"Ceremony" - Leslie Marmon Silko Book Review by Top Papers

This paper focuses on Leslie Marmon Silko, who is a Laguna Pueblo Native American who was born and raised in New Mexico. Her background serves her well in stories that bring out the conflict between traditionalism and modernity in Native American life. This is one of the central issues in her novel Ceremony (1977), in which the central character rediscovers his heritage in a moment of crisis and learns how that heritage was taken away by the white culture that still dominates today, and specifically that dominates the lives of his people today. The theme of the novel is discovery, here the discovery of the past and its relevance to the present.