​“They Kill What They Fear”: 
Assimilation and Gender Roles in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony 

By: Erin Elliott

In a society seemingly obsessed with marketing merchandise into gender specific categories, it seems almost impossible for the concept of gender-neutrality to spark anything but outrage among a more conservative demographic who often quote the Bible as evidence for their beliefs. This passage from Matthew is often used for that purpose, but another meaning can be derived that embraces gender-fluidity: 
“the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’ 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh” (New International Version, Matt. 19.4-6). 
This blending of feminine and masculine traits is present in the Bible as it is also present in the polytheist beliefs of certain Native American tribes. This common ground is often overlooked by those who wish to force their beliefs on other people through assimilation. Assimilation occurred after imperialists “conquered” native lands and were confronted with a culture that did not coincide with their own. The solution was to rid the natives of their culture: “Kill the Indian, save the man” (“Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans). In 1887, the Dawe’s act was passed to assimilate the indigenous people into white culture. The government offered small plots of land in exchange for citizenship in a trade that resulted in more land being stolen from the Natives. The plots of land were small compared to the landscape they had shared with each other before. This trade ultimately led to a breakdown of the former tribal social structure. Gender roles, while heavily prevalent in white culture, were not as important to many tribal cultures; however, after many years of forced assimilation and living drastically different from their traditions, Native American families adopted white gender roles, and the detriments that come with it, into their culture. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Tayo lives on a reservation that has felt the effects of cultural assimilation. The cultural trauma Tayo’s people face can only be healed by acknowledging the damage made by assimilation, respecting the feminine traditions and landscape that have been altered by the damaging effects of hierarchal gender roles, and changing the traditions to properly heal a people effected by assimilation and account for mixed-race tribal members like Tayo. The characters in Ceremony who adopt these gender roles and are uncomfortable with their identity have internalized generations of assimilation; they ignore the traditional stories that incorporate the interconnectedness of all things including nature, gender, family, time, and all people. 
The traditions of the Pueblo people present in the novel are primarily influenced by feminine figures like Corn Woman, Thought Woman (Spider Woman), Ts’eh (the mountain woman), and other more human female figures—but spiritual all the same—like Night Swan and the Mexican woman. The traditional masculine figures like the Hunter, Betonie, Uncle Josiah, Robert, and Tayo are gentle and accepting of the integral position of women in their tribe. According to Paula Gunn Allen, author of The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, a woman’s position in the Pueblo tribe is central to a matrilineal, “gynocratic” lifestyle rather than peripheral to a patriarchal one (2). The Laguna Pueblo’s creator, Thought Woman, “like all of her creation, is fundamentally female.” In accordance with Keres theology, Thought Woman is not only female, but male as well: “Since she is the supreme Spirit, She is both Mother and Father to all people and to all creatures.” (15). Allen argues that because the creator is feminine, “The Lagunas regard their land as feminine” (122). Allen also says that “While Ceremony is ostensibly a tale about a man, Tayo, it is as much the feminine life force of the universe and the mechanistic death force of the witchery” (118-119). The characters that respect this “feminine life force” do not implement hierarchal gender roles into their behavior and instead respect the land and all of its people.  
The mountain people who help Tayo complete his ceremony, the Hunter and Ts’eh the mountain woman, are representations of the ideal traditional male and female. Tayo believes them to be married and thinks the man will incite violence against him like the men fighting at the bar in Gallup, but the hunter and Ts’eh work together and do not fight for ownership over the other. Tayo’s relationship with Ts’eh stays with him after his ceremony is completed: “he thought of her then; she had always loved him, she had never left him; she had always been there” (237). No name is given to who Tayo is referring to, but one could assume he is also thinking of his mother who left him when he was a child. Ts’eh’s nurturing nature is one that Tayo never experienced from his Aunt growing up; Ts’eh, unlike Auntie, does not care for the labels society places on families: “They would leave the questions of lineage, clan, and family name to the people in the village, to someone like Auntie who had to know everything about anyone” (208). Tayo grew up without a mother because of his communities’ fear of the other and shaming of pre-marital sex. Ts’eh and Night Swan are older women who convey wisdom and acceptance Tayo did not receive from a feminine figure and represents their traditions of respect and fluidity between genders and their relations. The encounters Tayo has with both Ts’eh and Night Swan are vastly different from the stories Emo tells of the women he sleeps with in which he uses disgusting and disrespectful language towards women. There is no person in either sexual encounter Tayo has that is wishing for a selfish ownership over the other. In this way, they have “become one flesh” (New International Version, Matt. 19.4-6). In Lydia R. Cooper’s article “The Sterility of Their Art,” she goes as far to argue that Tayo is healed through the process of a spiritual pregnancy with the land-this feminine life force represented in Night Swan and Ts’eh: who are connected by their femininity, association with the land, mixed-race, and traditional sacred colors of blue and yellow. Before, Tayo’s “pregnancy” was a hollow one in which he wakes up from nightmares with morning sickness. When Tayo tries to heal his trauma with alcohol, like the other veterans, he becomes enraged and cannot make sense of his own thoughts. Allen argues that because Tayo had become a warrior, he felt separated from his people: “A warrior in a peace centered culture must experience total separation from his tribe” but “through his love of Ts’eh he becomes conscious of the female side of his own nature and accepts and integrates feminine behavior into his life.” When Tayo instead finds healing through unification of the feminine landscape that represents itself in Ts’eh and Night Swan, his “pregnancy” is that of new life and healing: “the terror of the dreaming he had done on this bed was gone, uprooted from his belly; and the woman had filled the hollow spaces with new dreams” (Silko, 204). The representation of this new life after the unification of Tayo and the land is present with the painting of the pregnant she-elk and the calves from Josiah’s cattle (214). This healing is for the entire tribe, but it cannot reach the veterans who will not let go of their obsession with masculinity and power. This ultimately leads to their death or complete separation from the tribe. 
The Native Veterans rejection of their feminine traditions correlates with their internalized shame and want for acceptance in the white world. White America, especially in the 1940s, is a patriarchal society. These men reject Tayo because they are jealous of his white genetics and believe Tayo thinks he is better than they are. This causes them to become furious at their position in life as they have adopted the misogynistic need to be better than everyone and possess and conquer everything. It is Night Swan that tells Tayo, 
“Indians or Mexicans or whites-most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing…they are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves” (92).
 Night Swan is not interested in labeling and demonizing other races; she helps Tayo along with his ceremony even though she is Mexican and not Native American. In this way, her role is like that of medicine man Betonie’s grandmother Mexican Woman, who married his grandfather Descheeny—a Navajo medicine man. It is the Mexican woman who tells Descheeny that to heal their people from the witchery of the world, they “must have power from everywhere. Even the power we can get from the whites” (139). It was a Mexican woman that convinced Betonie’s grandfather Descheeny to change the ceremony so that he could heal the victims of cultural trauma that had not occurred when the original stories were told: “because it was set loose by witchery of all the world, and brought to them by the whites, the ceremony against it must be the same” (139). To heal their cultural trauma, Tayo’s tribe must respect the old traditions while also accommodating them to their new reality. 
Tayo needed to be cured not only from the trauma of war, but of the cultural trauma he faced specifically because of his mixed race. As a Native, he is not accepted into white society; neither is he fully accepted into his community and, in some cases, his own family. The characters that react negatively to Tayo’s race are also characters who reject the traditional stories and have a more assimilated attitude. They are suffering because of the discrimination they face, and the internalized shame they feel: “they blamed themselves for losing the land the white people took…they never saw that it was the white people who gave them that feeling and took it away again when the war was over”. The Isleta man at the bar in Gallup acts on this internalized shame in his disdain towards Helen Jean: “You think you’re better than a white woman?” (153). The more assimilated characters like Emo and the Isleta man from the bar seemingly have no respect for women or a connection to the world around them. They have adopted the attitude of white men like the Texans who have no respect for life and hunt a mountain lion for fun rather than out of necessity (188). Near the end of Tayo’s ceremony, he becomes angry at the people back home: 
“he wanted to scream at Indians like Harley and Helen Jean and Emo that the white things they admired and desired so much…had been stolen…these people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs.” 
Tayo comes to this revelation through the double-consciousness of his bi-racial liminality. He does not envy the white people who discriminate against him because of the discrimination he faced for being partially white. “he was not one of the destroyers” (189). Tayo is more respectful to the world around him because of his “non-traditional” household helmed by his grandmother and non-destructive masculine influences. Uncle Josiah and Robert have respect for wildlife and still perform the proper ceremonies after Rocky and Tayo kill the deer. It is Rocky who, under the influence of his mother, rejects the old traditions. Tayo’s nature is contemplative and hesitant on taking another life, rather than his friends who rejoice in it. While Auntie is a woman that likes to be in charge, she was not very kind to Tayo; and therefore, her influence did not reach him the way it did Rocky. 
At the end of Tayo’s Ceremony, Tayo has finally found peace through his newfound understanding of his people’s traditions and feminine landscape. He no longer is tormented by Rocky and Josiah’s death as he now can access his memories as they connect to his sense of belonging and tradition: “This feeling was their life, vitality locked deep in blood memory, and the people were strong and the fifth world endured, and nothing was ever lost as long as the love remained” (204). The fifth world is the spiritual world that connects the Pueblo people through the feminine landscape. Tayo has been healed through this landscape as he now understands the world in which he lives and has let go of his anger: 
“He cried relief 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 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” (229). 
The boundaries of gender, race, time, memory, and borders do not plague Tayo anymore because he is now unified with the earth, rather than manmade constructions like gender roles and assimilation that keep people separated from one another. The new Ceremony was a common-ground to bridge the liminal space Tayo suffered in. Those caught in the liminal spaces of this diverse world can be healed through a mutual understanding and open-mindedness. The United States’ government assimilated Native Americans into the Christian faith because they could not see themselves reflected in the Native’s traditions. Instead of finding a common-ground to bridge this separation of cultures, the government took the Native’s culture away from them along with their sacred land. They did not see that the lines drawn to separate the earth’s people were imaginary. The Christian Bible and the oral traditions of the Laguna Pueblo tribe seemingly have no shared ideology; however, they share similar concepts of blending femininity and masculinity. For America to heal its transgressions and collective suffering, it must recognize that this common-ground can be found through respect and knowledge of other cultures.












Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin, 1977.
Cooper, Lydia R. ""the Sterility of their Art": Masculinity and the Western in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony." Western American Literature, vol. 49, no. 3, 2014, pp. 267-291.
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Restoring the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Beacon Press, 1986.