The white man behind the counter regards Tayo suspiciously, which makes Tayo want to laugh because the man. He stops at a truck stop to buy some candy and immediately notices a calendar hanging behind the desk, eerily similar to the calendars he saw at Betonies. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. Tayo hitchhikes away from Betonie s after the scalp ceremony is complete. Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. It is a seasonal ceremony that occurs in the spring or summer, and as a result of the influence of Spanish missionaries, it is usually held on the feast day of. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. It was the white people who had nothing it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Laguna Pueblo young man.

“The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers.

Ceremony silko