The Psychological Landscape of "Ceremony"

Abstract

are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea of Native American life: the land and the People are the same. As Luther Standing Bear said of his Lakota people, We are of the soil and the soil is of us.l The earth is the source and the being of the People, and the People are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really the place, separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a mere source of survival, distant from the creatures it nurtures; nor do we consider it an inert resource on which we draw order to keep our ideological self (sociological persona) functioning. The earth is not the ever dead Other which supplies us with a sense of I by virtue of its unbeing; rather for Native Americans, it is being, as we are, as all that springs from the land is being: aware, palpable, and alive. Had Tayo known consciously what Luther Standing Bear knew, that in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested, thathuman beings must be born and reborn to belong, so that their bodies are formed of the dust of their forefather's bones,2 he would not have been ill.