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

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony the “primacy of the geographical” has often been interpreted as a particularly holistic and healing sense of place—what the critic Robert M. Nelson has characterized as the “spirit of place.”¹ This heightened awareness of the spiritual and redemptive power of the natural and the imaginative in Ceremony—the indelible link between land and story—is famously focused through the novel’s protagonist, Tayo, as he (re)engages with the Laguna Pueblo landscape in a specific way: “Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it.”² Silko, in common with many Native American and Indigenous writers, sees an exact and direct relationship between oral narrative forms such as myths, ceremonies, and stories and a tribally specific geosacred relationship with the land or landscape—with the landscape encompassing the animate matrix between and including land and sky and all plants and beings within.

Nelson observes this geomythic view of the landscape in Ceremony as a consequence of the epistemological belief of the Keres people, whose “stories grow out of the land just the way other forms of life do”: “To put the matter into existential terms, the ‘existence’ of the land precedes the ‘essences’ (cultural and personal identities, and the stories about those identities) that come into being there. Acquisition of a ‘realistic’ vision of the landscape is . . . a prerequisite to the acquisition of a verifiable cultural identity.”³ Silko is a member of the Laguna Pueblo people, and her writings reflect this particular Keresan vision of the land as the concrete conferral of more amorphous “essences” of cultural identity and story. This is due in part to a particularly intense relationship with the land that stems from her growing up in and around Laguna as well as the exceptional historical circumstances that spared the Laguna people’s removal from their homelands under colonial occupation. Silko emphasizes that the Laguna “have always been able to stay with the land,” and as a consequence of this geographical stability there is an unimpeachable quality to Laguna cultural authority: “Stories are so much a part of these places that it is almost impossible for future generations to lose them—there is story connected with every place, every object in the landscape.”⁴ For Silko, land not only generates stories but also author(ize)s them as cultural identity. This personal and tribal experience of historical and geographic isolation, coupled with “the powers and potencies” of a synaesthetic experience of landscape, has led to the critical assumption that Ceremony, along with other Native American novels such as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, exhibits a particularly untroubled, almost unmediated, spiritual relationship between words and place.⁵ The common elements in these texts of geographic isolation and geomythic emphasis have led William Bevis to observe: “Place is not only an aspect of these works; place may have made them possible.”⁶ Such critical response reveals in perfect measure the profoundly symbiotic relationship between place and narrative in Ceremony, illustrating the “primacy of the geographical” to its creative expression and formal dimensions.

However, the historical continuity of territorial access and isolation that magnifies the symbiotic, generative relationship between oral stories and the land, while legitimating their place as markers of “verifiable identity,” has also encouraged a problematic critical approach, particularly if issues of Native sovereignty and Indian nationalism are considered. It is seemingly counterintuitive, perhaps, to claim that because such a strong and unbroken relationship between story and land exists throughout Silko’s work, considerations of the land and its function have remained relatively unchallenged by critics. Yet evidence exists in the critical disavowal of social processes and historical and political intervention in the formation of cultural identity, as borne out by Nelson’s suggestion that in...