A Study of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Select Short Stories Department of English
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Knowledge Repository Open Network Forging a Cultural Identity: A Study of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Select Short Stories Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in English by Mohd Mohsin Under the supervision of Dr Nusrat Jan Department of English University of Kashmir, Srinagar 2012 Certificate This dissertation titled Forging a Cultural Identity: A Study of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Select Short Stories submitted by Mohd Mohsin in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Master of Philosophy in English, is an independent and original piece of research work carried out under my supervision. This research work has not been submitted, in part or in full, to any University/Institute for any degree. The candidate has fulfilled all the statutory requirements for the submission of this dissertation. Dr Nusrat Jan Supervisor Acknowledgements I would never have been able to finish my dissertation without the guidance of my supervisor, help from friends and moral and emotional support from my family. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Nusrat Jan for her excellent guidance and for providing me important books when I needed them most. Her encouragement and patience proved to be the best gifts I could have asked for from a supervisor; there was not a single instance when I needed help and she was not available with some useful insight. I would like to thank Professor Lily Want, Head of the Department, who helped me out when I had missed my course work paper due to a health problem. Always showing affection for all the scholars, her caring approach and concern towards me, in particular, made me work even harder and motivated me to complete my work within time. I would also like to thank Dr Iffat Maqbool for providing me study material for my course work. Dr Mufti Mudasir deserves my special gratitude for the wonderful classes in literary theory. My special thanks go to the other teachers in the Department who were always willing to help. I would like to thank the non-teaching and library staff of the English Department for their cooperation and help. Finally, I would like to thank all my friends: Mudasir, Farrukh, Abid, Umrah, Shazia and Irfan for their encouragement. Mohd Mohsin Contents Page No. Introduction i-xxii Chapter I Finding a Voice: Emergence of Native American 1-57 Literature Chapter II Ceremony: Welding the Past and the Present 58-99 Chapter III Storyteller: Telling Laguna Stories 100-150 Conclusion 151-162 Bibliography Introduction Introduction t the time of the first contact between the European immigrants and the Native Americans there were A thousands of Native American tribal societies that inhabited America with distinctive languages and dialects, governments, cosmologies, histories and traditions. In fact, ―the pre-1492 Western Hemisphere was among the most linguistically and culturally plural areas the world has ever known‖ (Dorris 1979: 147). With the cumulative influx of the European immigrants to America, Native Americans suffered severe population losses due to massive bloodshed and subsequent enslavements. Besides, imported European diseases like smallpox and measles further reduced their numbers. Despite these losses, Native American people survived and continued to maintain their distinctive identities and intellectual and spiritual traditions. At the time of the first contact with the European immigrants, the multicultural, diverse tribes of Native Americans spoke as many as three hundred fifty languages. Out of more than ten million Native Americans who lived in America at this time, about two million of their descendants still live in the United States and in North America and as many as two hundred languages are still spoken by these i Introduction indigenous populations (Gray 2004: 4). Believed to have migrated from Asia more than thirty two thousand years back, these Native tribes survived by adapting to American land and clime and incorporating into their lives metaphysical beliefs and cultural understandings that sustained their existence. The Europeans were baffled by a diversity, the like of which, they had never seen before. In addition to this, the biblical protology did not provide an explanation of the existence of humanity in this remote part of the earth. Jace Weaver states that ―the biblical protology clearly spoke of only three continents (Europe, Africa, and Asia), each populated by the progeny of a different son of Noah after the Flood‖ (2001: 18). As a result, the Europeans denied the Native Americans the status of human beings. It was only in 1512 after Pope Julius II proclaimed the Native Americans to have ―descended from Adam and Eve through the Babylonians‖ (Weaver 2001: 18) that Native Americans were accepted as humans although now the Europeans started postulating that these dark-skinned peoples who met Columbus were the ‗Lost Tribes of Israel‘. Implicit in these practices of defining and locating the Native American peoples was the underlying project of erasing their ‗otherness‘, of killing the Indianness of the Indians. With Columbus acting as a pioneer, the Spaniards, the French and the Anglo-Saxons came and asserted ii Introduction their rights to occupy the land. Europe came to look upon America as a potential place for fulfilling its colonial ambitions in the name of Christianizing and civilizing the indigenous populations. Christianity and science served the colonizer immensely and justified its colonial project as noble. Alexis de Tocqueville observes that the United States was able ―to exterminate the Indian race ... without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world‖ (1994: 355). The expansion of the European immigrants in the Americas was justified in terms of America‘s ‗Manifest Destiny‘, a term coined by John O'Sullivan in 1845. The Native American people were subject to genocide and reduced to a non-entity by these colonial projects. The immigrants that came to America left written records that served the purpose of gaining control over American land and people, among other things. Writing served as a means of stereotyping the Native population as ‗noble savages‘, ‗uncivilized‘, ‗barbarians‘ and a ‗vanishing‘ race. With the emergence of the printing press, the stereotyped images drawn by early immigrants spread quickly to different parts of the world. Moreover, owing to European colonial sway across the world, these textual records served as the only window for people across iii Introduction the globe to know about the Native Americans. This, in turn, made the textual creation of an Indian identity as the most powerful weapon that the colonizing powers used against them. Down through the pages of history, the Indians became people without names and faces, people who are very stoic and have no feelings. After the creation of the US, Native Americans were forced to assimilate into a white ideal in order to ‗belong‘ to the new nation. For acquiring the citizenship of US, Native Americans were expected to give up their Indianness. Numerous policies were framed by the US government to erase the differences of the Native Americans. Initially the new government made treaties with the tribes, but later on the Indian tribes and nations were reduced to the status of ―domestic dependent nations‖ (Porter & Roemer 2005: 51). The Dawes act of 1887 dealt another blow to Native American sovereignty and tribal identity as it accelerated the process of land confiscation. The relocation policies of post-second world war US government were similarly meant to eradicate the Indian identity once for all. In order to erase cultural differences, the white immigrants used education as a complementary weapon to physical oppression. Education was meant to tackle all kinds of ethnic and tribal iv Introduction differences by replacing indigenous languages with the colonizers language and by Christianizing the masses. Carlisle Indian school (1879) came to represent this type of education with its founder, Richard Pratt‘s motto, ―Kill the Indian and save the man‖ (Rowe 2010: 182) serving as the basic principle guiding the education policies of the white Americans. Besides education serving as a method of cultural genocide, writing was used to justify the confiscation of land and ‗legalize‘ the possession of Native American lands. The process of replacing the Indian identity with colonial projections also affected the identity and character of the immigrants that came to America. The white Americans saw themselves as the ‗civilizers‘ of the ‗uncivilized‘. Frederick Jackson Turner‘s essay of 1893, which delineated specific characteristics of the white American self such as ‗individualism‘, ‗manliness‘, ‗ruggedness‘ and ‗the power to tame the wild‘, was primarily based upon the idea that America belonged only to homogenous white Americans whose expansion was the only meaningful thing that could define the ‗American character‘. On the other hand, the Native Americans represented the ‗Wild West‘. White American literature imbibed all these influences and acted as a powerful weapon to promote the stereotypical images of the Native American population. Writers such as Washington Irving, v Introduction James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville and Mark Twain while creating such characters that embodied the white American spirit simultaneously projected racist American stereotypic beliefs by creating fictional Indian characters. However, despite all these odds, Native Americans maintained their identities and ascertained their presence in the US by countering the colonial onslaughts of the oppressor in diverse ways, literature being one such way. The Native Americans had an oral tradition to sustain their identity that was pitted against the Eurocentric writing tradition. However, with the advent of time the Native American writers started contributing to written literature. During the second half of the twentieth century, the world witnessed the revival of Native American literature with the publication of Scott Momaday‘s novel House Made of Dawn (1968).