As we continue our trek across the terrain of Indigenous Art and Cinema, this week’s addition to the expansive shelves of the WRITE BRAIN TV Radical Library takes us into the sanctified sands of the Pueblo nation to examine the tangled intersection of traditional Native values and adopted modern ways.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is a monumental text in the Native American Renaissance; a work that profoundly encapsulates the uniquely confused identities of “mixed-breed” Natives and the consequences that WWII had on Indigenous culture at large. Silko herself is a self-identified “mixed-breed” member of Laguna Pueblo tribe, and her personal experience from growing up on the reservation clearly inform the character of Tayo, a shell-shocked half-pueblo, half-white soldier who returns home to a drought-plagued landscape amidst ever-encroaching European influence and settlement.

Righteously seething with contempt towards the US government, Tayo and his fellow returning GIs sink into alcoholism while trying to cope with the horrors of war and the discrimination that they faced from within their own ranks. Increasingly disaffected and wanting to reconnect to his ancestry, Tayo seeks a series of ancient healers, a spiritual quest that climaxes with a desperate attempt to ceremonially summon the rain in order to overcome the prophesied drought.

Written in a combination of prose and poetry, Silko brilliantly weaves traditional Pueblo storytelling through multiple timelines to cast the light of old wisdom onto the shadows of modern malady.

WRITE BRAIN TV is proud to present this immensely influential work of Indigenous Literature.