by Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up fifty miles to the west in the Laguna Pueblo, a seven-hundred-year-old settlement of American Indians. Partly Laguna Pueblo herself, Silko draws on this heritage for background to her novel Ceremony. The novel, written during the mid-1970s, a period of unrest and protest among many American Indian peoples, examines the clash of Indian and white cultures. Reaching back in time, it examines this clash in the context of mid-twentieth century events as they affect the life of a mixed-blood Laguna veteran of the Second World War.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Laguna Pueblo in the 1940s. By 1944 there were an estimated 2,400 people living on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in the desert of New Mexico. Unlike most other groups of Pueblo Indians- there were close to twenty...