Timo Dersch 
Tradition and Renewal in Leslie Marmon Silko´s ‘Ceremony’ 

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics – English – Literature, Works, grade: 1, 5, University of Stuttgart, language: English, abstract: Leslie Mormon Silko, a Native American writer, grew up at the edge of the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, New Mexico, USA. Because of her mixed origins and for the fact that she was not living directly in the reservation and thereby in the pueblo society, she was not allowed to attend several rituals. Silko´s roots are Native American, Anglo American and Mexican American but she was raised and educated by her grandmother and aunts with the traditional Laguna stories. This led to a strong identification of her with the native part of her ancestry and to her writing, which always deals with Native American topics. Her writing includes autobiographical parts and lots of relations to tradition which only a member of this particular native tribe could describe as precisely as she does. In “Ceremony”, her highly regarded 1977 novel, these traditional relations seem to play an important role. The following essay will show how the importance of tradition for the Native American communities is expressed in the novel, and how it is responsible for the healing of the main protagonists illness.