Police Zones: Territory and Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony"

Abstract

The year that Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony was published was the year the Laguna tribe received a warning that the Rio Paguate, the main river that runs through the reservation, was contaminated with radium-226. It later became public knowledge that not only were all of the Laguna's wells highly irradiated, but that the tribal council building, community center, and reservation road system had been constructed with radioactive mining waste as well. These findings led to the suggestion by the U.S. government that the area be designated a National Sacrifice Area, so that further dumping could continue. American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Russell Means pointed out, in response, that for a land-linked people, the sacrifice of any geographic region, even one poisoned like this, meant the sacrifice of all native peoples residing within it.1 In an essay entitled Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination, Silko discusses the impact of the decision in the early 1950s to begin open-pit mining of the huge uranium deposits north of Laguna: was a child when the mining began and the apocalyptic warning stories were being told. I have lived long enough to begin hearing the stories which verify the earlier warnings (510). The Laguna response to this devastation of the landscape was to include it in their stories, thus ensuring its memory: By its very ugliness and by the violence it does to the land, the Jackpile Mine insures that from now on it, too, will be included in the vast body of narratives which make up the history of the Laguna people (511). There are two strands of thought in Silko's analysis of the mines that provide a basis for reading Ceremony. On the one hand is the