Ceremony

Tayo is the protagonist of Ceremony. He was born in the 1920s; his mother was a Laguna Pueblo sex worker and his father an unnamed white man. He was raised by his uncle Josiah and lives with his mother’s family, including Auntie Thelma, his grandmother, and Thelma’s husband (Robert). Tayo is doubly marginalized because of his parentage: To white people, he is Indigenous, but to Thelma and Emo, he is white. This unique position shows Tayo that Emo’s desire to integrate into white society is a trick of the witchery of colonization. In Tayo’s experience, doing so is neither possible nor desirable.

Nevertheless, Tayo does not begin the novel with strong ties to Laguna Pueblo heritage. He trusts the white doctors’ treatment of his war-related PTSD, which consists of heavy drug doses and psychological therapy. The veterans’ hospital makes him feel like “white smoke” that is unaffected by his trauma, and he wants to recapture that numbness after leaving. Consequently, Tayo is dismissive of Ku’oosh and Betonie’s cures.

Tayo later realizes that the cures offered by the army doctors are highly individualistic and not rooted in communal care. The white doctors in the veterans’ hospital even tell him that he will never get better “as long as he use[s] words like ‘we’ and ‘us’” (116).