SOURCE: "Feminine Perspectives at Laguna Pueblo: Silko's Ceremony," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 309-28.

[In the following essay, Swan analyzes the influence of matriliny typical of the Laguna Pueblo on Silko's Ceremony.]

If we are to grasp the social and symbolic significance of the feminine in Native American writing, then western presumptions must be set aside so that they do not adversely bias or manipulate tribal structures of meaning. Native premises must be allowed to stand on their own terms. Therefore, in the following study of ethnology evident in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, feminine perspectives are discerned within Keresan theory, the tenets of which Laguna/Sioux critic Paula Gunn Allen reports derive from a society "reputed to be the last extreme mother-right people on earth." My aim is to portray an archetypical configuration of feminocentric values distilled from literary and cultural dimensions at Laguna Pueblo where these are rooted in solid feminine bedrock. My intent is to encourage others to apply this synopsis more widely, to illuminate critical factors shaping contemporary literature penned by American Indians, especially when either author or text is affiliated with matriliny.

Keres is the language spoken by Silko's and Allen's kinfolk, the Laguna. Their pueblo is located in northwestern New Mexico at the foot of a towering volcanic peak called Mount Taylor, a mountain sacred in traditional theology. Mixed blood predominates due to Laguna's founding, and this community is unique in this respect among the other matrilineal pueblos of the Southwest. Instead of exhibiting the common denominators of genetic and cultural homogeneity, Laguna is a proverbial melting pot, uniting diverse groups and their varying cultures. In an autobiographical interview entitled "I Climb Mesas in My Dreams," Allen remarks, "they were a polyglot people." The resulting social matrix emphasizes the female line inscribed by a hybrid past: in every sense of the term "Laguna is a breed Pueblo."

Scholars employ useful devices for unraveling the organizational fabric of kinship and cognitive systems, and these will help us appreciate the inherent models operational behind the literary form, enhancing our comprehension not only of the novel but also of its internal dynamics. Silko's words energize by granting form, substance, and worth in a way consistent with basic Laguna ideology: the spoken word (a name) brings existence into being, and thought as knowledge informs the conception of words. The font of thought combined with sacredness of the word defines concepts requisite for understanding the inception and continuity of an oral tradition. Because words create, they unify the quintessence of things, on the one hand, and fuse object to referent, on the other; the telling remains undifferentiated from what is told.

At Laguna, thought and the word emanate from a woman. Knowledge and belief are equated; thus both origin legends and Ceremony posit the cosmos as Spider Woman's creation:

     She is sitting in her room
     thinking of a story now
 
     I'm telling you the story
        she is thinking.

"She" is spoken of as "Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought-Woman." In Silko's article "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective" we learn that Spider Woman's script incorporates "the whole of creation and the whole of history and time," and it serves as the basis for "the structure of Pueblo expression [which] resembles something like a spider's web—with many little threads radiating from a center, criss-crossing each other." As author, Silko taps Spider Woman's vivifying principles of articulation: Silko becomes Her voice, Her storyteller, following Her techniques. So Silko attributes her story as well as her literary conventions to the authority of ontological genesis, to the feminine universe maker who is a spinner of names.

Woman/word: My unfolding of the picture of the feminine at Laguna Pueblo will take place through consideration of complementary layers of the novel. The first section of this essay, "Women in the Social Sphere," presents the characters typifying everyday life in the form of Auntie, Grandma, and the hero's mother, Laura or Sis. These figures are also secular representatives of "Women in the Sacred Order" discussed primarily in the third section, which gives attention also to Night Swan and Ts'eh. Each signifies aspects of female power, and like the facets of a diamond refracting the prismatic interplay of light, the faces of "Woman" at Laguna are individual personifications condensing into a central being, the "The Mater-creatrix" discussed in the second section, variously known as Spider Woman/Yellow Woman/Thought Woman.

Everything belonged to them, including the good family name.

Examination of relationships is central to Silko's assessment of her writing: "What I write about and what I'm concerned about are relationships." At Laguna, the hub of kinship relations is located in the women, who form the web of belonging that integrates her people. According to Tewa scholar Edward Dozier, major features of social structure in the western pueblos (Hopi, Hano, Zuni, Acoma, and Laguna) "emphasize matrilineal exogamous clans, the importance of women in the ownership of houses and garden plots, [and] matrilocal residence." Unpacking this terminology one finds that descent is reckoned through females so that children belong to the clan of their mother (matrilineality). Exogamy means that a person must marry outside of her clan, yet at marriage a bride continues to live with or near her mother (matrilocality), requiring that her husband move to her household (uxorilocality, stressing residence with the wife), thus spatially concentrating women of the same bloodline. Living patterns arranged by this skein of lineation are briefly alluded to in the novel, as when the hero, Tayo, learns that the woman Ts'eh is eligible:

The tone of her voice said that of course he knew what the people said about her family, but Tayo couldn't remember hearing of that family.

"Up here, we don't have to worry about those things." She was right. They would leave the questions of lineage, clan, and family name to the people in the village, to someone like Auntie who had to know everything about anyone.

Tayo is reared in a matrilineal extended family composed of Auntie and her husband Robert who live with her mother, Grandma, and her unmarried brother, Josiah. Sis is Auntie's dead sister, Laura, who is Tayo's mother. Her waywardness begot Tayo, and subsequently she left her son, relinquishing his care to her sister and mother. This situation nonetheless exemplifies Allen's definition of a unified household: "one in which the relationships among women and their descendants and sisters are ordered."

Auntie's acceptance of Tayo, however, is at best grudging, cloaked with suffering as she emulates the saints and martyrs. Auntie is a "Christian woman," characterized as entrusting propriety to white authorities; she is swayed by opinions of teachers and by those published in books and newspapers. The written word distinguishing Anglo outsiders brings "importance and power" for anyone who writes and reads; such skills she takes pride in for Rocky (Auntie's son), Josiah, and to some extent, Tayo. She dotes on practices of Anglo doctors and the solace or guidance of Catholic priests. Influenced particularly by the power of the word in gossip, a controlling guide in societies without writing, what others think and what Auntie concludes they are saying about her—their stories—hold her firmly to Christian ethics and styles of conduct. In The Sacred Hoop, Allen notes that "among many American Indians, family is a matter of clan membership … membership in a certain clan related one to many people in very close ways, though the biological connection might be so distant as to be practically nonexistent." This notion of the clan's spiritual kindred appears in Ceremony at the heart of the conflict surrounding Auntie, who is waging a fight that only Tayo sees and apprehends, and it ties the two despite the barriers she enforces between them. As Anglo values mingle and confound Laguna assumptions, her war becomes a cultural one revolving around "her terror at being trapped in one of the oldest ways"—her own Indian mindset.

Rules of lineal descent give Auntie no choice about her obligation to raise the half-breed child of her dead sister since that child is viewed as hers—her son. An illustration of this taxonomic merging is, perhaps, most obvious in the fact that Tayo would call his mother (Laura or Little Sister), his mother's sister (Auntie), and the mate of his mother's brother Josiah (Night Swan) all by the same name, naiya or mother. The narrative treats Night Swan as Josiah's lover or Mexican girl friend rather than his wife, but the commitment between the two is deep, and practice of Laguna social mores would have sanctioned their intimacy by marriage if Josiah had lived. In her discussion of Laguna Genealogies, anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons documents matings as "casual," and "couples may live together before the ceremony" in the Catholic Church. By the standard nomenclature of Keresan ontology, then, Night Swan stands in the position of "mother" to Tayo. She is also to him a lover (like Ts'eh) and sexually initiates him. Western sensibilities would dwell on apparent incest here and generational difference of oedipal proportions, but the logic of matrilineal categories permits this possibility without the negative overlay of western interpretation. Simply, clans where intermarriage takes place have the ongoing potential of supplying further spouses to men of the same lineage as to Josiah or Tayo. In addition, male descent-group members are called by the same word. For example, a self-reciprocal term occurs with anawe, mutually identifying "mother's brother" (Josiah) and "sister's son" (Rocky and Tayo). Likewise, Tayo and Rocky should address each other as tiume or "brother," although Auntie continually tries to prevent this association from happening.

Indulgent and nurturing relationships between grandparents and grandchildren tend to characterize matrilineal societies. Alternate generations at Laguna are classified together using the self-reciprocal of papa: to each other, Grandma and Tayo are papa. Anthropologists regard this dyad as being unusually close at Laguna. Grandparents bear responsibility for childcare when the parents are busy, but execute their charge with gentleness, patience, and goodwill; they are also prominent in naming ceremonies. Tayo's warm, positively toned relationship with Grandma is often repeated in the novel, mirroring Silko's strong affection for her own Grandma A'mooh, which she amplified in Storyteller. In Ceremony Grandma is traditional, bearing her Laguna heritage with pride. She exemplifies a generation that adheres to native teachings, respects the wisdom and status of the elders, and honors the way it has always been. She is convinced of the dignity and efficacious nature of tribal methods for curing and sanity—precepts undergirding her insistence that medicine men (Ku'oosh and Betonie) treat her grandson Tayo. As maternal figurehead, Grandma is the living reference point for the "good family name." She is as stubbornly persistent in her survival strategies as she is a powerful force in determining family affairs. Grandma embodies the traditional Laguna ethos in counterpoint to the bicultural entrapment in which Auntie struggles.

Like Silko's great grandmother, Grandma is a storyteller—she wields language with a quick and practiced tongue. Thriving amidst the "goings on" at Laguna, she brokers in gossip: "She liked to sit by her stove and gossip about the people who were talking about their family…. She pounded her cane on the floor in triumph. The story was all that counted. If she had a better one about them, then it didn't matter what they said." Moreover, Grandma relates the "long ago, time immemorial stories" to her grandsons, Rocky and Tayo, sees to it that they receive Indian names from her sister, and overall represents caring, nourishment, and "home."

As indigenous lore would have it, Grandma makes the ritual offering for the deer's spirit, asks Tayo to gather Indian Tea, and in the end feeds members of the medicine society led by Ku'oosh when Tayo speaks in the kiva. Grandma is sensitive to the divisive currents eroding her family, her people, but she does not impose adherence to her viewpoint. However, in keeping with the influential role of maternal grandmothers in matriliny, Silko grants Grandma the last narrative comment in the novel: "It seems like I already heard these stories before … only thing is, the names sound different" (my emphasis).

Ease, humor, and affection mark relationships with grandparents, and this contrasts with the authority and respect vested in the parental generation. In Matrilineal Kinship David Schneider and Kathleen Gough contend that the empirical disposition of group placement runs through women, giving men access to lines of authority through the female line. It is of minor concern in Ceremony, then, that Tayo's father is missing, for it is the mother's brother (Josiah) who acts as the authority figure for the children (Tayo and Rocky) of his sisters, reinforcing the strong bonds of interdependence between a woman (Auntie) and her brother (Josiah). He is the children's teacher, disciplinarian, and source of inheritance; he plans their marriages and provides the brideprice in the wedding of his nephews. So it is not coincidental that anawe, Josiah, sends Tayo to Night Swan carrying a note on blue-lined paper. Further, one may speculate that Josiah's cattle, purchased at Night Swan's urging, serve as Ts'eh's marriage "gift" (bridewealth), thus illustrating how old practices may resurface in new forms. Following norms of ownership, the Mexican longhorns would become Ts'eh's property (or her family's), which she might dispose of as she pleased. Ts'eh indeed tends the cattle and then returns them to Tayo's care after he comes to be with her again in accordance with custom.

Matrilineal principles underscore the "good family name" of Auntie and Grandma. Auntie claims that in the past it commanded esteem: "Our family, old Grandma's family, was so highly regarded at one time. She is used to being respected by people." Several lineages tracing descent from a common ancestor are aggregated, forming the clan, a social unit above the level of the extended family. Parsons's Genealogies discloses 19 clans among the 124 houses scattered through the 8 village settlements comprising the pueblo of Laguna. The name of the maternal line (the matriline) bestows social identity shared with those in the tribe possessing the same name—it makes "relatives." This all-important clan name endows status, ensures etiquette, and gives knowledge of where one belongs. Social place is prescribed as is collective responsibility and life force, expressed in the novel as the "vitality locked deep in blood memory."

Clans have their own stories. Such stories become integral components of Ceremony, blending different personae into the oldtime beliefs and fusing them to the architecture of Spider Woman's cosmic blueprint. Legends record clan origins entwining ancestors with certain plants or animals either during the time of Emergence from the underworlds or in the Migration thereafter. Fundamentally, "the Origin story functions basically as a maker of our identity—with the story we know who we are," Silko says in "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective," then continues with an example: when "Antelope people think of themselves, it is as people who are of this story [how Antelope and Badger widened the Emergence Place], and this is our place, and we fit into the very beginning when the people first came, before we began our journey south." In Ceremony, Ts'eh is connected to Antelope and Descheeny to Badger. Clan stories furnish a rich inventory of symbolism as well as the familiar mythic backbone of historical precedent, augmenting the poetic scope and sweep of Silko's literary repertoire.

There are also family stories, which "keep track" of the events, "both positive and not so positive—about one's own family." Family stories, like clan stories, mold Laguna character because the idiosyncratic details making a family history unique are related countless times in the communal process of remembering and retelling. In Ceremony, Auntie fears and Grandma relishes these stories. Each generation hears and tells the stories anew—time and again family members learn their family's account of itself, of themselves:

the people shared a single clan name and they told each other who they were; they recounted the actions and words each of their clan had taken, and would take; from before they were born and long after they died, the people shared the same consciousness.

Silko states in "Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination" that "human identity is linked with all the elements of Creation through the clan." Clan names stem from the natural environment. At Laguna, Parsons found them divided into a dual entity: among the western clans one finds Bear, Parrot, Coyote, Roadrunner, and Oak—the winter people—under the aegis of the Kurena medicine society, while the Koshare have jurisdiction over the eastern, summer cluster of Sun, Turkey, Corn, Water, and Turquoise. Laguna myth assigns most clan names to one of the four cardinal directions, thus linking the clan to a discrete set of symbols and harnessing the power grounded in that direction. For instance, Ts'eh's "antelope" qualities draw on the South. In turn, this prompts a series of associated symbols, including those of Summer, Thunder and Lightning, Eagle, Red, Red Corn, Wildcat, and Badger. Principles of classification produce a symbolic dictionary or cluster of synonymous symbols, if you will, and a careful reading of the text shows Ts'eh in relationship to these images.

Composing a systematic framework of symbolic representations, the matri-clans thus weave social customs to land, nature, and gender, while knitting the individual into ontology by acknowledging a common source for all existence. Everything germinates from Spider Woman's ideational process, an image beautifully sketched by Silko in "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective": "In the beginning, Tséitsínako, Thought Woman, thought of all these things, and all of these things are held together as one holds many things together in a single thought." All in one, all is one.

Their theory is that reason (personified) is the supreme power, a master mind that has always existed, which they call Sitch-tche-na-ko [Spider Woman]. This is the feminine form for thought or reason.

Paula Gunn Allen in "The Psychological Landscape of Ceremony" argues that

it is clear that the land is female … the nature of Woman associated with the creative power of thought. Nor is ordinary thinking referred to in connection with Her. The Thought for which She is known is that kind that results in physical manifestations of such as mountains, lakes, creatures and philosophical/sociological systems.

All systems of order are writ larger than life where the cognitive schema bond culture with nature and arise from a powerful gynocratic foundation cementing the Laguna conception of womanhood.

The Mother loves and cares for the Laguna as her children or her family. She lives at Spider Woman's Emergence Place, shipap, in the North, where she ascended with the Kurena shamans from the underworlds. Specific accounts of the Laguna origin myth render several beings as "Our Mother(s)." Her profile is drawn in the following sentiments:

She is the deepest in heart and, through her, religious feeling is most fully expressed. When a baby smiles, the old women say that [Iyatiku] is talking to it, when it cries, [she] is scolding. [She] is mentioned first in prayer, ritualistic origins are dictated by her and … her symbol is too sacred to be exposed commonly to view…. In the ritual, Iyatiku is the cotton-wrapped ear of corn which is possessed by the cheani and set out on altars…. In myth … Iyatiku lived with the earth at shipap … and with her sisters remained within.

Thought Woman is immortal; She is origin and summary, and, to the Laguna, Her presence is all-encompassing, as Fred Eggan explains:

One important pattern at Acoma, which is characteristic of Keresan villages generally, and which contrasts with the Hopi and Zuni to a considerable extent, is the emphasis on the concept of "mother." In the Origin Myth we have seen that the central figure is Iyatiku, who is the "mother" of the people whom she created and whom she receives at death. The corn-ear fetishes represent her and have her power.

Women making themselves women constitutes an act that discloses the pivotal symbolism of matriliny. In Ceremony, Silko puts it this way:

      … Thought-Woman,
          is sitting in her room
      and whatever she thinks about
            appears.
      She thought of her sisters….

As Silko further elaborates in "Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination," "they helped her think of the rest of the universe … including the Fifth World and the four worlds below."

Thought Woman is the source of names, language, and knowledge. She is termed the "creator of all," or she is said to have "finished everything." Some versions call her "mother" or, in Kenneth Lincoln's gloss, "Thought Woman, the matrix, deifies an old integrated regard for ideas, actions, being, plots, and things." Anthony Purley, a Keres scholar, writes, "Tse che nako is the all-fertile being, able to produce human beings and all other creatures: 'She is the mother of us all, after Her, mother earth follows in fertility, in holding, and taking us back to her breast….'" Yet another tale sets Thought Woman as being identical to Iyatiku, who is the mother of colored corn women.

If not synonymous with the Mother, female creator of women and people, then Thought Woman figures as her sister in a society that conjoins sisters. Variously, She is Mother, Sister, Grandmother—the syncretic woman who is the "naming" and "knowledgeable" creatrix birthing the universe of stories spun from her abdomen; She is the "mastermind" teaching, nourishing, determining how things will be, and deciding what must be done. A Laguna spokeswoman explains:

My tribe, the Keres Pueblo Indians of the Southwest, put women at the center of their society long ago…. Where I come from, the people believe traditionally that nothing can happen that She does not think into being, and because they believe this they say that the Woman is the Supreme Being, the Great Spirit, the Great Mystery, the All-Being. This WomanGod, Thought/Thinking Woman they call Spider Grandmother, acknowledging her potency as creator, as Dream/Vision Being, as She Who Weaves existence on all material and supernatural planes into being.

Women in the Sacred Order

Our Mothers, Uresete and Naotsete, are aspects of Grandmother Spider, are She at lower voltage, so to speak. The same may be said of Ts'eh, who is Tse-pi'na, the Western Woman Mountain.

Let us expand Allen's statements in the above epigraph and suggest that the entire cast of female characters in Ceremony are individual permutations of Spider Woman—each is "She at lower voltage." Allen goes on to contend that the cure for Silko's hero rests in living in harmony with nature and being "initiated into motherhood…. For Tayo it is planting Her plants and nurturing them, it is caring for the spotted cattle, and it is knowing that he is home," for "he has loved the Woman who brings all things into being, and because he is at last conscious that She has always loved them, his people and him."

Tayo's "initiation into Motherhood"—his rite of passage—develops throughout the novel, encoded in his interactions with and indoctrination by women situated in the social and sacred domains. But his biological mother deserts him: "the birth had betrayed his mother and brought shame to the family and to the people." She is sister to Auntie, and in kinship nomenclature sisters are grouped together, depicting Allen's assertion that "male relationships are ordered in accordance with the maternal principle; a male's spiritual and economic placement and attendant responsibilities are determined by his membership in the community of sisterhood." The sisters called naiya (mother) by Tayo both reject him. He is alienated from his "mothers," literally and figuratively abandoned: as Allen points out, "Failure to know your mother … is the same as being lost."

Tayo's sexual instruction starts with Night Swan who is Mother/Lover: "Mother," by virtue of kinship terminology in her relationship with Josiah, and "Lover," by virtue of initiating Tayo into the restorative pathway of feeling, previewing the love borne to him by Ts'eh. "You will recognize it later. You are part of it now," she says. Night Swan is timeless, likened to "the rain and the wind"; analytically, she is associated with spring, the color of blue, and cardinal West. She is Grandmother with "no age," emblematic of the matriliny, since all her descendants are female. "She moved under him, her rhythm merging into the sound of the rain," and Tayo is immersed, "swimming" in the water that Night Swan represents. Then Night Swan vanishes abruptly after Josiah's death rather like the spring rains seeping into the thirsty earth to become clay.

Analogous to Night Swan, Ts'eh personifies elemental forces of nature, and she too is a Lover/Mother. Her color is yellow. Yellow denotes North, invoking the phenomenology of a symbolic category whose members may stand in lieu of one another or for whom the mention of one implies a reference to the rest: this class of the North includes Mountain Lion as the sacred animal, Mount Taylor the sacred peak, Yellow, Yellow Corn, Snow, and Winter. Yellow pervades scenes involving either Ts'eh or her residence, located on an upper plateau of the sacred northern mountain. Eventide in the late autumn sunset is the temporal stage for Tayo's first glimpse of Ts'eh. She stands beneath an apricot tree wearing a yellow skirt. After acknowledging his presence, she invites him into her house and feeds him chili containing dried corn. To the Laguna, corn is not only a fundamental food staple with its welcome harvest in the fall, but socially it is the name of a clan that is segmented into groups of different colors. Esoterically, corn is the staff of life—the visible form (corn ear fetish) of "Our Mother" fashioned by the Kurena priests and cared for by the cheani, the shamanistic leadership. Corn codifies the origin, maintenance, and blessings of life; it represents sustenance and becomes a critical attribute connoting the essence of matriliny and the matrix—it symbolizes above all the feminine. Allen summarizes: "As the power of woman is the center of the universe and is both heart (womb) and thought (creativity), the power of the Keres people is the corn that holds the thought of the All Power (deity) and connects the people to that power through the heart of Earth Woman, Iyatiku."

It is significant, then, that after enjoying Ts'eh's food and hospitality, Tayo rises to greet "the dawn spreading across the sky like yellow wings"; he remembers the bells and rattles of a late November dawn when the Katcina appear at the moment of "sunrise" after the "pale yellow light," and he haltingly says the prayer welcoming the Sun. Katcinas are supernaturals impersonated by men inducted into certain medicine societies; the initiated don elaborate masks and costumes portraying parts taken by these spiritual beings during performances of the sacred dances. Arrival of the Katcina heralds the start of the winter ceremonial season. Tayo has the impression that Ts'eh is a Katcina, an Antelope Katcina, when he sees that Ts'eh's "eyes slanted up with her cheekbones like the face of an antelope dancer's mask." In the creation myth, Antelope uses her hooves to butt against shipap, helping Badger enlarge the Emergence Place so the holy people can arrive on the surface of the present world. Stories tell it clearly: the Antelope Clan is one of the oldest to have been formed; it is a founding clan at Laguna and associated with the South; it is preeminent among all clans, the hearth of leadership for both Laguna and Acoma Pueblos; unquestionably, Ts'eh's clan is the most venerable of all.

The symbolism of Ts'eh's "antelope" features converges with that of the spotted cattle, which Tayo, Rocky, and Josiah call "desert antelope," cows obtained from the southern climes of Sonora. Uncle Josiah purchased the Mexican herd at Night Swan's behest, and, as I noted earlier, they served as Tayo's bridewealth. If Ts'eh and her cattle are symbolically equivalent, Tayo's "husbandry" illustrates the sophisticated metaphors used by Silko in knotting the social with the natural strata in Spider Woman's thought. The mystical and supernatural are involved as well. Tayo quietly observes Ts'eh preparing her herbs and medicines, paraphernalia signaling her role as a medicine woman and rainmaker. She brings lifegiving moisture—the snow and rain—using her stormcloud blanket and crooked willow staff, and her potency is encoded in the eagle rainbirds imprinted on the silver buttons of her moccasins.

This set of symbols reappears interestingly in connection with a woman in a prophecy made by the Navajo healer, Betonie, midway through the novel: "Remember these stars," he said. "I've seen them and I've seen the spotted cattle; I've seen a mountain and I've seen a woman." This woman is Yellow Woman, who is all women. Heroines and holy women in Laguna myth often live in the North and are named "Yellow Woman." Among these, one Yellow Woman is the wife of Winter. Yellow Woman is the maternal source of the Antelope Clan. Yellow Woman is in fact the generic name—the core integrative symbol—for all female Katcinas. There can be little doubt that Ts'eh is Yellow Woman, the personage Allen considers to be an ultimate "role model … She is, one might say, the Spirit of Woman."

Conforming to the paradigm set by Ts'eh, the hero follows suit: Tayo becomes yellow himself. This metamorphosis occurs when both Tayo and his urine change color. His color symbolism switches from white (father) to yellow (mother) as he takes on qualities of his maternal blood in the process of assuming his tribal identity; in Allen's idiom, Tayo is no longer "lost" and is learning "to know" his Mother once more.

During the illness, which the white doctors called "battle fatigue," Tayo projects himself as being "white smoke" fading into and out of the white world:

For a long time he had been white smoke…. He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinitely and their own bones mark boundaries…. It was not possible to cry on the remote and foggy mountain. If they had not dressed him and led him to the car, he would still be there, drifting along the north wall, invisible in the gray twilight.

Tayo gets drunk at the Dixie Tavern and fights his war buddy, Emo. That night his urine has no color, but yellow surrounds his body: "The yellow stained walls were at the far end of the long tunnel between him and the world…. He looked down at the stream of urine; it wasn't yellow but clear like water." Responding to Emo's insults, Tayo attacks him: "He moved suddenly, with speed which was effortless and floating like a mountain lion." But he is not the archetypical hunter, not yet. It is highly probable that the distant elk mountain, covered with gray winter fog located "along the north wall," is in Tayo's projection none other than Mount Taylor, sacred mountain of the North, which the Laguna call "Tse-pi'na, the woman veiled in clouds": "The mountain had been named for the swirling veils of clouds, the membranes of foggy mist clinging to the peaks, then leaving them covered with snow." The mountain lion that Tayo encountered near the summit of this sacred peak is "yellow smoke," Tayo's Indian alter ego. Furthermore, Ts'eh's companion there is the Hunter. The Hunter is the human manifestation of Mountain Lion Man, the Katcina charged with the welfare of all game: he is deity of the hunt and serves as a mentor to Tayo. The Hunter's animal counterpart is the cougar, sacred animal of the North, the animal that Tayo speaks to and is identified with: "mountain lion, becoming what you are with each breath."

Now the change occurs: Tayo is yellow, as he "pissed a yellow steaming slash through the snow," while the whiteness of the blizzard's cocoon remains outside his skin. He expresses the quality of personhood—yellowness—spoken in prayer when he receives his sacred "Indian name." Shortly after birth, each child is presented to the sun by the maternal grandmother or her sister, the naming ceremony is held, and the child's sacred name is spoken; thereby she becomes known, the gods recognize her. The child is said to be "yellow"—either a "yellow woman" or "a yellow youth"—the colored essence of Laguna identity. It is not certain whether "Tayo" is a sacred name or a nickname, but it is clear that "Tayo" is a twinned name since the novel's hero shares it with a folklore hero. "Tayo" is the name of a traditional folklore hero at Laguna whose pet eagle takes him to visit and hunt at the home of Spider Woman. Secret names are carefully guarded and rarely mentioned, which leads to the use of "nicknames" such as those of "Ts'eh" or "Rocky."

Both Tayo's environment and Tayo himself have become saturated with the color yellow. He has become a "yellow" person through his love for Ts'eh, the Yellow Woman, a mutation that was catalyzed by inhaling the penetrating yellow moonlight reflected in mountain lion's eyes. This transformation culminates in the slanting rays announcing early morn when "he crossed the river at sunrise." Just as the Katcina reach this river at dawn, Tayo's "safe return" occurs at sunrise at a critical moment of the seasonal cycle: the autumnal equinox when winter commences and summer ends. These diurnal and seasonal periods of time governed by the Kurena shamans prompt the suggestion that Ku'oosh, the Laguna medicine man who treats Tayo, is the cheani heading the Kurena medicine society, and Tayo may also be meeting with its membership in the kiva. Kurena songs are performed early each morning during the calendar of ceremonial dances. "The Kurena lead the people back from the harvest," explains Boas, an event placing their songs in the seasonal cycle between the corn harvest and the winter solstice; they are custodians of the Sun's "turning back," leaders of the winter moiety.

The connection between Ku'oosh and Ts'eh dramatizes the story of the Kurena and Our Mother in Laguna philosophy. Mythology recounts that the Kurena came up with Our Mother from the underworlds, an event ranking the Kurena foremost among the medicine societies. They make and tend the sacred corn fetishes named "Our Mother." "The Shamanistic groups prepare the masks in the houses of Antelope [Ts'eh] and Badger [Descheeny] clans"—masks that Tayo discovers stored in the southwest corner of the kiva, hidden from the eyes of the "uninitiated." The entire "Katcina cult remained under the control" of these two clans, who were the guardians of all spirits. The Kurena go to live in the Northeast—the same direction taken by Ts'eh when she parts from Tayo at the end of Ceremony. But their provenance is in the West, as in Ts'eh's in her guise as Tse-pi'na, whom Allen terms "Western Mountain Woman." The Kurena (Ku'oosh) are the male caretakers of the visible aspect (corn fetishes) of the key female personae in Laguna belief, so it is logically consistent that Ts'eh would share a common destination with them.

Going home, Tayo is bathed in pale light, like the "sunrise" in Silko's verses that open and close the novel; the word "sunrise" also ends the Kurena's dawn songs. This reiterates an earlier baptism by the sun when Tayo was in utero. Auntie reports watching his mother: "Right as the sun came up, she walked under that big cottonwood tree, and I could see her clearly: she had no clothes on. Nothing. She was completely naked except for her high-heel shoes." Silko notes it was customary for Laguna lovers to meet down among the willows and tamarisk beside the San Jose River, so it is a place for conception.

Life is made by Our Mother just as it is taken away, so it is not a surprise that abortions occur in a similar setting. One day near Gallup, a child finds where his mother disposed of bloody rags; the place was "near the side of the arroyo where she had buried the rags in the yellow sand." Instead of being bathed in sunrise's yellow light, he is covered and filled with pale yellow sand like the rags discarded by this mother. Just as the fetus is buried, Tayo is cast off by his social mothers. He is lost. In dreams his loss masquerades as a burial in yellow sand, like that of Old Betonie, the breed medicine man, who was also buried just after birth before he was rescued from the trash pile by his mother. Abandoning unwanted life, mothers leave the fetus or newborn to die in the arroyos, the cutting edge of the landscape.

Comparable imagery recurs in connection with Ts'eh as both mother and lover, though for lovers some of this imagery is revised. To achieve conception of his own life, Tayo penetrates the sand beyond his body and thus preempts the action of burial that signifies death. The first time the two make love, he "felt the warmth close around him like river sand," and later, "he dreamed he made love with her there. He felt the warm sand on his toes and knees; he felt her body, and it was warm as the sand, and he couldn't feel where her body ended and the sand began." Traversing the "sandy ridge" with Ts'eh, crossing the ruins left by the ancient ones, he is struck with the immensity of the grand scheme, "the way the arroyo sand swallowed time" and intuits that Ts'eh is the land, the Mother, and that she is eternal: "He could feel where she had come from, and he understood where she would always be." Ts'eh walks toward the Northeast where the Kurena reside; she admonishes Tayo to "remember everything" and tells him, "I'll see you." Her departure provokes another dream like the one caused by a mother's leaving.

Mother and lover, birth and sex, yellow light and yellow sand. Tayo achieves his identity in union with the land through women. Yellow Woman, the infinite, is the Laguna composite model of Woman—a facet of the Spider mater and creatrix, Thought Woman.

Various ideological principles at Laguna reflect core feminocentric values within a matrilineal system of descent. This model has been detailed as a guide to characteristic structures underlying the powerful feminine in Laguna culture. By summarizing its salient points, I hope to encourage scholars to apply this exemplar more broadly for understanding non-Keresan texts authored by other Native Americans.

In numerous ways, Tayo starts out as being "lost"; his ultimate achievement, therefore, is "belonging." Rites for his "initiation into Motherhood" are eventually completed, and the half-breed finds himself continuously striving for equilibrium within Spider Woman's teleological doctrines. On the human level, the culture hero returns to his natal home, reentering the bosom of his family. Tayo's social position is determined by the maternal line within family, clan, and cosmos—a view confirmed by Tayo's waking dream that "Josiah was driving the wagon, old Grandma was holding him, and Rocky whispered, 'my brother.' They were taking him home." On the supernatural level, Tayo reaches unity with Yellow Woman; he knows at last his Indian identity, his name.

Tayo is mobile and mortal. Ts'eh is grounded and enduring; through her Tayo comprehends the sacred reality that the tribe embodies. She is the source, the female fulcrum of this gynocratic system. As she thinks, reality is named: cosmogony is woven into her linguistic universe. Fashioning celestial and earthly bodies with their finely wrought spatial/temporal designs, the mater-creatrix fabricates women, deities, animals, and humankind, all of which participate in the dialect of creation and are related to everything else material and spiritual; and She designs systems of order according to the cardinal directions, the cycle of the sun, and matriliny. Myth sanctifies the primacy of matrilineal symbolism on the one hand and decrees the sacred vital force of the clan on the other, and this vitality becomes manifest in yellowness, color of the stuff of corn, personhood, women, and Our Mother.

Utilizing methods predicated on the art of telling stories at Laguna, Silko gives shape poetically to Spider Woman's thought world. Her focal point is Tayo as he undergoes a ceremony reuniting him with the land, the place from which he originates, because, as Silko declares, "we came out of this land and we are hers." He can only be healed by enacting Josiah's teachings about being and becoming one with the earth. Silko depicts this transformation through metaphors of Tayo's immersion in women, light, water, and the land: congruent symbols formulating the generative, conceptual power of Spider Woman, who symbolizes the ultimate feminine principle, the template for Yellow Woman/All Women.

Tayo portrays the culture hero, the lyric figure of a yellow man returning to Laguna beneath the shelter of the golden leaves of the old cottonwood where his Mother-Lover stood in another dawn pregnant with his seed. Coming full circle, he arrives in the end at sunrise: whole, loved, and home at last, like the Katcina. His homecoming transpires near the autumnal equinox under the dominion of the Kurena medicine society. In the kiva, thought to replicate Spider Woman's home within the earth at shipap, he is confirmed ceremonially after relating his journey to the world of Spider Woman—a journey that parallels the visit of his analogue in folklore. This is Silko's portrait of the questing half-breed, who overcomes his alienation and untangles the twisted cords of his ancestry.

Out of forgetfulness, Tayo cursed away the rain and became lost. Now he wins back the rain by native rules through his relationship with Yellow Woman when he remembers, realizing that "she had always loved him, she had never left him; she had always been there." Standing on the bridge outside of Gallup, on the way to visit Betonie, Tayo makes a prophetic wish for a "safe return." His self-fulfilling thought is transformed into a named reality, for his ritual process is one of being "called back." Through utterance, Tayo is transported "back home" where "belonging," "long life," and "happiness" prevail, becoming, in other words, a person "our Mother would remember." He has found interconnectedness through Her, the one who makes the unmade into all things: he has a name, he has a place, he has a story, he has returned to his people and the land, he is one with Thought Woman and Her metaphysics—he is laced paradoxically into Her "verbal" legacy of "blood memory."