that obtain among multifarious forms of plant, animal, and human life, as well as the elemental processes that sustain them, manifesting the sacred in multiple forms of material substance. Situated to the cardinal directions, the mountains orient the community in relation to the sacred, which provides them with sustenance, just as assuredly as the forms of plant and animal life that are sustained by the mountains. Moreover, in their verticality, the making of the mountains echoes the ascent of the sisters from the dark underworld of their gestation to the world of the light, along the umbilical pine that draws together the two worlds. From this perspective, one might read Tayo’s descent into the cave as a return to the womb of the world, and his healing part of the birth of a world that is still in the process of becoming. Silko’s Ceremony, in this sense, becomes a parable of sovereignty and survivance, the projection of a futurity outside the punishing register of capital, linked to the reclamation of “tradition” as a living mode of being-in-relation. While I believe that indigenous sovereignty provides a necessary framework through which to approach the question of American decolonization, this evocation of geontology as it relates to the manifestation of Pueblo sovereignty is offered to better highlight enduring conditions of invasion and injury under settler colonialism and empire. Within this schema, the realization of indigenous autonomy and self-determination present themselves, for settlers, as limits on the capacity to engage sovereignty as such a framework, insofar as sovereignty implies a depth and specificity of kinship relations—here understood as extended familial and clan relations that run counter to the matrix of heteropatriarchal reproduction—far in excess of mere professional or political affiliation. Sovereignty, in other words, implies a realm of indigenous self-determination and autonomy that should not be instrumentalized by the settler, without a careful engagement with questions of indigenous self-representation and self-determination. Nonetheless, insofar as indigenous sovereignty presents an unimpeachable barrier to the realization of settler counter-sovereignty, it compels settlers to account for their own ontological conditions of possibility, especially as those relate to conditions of invasion and injury. Here, invasion is meant to echo Patrick Wolfe’s argument that settler societies are sustained by a structure of invasion, where invasion is understood not as a punctual or reversible process, but inherent to the very conditions and reproduction of everyday life.