Greg Sarris's 1994 "Grand Avenue" offers tough urban stories about a long-fought, still-continuing struggle for survival and self-determination. Sarris's stories present the day-to-day lives of a contemporary, fictional Pomo community living in a multiracial neighborhood not far from their traditional homeland. The stories depict poverty, high…

William Bevis has argued that, whereas the classic American novel tells a story of "leaving," in which characters find growth and fulfillment away from the homes they grew up in, the typical Native American novel is based around "homing." In homing stories, the characters do not "find themselves" through independence but rather discover value and…

Diane Glancy's historical fiction, "Pushing the Bear", reconstructs one episode in the Cherokee Trails of Tears (there were actually several relocations to the west, for the Cherokee and the other eastern tribes of the same period). The Removal of eastern peoples from their ancestral lands westward to eventual resettlement in Oklahoma is…

David Treuer's 1997 novel, "The Hiawatha," engages the traditional literary strategies employed by Native American writing, compares those strategies to earlier narratives (Native American and canonically American), offers a reassessment of indigenous novelistic structures, engages critical responses to tribal fiction, and does so in response to…

In this article, the author examines Louise Erdrich's representation of Father Damien in "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" in the context of mainstream attitudes about transgender identities and Native American gender systems. In this context, Erdrich's novel provides a theory and practice of gender identity formation that…

The book "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko was written about the main character, Tayo, who was patterned after Robert Leslie Evans life. Tayo, a young American, was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II.

Efforts made by Leslie Marmon Silko's who took factual raw materials and, through the alchemy of her creative artistry, transformed her novel, "Ceremony" into something new and different is presented. Silko has made certain changes in the Bataan Death March in "Ceremony", and portrayed the Japanese with considerable sympathy.

In the novel Ceremony, Tayo suffers from flawed psychological vision, mainly as a result of being contaminated by certain preconceptions that he, like most Americans, has acquired from the social environment. In the beginning of the novel, Tayo suffers from physiological eyestrain.

Quilts have become a part of American Indian culture, and they are mentioned and even highlighted in certain works of contemporary Native American literature. Certain questions can be posed in regard to the inclusion of quilt references in contemporary American Indian novels. Do the quilts and the making of quilts have some type of metaphorical…

Leslie Marmon Silko physically locates the climax of the novel, Ceremony at Canoncito, southeast of the Jackpile Uranium Mine, and so metaphorically correlates this site with witchery. The novel is ultimately the story of Tayo, and how he must restore harmony between the land and his people.

Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony" is a novel about a young man who returns to the Laguna Reservation in 1948, after horrifying experiences on the Pacific front in World War II. He comes home in a psychological mess after being released from a prisoner of war camp. An attempt is made to enable teachers to help first-time readers untangle the various…

In Leslie Marmon Silko's novel "Ceremony", Rocky appears as Tayo's childhood friend and "brother" and also as a major part of Tayo's prisoner-of-war experiences in the Pacific during World War II. The interpretation of the novel presents both Rocky and Tayo as two men destroyed by the war, the former physically and the latter spiritually.

A nondescript rock shelter in Texas provides the evidence for shamanism in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, "Ceremony". There, archaeologists found identifiable images of antlered human figures and entheogenic plant substances, which are medicinal plants, associated with shamanistic practices.

The structure of "Love Medicines" interpreted by Hertha D. Sweet Wong who claims that the book's "multiple narrators confound conventional Western expectations of an autonomous protagonist, a dominant narrative voice, and a consistently chronological narrative". "Love Medicine" is a brilliant use of the Western literary tactics that create the…

It is known that for Louise Erdrich the "old language" is Ojibwe, sometimes called Anishinaabe or Ojibwemowin, a language that is still spoken, but that, like most Native American languages, is losing ground to English or, more rarely, Spanish. Erdrich has been learning the Ojibwe language for some years, and she is increasingly macaronic in her…