Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony"

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm taking to refer to any material that is drawn from ritual and myth. This definition might extend to include little stories, the kind that are told to children, and it certainly includes most arcane information that can be culled from a variety of scholarly or native sources. Street smart is fairly simple in the commercial, but it's a bit complicated in a university setting. It's easy enough to discern the lay of the land from a white professor's point of view and teach ethically in the best academic tradition, unworried about treading on sacred ground. Ethically, a professor is responsible to provide students with the most complete, coherent information available, and in teaching Native American literature providing the best information includes drawing from ritual and mythic sources that have bearing on the text under consideration. Indeed, I myself have argued elsewhere that teaching a native text without recourse to ethnographic as well as historical glossing is an exercise in obscurity, because texts, either derived from or directly connected to tradition, are firmly embedded within the matrix of their cultural base. But to use the oral tradition directly is to run afoul of native ethics, which is itself a considerable part of the tradition. Using the tradition while contravening it is to do violence to it. The ethical issue is both political and metaphysical, and to violate the traditional ethos is to run risks that no university professor signed up for in any case. The protectiveness of native people, particularly Pueblos, toward their traditions is legendary, but the reasons for that protectiveness are perhaps not so well known. Among the Pueblos, a person is expected to know no more than is necessary, sufficient and congruent with their spiritual and social place. One does not tell or inquire about matters that do not directly concern one. I was raised to understand that street smart around Laguna meant respecting privacy and modesty, and that