St. Andrew's "Healing The Witchery: Medicine in Silko's Ceremony," printed in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 44, No 1, discusses the Pueblo cosmology in greater detail. This is a good article for further investigating the underlying religious and cultural themes of the novel.

Download Ceremony Study Guide

Subscribe Now

After ten years of work, Silko published her second novel, Almanac of the Dead. This novel is more overtly political and reflects the hysteria surrounding illegal immigration, drug running, the CIA, and other phenomena of the 1980s. Like Ceremony, legends are interwoven with the present day as an ancient book is pieced back together after being smuggled out of the clutches of the book-burning Spanish.

Silko corrects some mistakes about her own biography and gives insights into her work in a book of essays, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996). In this collection, she tells of her fascination with photography, the ancient codices, and some of the historical events which influenced her novels.

N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn was published in 1968 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. It was published at the start of a Native-American cultural renaissance and in the midst of a new assertion of political rights, the novel tells the story of a man returning to his Kiowa Pueblo from World War II.

A decade before Dee Brown and the general reconsideration of Native Americans that occurred in the early 1970s, William Brandon presented a general survey of Native-American history for The American Heritage Library. The book was appropriately titled, Indians, and was published in 1961. The work, though brief, is quite remarkable for its scope and objectivity.

Ward...