Leslie Marmon Silko - Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony was first published by Penguin in March 1977 to much critical acclaim.

The novel tells the story of Tayo, a veteran of Laguna and white ancestry returning from fighting against Japan in World War II. Upon returning to the poverty-stricken Laguna reservation after a stint at a Los Angeles VA hospital recovering from injuries sustained in World War II, Tayo continues to suffer from "battle fatigue" (shell-shock), and is haunted by memories of his cousin Rocky who died in the conflict during the Bataan Death March of 1942. Seeking an escape from his pain, Tayo initially takes refuge in alcoholism. However, with the support of Old Grandma, he is helped by ceremonies conducted by the mixed-blood Navajo shaman Betonie. As a result, Tayo comes to a greater understanding of the world and his own place within it as a Laguna man.

Ceremony has been called a Grail fiction, wherein the hero overcomes a series of challenges to reach a specified goal; but this point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric, since it involves a Native American contextualizing backdrop, and not one based on European-American myths. Silko's skill as a writer is evident in the way in which the novel is deeply rooted in traditional stories (for instance, there are several retellings of old stories). Fellow Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen criticized the book on this account, saying that Silko was divulging tribal secrets she did not have the right to reveal. These claims have been contested, noting the public circulation and availability of the oral narratives from anthropological texts published in the early twentieth century.

Ceremony gained immediate and long-term success following the end of the Vietnam as veterans took to the novel's message of healing and reconciliation between races and people in order to cope with the trauma of the military campaign. It was largely on the strength of this work that critic Alan Velie named Silko one of his Four Native American Literary Masters, along with N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch.

Ceremony remains one of the Native American novels featured most on college and university syllabi, and one of the few individual works by any Native American author to have received book-length critical assessments.