The Ecopolitics of Warfare in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) showcases the ecological effects of warfare through the microcosm of Laguna Pueblo Reservation (modern day New Mexico, USA) in the 1940’s. The protagonist, Tayo, has fought in World War II and now suffers from PTSD. His post-war trauma engenders his horrification of nature, meaning he develops antipathy for the fundamentals of indigenous culture and ecological knowledge. This is because he struggles to reconcile it with the new reality of the land that suffers from colonial exploitation via uranium mining and anthropogenic environmental change. Warfare can then be seen to initiate cultural and epistemological estrangement from the land. In addition to physical effects of the war on the landscape, the human effects are equally ecological concerns according to the cultural framework within which Silko writes, as ‘Laguna epistemology ruptures the dualist perspective that separates humans from nature’ (Premoli, 2020). Silko illustrates how the severance of human ties reverberates in the rupture of the ecosystem.

'They fear

They fear the world.

They destroy what they fear.

They fear themselves.' (125)

Silko signifies how the indigenous community is psychologically and culturally at war through Tayo's traumatised psyche. When he is taken to the Philippine jungle while in the army, he is thrown into a ‘new world’, to ironically reclaim the western term, one in which nature takes on a new form that is antithetic to cultural eco-knowledge. Here, the jungle is the battleground; already an irony in its proximity with death when jungles are considered ‘lungs of the planet’ (Tropical Rainforests, 2013). Tayo therefore conflates the jungle with the attribute’s of war, such as the blood of corpses; ‘blood that was already dark like the jungle mud’ (7). Tayo’s estrangement from indigenous ecological knowledge is seen in his disillusioned perception of nature. Redolent of indigenous conceptualisation, he acknowledges that nature is alive because ‘the jungle breathed an eternal green’ (10). However, the oxymoron is in the metaphor of the jungle’s breath that ‘fevered men until they dripped sweat the way rubbery jungle leaves dripped monsoon rain’ (10), indicating that the jungle is suffocating and noxious. The narrator highlights Tayo’s disillusionment by exposing the irony in the way ‘Tayo hated this unending rain as if it were the jungle green rain and not the miles of marching or the Japanese grenade that was killing Rocky’ (10) his cousin. The way nature takes on a different meaning in Tayo’s mind, from nurturer to destroyer, demonstrates how warfare, and its colonial impetus, has ruptured the human-environment relationship. War becomes an invasion of the mind as well as of society and land. 

'But the wind and the dust, they are part of life too, like the sun and the sky.' (42)

Laguna epistemology ‘emphasises expansive interconnection’ between the land, seasons and natural balances (Premoli, 2020). These ideas are relational and not local. This means that the indigenous belief about the sacredness of nature would not have been limited to the desert landscape that characterised the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, but encompass the entire ecosphere. Tayo’s divergent view therefore displays his feelings of resentment towards nature, inflicted by exposure to war. The novel repeatedly refers to World War II as ‘the white people’s war’ (33), implicating the Western world. This could enable a postcolonial reading of Tayo’s PTSD as a metaphorical representation of postcoloniality, since Western exposure leads him to abandon and subvert Native American. This would be indicative of confusion amidst postcolonial social change as well as a postwar traumatic response.

Another way ecological relationships have been destabilised by warfare is in its impact on the community. Humans are considered part of the ecology (Premoli, 2020). Thus their relationships are just as integral to ecological harmony as that between humans and the land. But the international enmities stirred by war, and the personal enmity impacted by guilt and self-disillusionment, rupture human relationships. When recently released from hospital, Tayo sees the face of a Japanese boy ‘and he tried to vomit that image from his head because it was Rocky’s smiling face from a long time before when they were little kids together (16). Not only does this allude to the Asian ancestry of the Native American people, but also the interconnectedness of humanity as the faces of Tayo’s beloved relative and his enemy are conflated, indicating that their enmity is taught and unnatural. The described sensation of trying to ‘vomit’ an ‘image’ from his ‘head’ is visceral and complex in the confusion of emotional senses and bodily functions. This is another indicator of Tayo’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, being an ‘identifiable symptom’ alongside his ‘sleeplessness, alcoholism, aimless inactivity, and communication disabilities’ (Jacob and Mylamparambil, 2024). 

The momentary implication of pan-human unity is thwarted by Tayo’s resurfacing antagonism: ‘he cried at how the world had come undone, how thousands of miles, high ocean waves and green jungles could not hold people in their place’ (17). The recurring image of the ‘jungle’ denotes his trauma-induced hostility, as though the mixing of people was a negative consequence of war or a sign that the war had not ended. Bewildered, Tayo points out ‘those people’ to a passerby, referring to a Japanese family, saying he thought that ‘they locked them up’ (16). This is another instance of Tayo internalising colonial views, as the Japanese become a symbol of ‘the other’, to be feared, demonised and segregated; to be held ‘in their place’. The way he relates to the Japanese minority mirrors the way the Western colonisers relate to his community: ‘a Western/ imperialist geo-logic that views the lives of undesirable others as expendable’ (Premoli, 2020).

War deepens segregation. The narrator relays a moment in Tayo and Rocky’s past when ‘an old white woman rolled down the window and said, “God bless you, God bless you,” but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed’ (38). The cause, and not the participants, are appreciated and recognized. This implies that the fight is not over shared interests. The ‘uniform’ is a symbol of exclusive national identity that is contrary to the inclusivity of the human’s part in the ecosystem. The environment becomes political when it is invaded and, in the Philippines, destroyed as a site of war to defend colonial boundaries. The fact that the Philippines was an American colony up until 1946 reinforces an irony in the way Tayo, a victim of colonisation and ecological harm, fights to defend another American colony. This irony creates an internal confusion in Tayo and his peers, torn between loss and victory, following America’s defeat of Japan in 1945. For instance when ‘they tried to sink the loss in booze, and silence their grief with war stories about their courage, defending the land they had already lost’ (157). The ‘war stories’ can be read expansively as the war on indigenous ecological customs as well as World War II. This is because they are now ‘defending’ the colonial geopolitics that instigated their social and epistemological demise.  

'He was thirsty. Deep down, somewhere behind his belly, near his heart. He drank the beer as if it were the tumbling ice-cold stream in the mountain canyon on the beer label.' (51)

The ‘grief’ that Silko narrates can be understood as ‘ecological grief’, defined as ‘the grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change’ (Premoli, 2020).  To understand the particular grief of these Laguna Pueblo characters, one must remember that the human-environment dynamic is included in the ‘loss of [...] ecosystems’. This is because their epistemology centres around the fact that ‘Humans and nature are elements of an ecosystem in which they have the same ontological value’ (Park, 2018)

By the novel’s conclusion, Tayo is able to reframe his understanding of humanity and, through a paradox, restore the human-environment relationship and offer a global solution to impending disasters. This is by anticipating the global impact of warfare, its consequent ecological damage and climate change. When he is in a uranium mine, he reflects on his experience in the jungle battleground and his post-traumatic nightmares: ‘From the jungles of his dreaming, he recognised why the Japanese voices had merged with the Laguna voices, with Josiah’s voice and Rocky’s [...] From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate of the destroyers planned for all of them’ (228). This landscape is a symbol of ecopolitical tensions and of ‘Tayo’s awakening to the active source of his trauma’ (Jacob and Mylamparambil, 2024). He is standing where weapons of mass destruction are sourced and recognizing the international, intercultural scale of its outreach (Premoli, 2020).  The paradox is in the way that unity is only possible in light of destruction.

In the Native American oral tradition that is explored throughout the novel, the western invader is referred to as ‘the destroyer’ who is intent to ‘destroy the feeling the people have for each other’ (213). Once Tayo is reminded of the interconnectedness of people in the ecosystem, ‘He cried [...] the way all the stories fit together– the old stories, the war stories, their stories’ (229). Tayo eradicates boundaries from his mind (‘He had only seen and heard the world as it always was; no boundaries’ 229)  in order to show the first step in global ecological healing. Restoring human-human relationships enables the redemption of the human-environment relationship through the acknowledgement that segregation is futile when disastrous climate consequences will be shared. A postcolonial reading can propose that this is only possible when social hierarchies are broken down, so that the populations most vulnerable to the beginning effects of climate change are not neglected on the basis of spatial distance or ethno-cultural difference. Silko’s 1977 narrative would then be reflective of extant geopolitical models in which more affluent nations in the Global North capitalise on and destabilise the Global South (Hadžić, 2024). Where she expounds on warfare and uranium mining, other contributing factors include the extraction and pollution of industrial fossil fuels and global warming.

Reading List:

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. (2013). Tropical rainforests — lungs of the planet — reveal true sensitivity to global warming. [online] Available at: https://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/news/tropical-rainforests-lungs-planet-reveal-true-sensitivity-global-warming#:~:text=Tropical%20rainforests%20are%20often%20called,year%20variations%20in%20the%20climate [Accessed 23 May 2025].

Hadžić, F. (2024). Power of Global North vs. Global South; Environmental and Climate Change Policies of Inclusion, Inequalities, and Fragility. Humanities Today: Proceedings,Volume 3(1), pp.28–45. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/106224264/Power_of_Global_North_vs_Global_South_Environmental_and_Climate_Change_Policies_of_Inclusion_Inequalities_and_Fragility [Accessed 23 May 2025].

 Jacob, S. & Mylamparambil, B.K. (2024). Palliating War Trauma: Exploring the Therapeutic Role of Nature in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Rupkatha Journal On Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Volume 16(1). https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n1.04.

Park, J. Y. (n.d.). An Ecological Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. Konkuk University. pp 1-16. 

Premoli, M. (2020). “His sickness was only part of something larger”: Slow Trauma and Climate Change in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, American Imago, Volume 77(1), pp. 173–191. doi: 10.1353/aim.2020.0009.

Ščigulinská, J. (2015). Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: Story as a Means of Healing. Jazyk a kultúra, (23–24), pp. 344–350.

Note:

This essay was initially published on ResearchGate, May 2025.

Image Attribution: https://geraintsmith.com/laguna-pueblo-new-mexico/