Ceremony Native Americans

One of the most pertinent and ironic themes I derived from Cermony is the United States’s relationship with Native Americans. The struggles of Native Americans and the American government have had colonialism entwined in its roots since the dawn of modern society. These struggles have been incredibly bleak and American settlers have had a history of attempting to destroy and reinvent native american people and repeated attempts of using their land for selfish and destructive purposes. In the modern era, these purposes have been merely to make reservations into sacrifice zones for the United States’s nuclear endeavors and a storage space for the byproducts that a Nuclearism mind-state can produce. "They see no life when they look they see only

Nevertheless, the American government had the power to use the land for their own means and as a result subjugated Natives into Indian reservations. This is an extremely relevant example of colonialism in the form of controlling a population geographically. The paradoxical relationship I derived from Ceremony is the relationship the Native Americans have to the government in times of crisis. When crisis happens, as depicted in Ceremony Native Americans become first class citizens. In other words, they were drafted into a war for a country that stole their land but were expected to be patriotic and ready to die at a moments notice even though they were not accepted into the culture in the first place. This forced assimilation is a perfect representation of colonialism in the modern world. "...an old white woman rolled down her window and said [to Rocky and Tayo] 'God bless you, God bless you, ' but it was the uniform, not them she blessed" (Silko

This inherently involved war and the clash of cultures that he experienced/experiences throughout his life. As Tayo incorporates the Uranium mine into his ceremony he reincorporates that specific part of the land and symbolically includes all the land Western culture has taken from the natives. He not only does this ceremony for himself but also for all the other people who were affected by the war and the “drought.” The process of a ceremony can act as a strategy for counteracting the ideas that lead to a Nuclearism mind state because before we make bombs and sacrifice our land and somebody elses we could in reality have a ceremony to just solve these problems before they escalate, thus easing death