SOURCE: "Feminine Perspectives at Laguna Pueblo: Silko's Ceremony," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 309-28.

In the following essay, Swan analyzes the influence of matriliny typical of the Laguna Pueblo on Silko's Ceremony.

If we are to grasp the social and symbolic significance of the feminine in Native American writing, then western presumptions must be set aside so that they do not adversely bias or manipulate tribal structures of meaning. Native premises must be allowed to stand on their own terms. Therefore, in the following study of ethnology evident in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, feminine perspectives are discerned within Keresan theory, the tenets of which Laguna/Sioux critic Paula Gunn Allen reports derive from a society "reputed to be the last extreme mother-right people on earth." My aim is to portray an archetypical configuration of feminocentric values distilled from literary and cultural dimensions...