At the Intersections of Empire: Ceremony, Transnationalism, and American Indian–Filipino Exchange

Native American and Indigenous studies has increasingly questioned how it might incorporate transnational analyses while adhering to calls for literary nationalism. Scholars including Shari M. Huhndorf, Jace Weaver, Chadwick Allen, and Steven Salaita have argued that transnational approaches to Indigenous literatures helpfully expand the territories of Indigenous critique while nonetheless highlighting nation-specific literatures. Building on this approach, this article uses a transnational framework to revisit Leslie Marmon Silko’s first novel, Ceremony (1977). The novel itself is both located and situated, as it recounts the postwar experience of Laguna Pueblo World War II veteran Tayo as he recovers from the traumas of war, the Bataan Death March, and his subsequent detention in a prisoner of war camp. However, as I argue, despite its located context, the novel is also inherently transnational, as the protagonist frequently contemplates his service as a US soldier in the Philippines.

By focusing on the Philippine context of the novel, I argue that Silko reveals overlapping histories between Indigenous peoples in North America and other colonized peoples abroad. This framework allows for comparative studies between settler colonial and colonial contexts to better link US empire as it occurs globally and to highlight historic overlaps in differently colonized spaces. By reading Silko’s novel as inherently transnational, I hope not only to contribute to Silko scholarship as a whole but also to read across settler colonial, colonial, and what Allen has called trans-Indigenous, contexts in an effort to reassess Silko’s overlapping depiction of multiple forms of empire. Similarly, I suggest that Silko uses the memories of her Native World War II veterans, Tayo, Harley, Leroy, Pinkie, and Emo, as a means of complicating previous narratives of war, colonial difference, national boundaries, and battle lines.

Because of the historical realities of the Bataan Death March, readers can imagine that Native American soldiers would undoubtedly have had some exchange with the Filipino servicemen with whom they fought, despite the fact that we never see Filipino characters within the text itself.¹ By situating Tayo at the intersections of multiple empires—both US and Japanese—in the midst of occupied territory in the Philippines, I suggest that his experience of settler colonialism in the United States and witnessing of colonialism in the Philippines lead to a flagrant rejection of colonial rule in all of its forms. Tayo, then, becomes an international, but no less traditional, figure who mirrors Silko’s later “tribal internationalists” in Almanac of the Dead (1991), whom scholars like Malini Johar Schueller and Channette Romero argue make up “cross-cultural spiritual coalitions . . . [that] provide a more powerful means of combating the social, political, and economic injustice faced by Native Americans (and many oppressed peoples around the world) than secular politics based on ethnicity and race alone” (Romero 623). I argue that Ceremony’s Filipino context prefigures the overtly transnational politics of Silko’s later novels, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes (2000).

To frame my reading of Silko’s novel, I follow Salaita, Allen, and Weaver, who have argued for the importance of reading Native American and Indigenous literatures in a global context. Second, I follow settler colonial studies scholars Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe, who argue that settler colonial systems are explicitly different from colonial and imperial systems. This distinction helps to more accurately differentiate between settler colonialism in the continent and US colonialism in the Pacific. As Veracini explains, while settler colonialism and colonialism may produce similar conditions and use similar tactics, the two systems ultimately have different aims, as settler colonialism aims to erase and remove Indigenous populations, while colonialism aims to subjugate Indigenous populations as a source of labor. Put more succinctly, Wolfe writes that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (388). The contexts for US occupation of Indigenous lands in North America and US colonialism in the Philippines are marked by difference even as they carry historical parallels and overlaps. Finally, I follow scholars like Jodi Byrd and Iyko Day, who have each discussed the ways Asian American...