Ceremony Earth: Digitizing Silko’s Novel for Students of the Twenty-first Century

You pointed out a very important dimension of the land and the Pueblo people’s relation to the land when you said it was as if the land was telling the stories in the novel. That is it exactly, but it is so difficult to convey this relationship without sounding like Margaret Fuller or some other Transcendentalist. When I was writing Ceremony I was so terribly devastated by being away from the Laguna country that the writing was my way of re-making the place, the Laguna country, for myself.

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

Many students I have taught, especially those who are non-Native, get frustrated when they read Leslie Silko’s canonical Native American novel, Ceremony. Not only do they struggle with Silko’s disruptions of linear temporality and her collapsing of binary oppositions, but they also struggle with the novel’s geographic and cultural location, which is wholly unfamiliar to most of them; because the novel takes place on the Laguna Pueblo in west-central New Mexico, students have trouble understanding the unfamiliar landscape, cosmology, and social conventions integral to the narrative. To help students better understand the novel, I offer them a variety of multimedia artifacts, including video, audio, static images, 360-degree panoramas, and traditional texts. Because Ceremony is so integrally connected with landscape and location, I use Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to attach these artifacts to specific geographic locations—using longitude and latitude—that correspond to places and events in Ceremony. Students open these files—which I have collectively called Ceremony Earth—in any geobrowser, the most popular of which is Google Earth.¹ Students then either follow a predefined tour or navigate to a specific geographic point, open the digital contextual material located there, and read, watch, listen to, experience, and interpret the background information designed to help them better understand the whole of Silko’s story.

In this essay I will provide background and context for this location-based multimedia project, including reasons why digital literary artifacts attached to specific geographic points on geobrowsers are so appropriate for teaching Ceremony. In doing so, I will investigate the Puebloan webs of meaning inherent in Ceremony’s spatial organization, all of which originate in the location-based discourse of Laguna cultural conventions. I will try to always stay aware of my position as a non-Native academic with largely northern European roots, and the inevitable concomitant postcolonial exigencies that go with my positionality.

Treating digital pedagogy as a mash-up (a mix of different elements), I will also discuss students’ development of a secondary literacy as they learn about the protagonist, Tayo—a returning World War II POW who painfully survived the Bataan Death March and suffers from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—and his reconnection with the landscape, which plays an essential role in his process of healing. After describing the purpose and function of geobrowsers in general and Google Earth in particular, I will lay down some of the structural building blocks upon which Ceremony Earth has been designed and constructed, including an overview of KML. Finally, in order to give readers an idea of how Google Earth can be used as a pedagogical tool for a literature class, I will provide an overview of the materials available on Ceremony Earth.

Webs of Connection

Beyond the fact that Ceremony is a difficult novel set in an unfamiliar culture, why should we choose it as the subject of a critically constructed, multimedia set of pedagogical materials? After all, students and scholars read many difficult, unfamiliar novels. Why is this one more important? As it turns out, Ceremony lends itself well to Internet application because of the structure and style of Silko’s writing. From her use of prose, poetry, and photography in Storyteller (1981)—in which the arrangement of the photographs suggests the circular design of oral tradition (Hirsch 2)—to her nonlinear construction of temporality and characterization in Ceremony (Bell 47), Silko constantly tries to transgress the limitations of paper-based...