In her novel ‘ceremony,’set in new mexico where uranium mining and the Manhattan project so profoundly affected human and environmental history, Leslie Marmon Silko employs an account of the physical world that is remarkably similar to theories proposed by contemporary physicists. Silko does not use the methods or words physicists generally do such as laboratory experiments, mathematics, principles, and laws. Instead her methods are experience and story, and her findings are expressed in the Native American terms of her Laguna heritage as embodied by her central character, Tayo. Tayo never knew his white father, and his Indian mother died when he was a small child. His mixed heritage brands him as an outsider in the world of the white army and in the eyes of his aunt who begrudgingly raises him. As the novel opens, he is returning to the reservation, a traumatized World War II veteran whom Army psychiatric treatment has been unable to cure. Tayo and the world are falling apart, unable to keep the past, nourish the present, or seed a productive future. Tayo needs a cure much more encompassing than what Army medicine can proffer, and so does the world which has been been misshaped by a truncated scientific approach. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that “the only cure... is a good ceremony”(3). As Laguna writer Paula Gunn Allen, writes,“what Tayo and the people need is a story that will take the entire situation into account” so that “spirit, creatures, and land can occupy a unified whole.” Allen continues,“that sort of story is, of course, a ceremony”(Sacred 124). Though Silko’s account of reality shares some features with quan-