Ceremony

Content Warning: This section references alcohol addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical violence, sexual violence, torture, sex work, ableism, anti-Indigenous slurs, and anti-unhoused and anti-Indigenous biases.

A verse section details the creation of the world. Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, thinks up the world as a story to tell. Tayo’s story is a story within a story of the larger world. An unnamed “he” (possibly Betonie) says that stories like Tayo’s are necessary to keep death and illness at bay. He says that “they” seek to destroy stories in order to destroy the listener’s people (presumably the Laguna Pueblo) but assures the listener that the stories remain alive and growing inside him (the speaker). An unnamed “she” (possibly Ts’eh) then says that the only good cure is a ceremony. The following page is blank except for the word “Sunrise.”

Tayo awakens in what he thinks is a Japanese prisoner of war camp, though it is actually his home on the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Tayo experiences flashbacks to his service in World War II, including his participation in the execution of Japanese prisoners of war. Tayo relives this particular scene over and over because one of the prisoners looked like his uncle, Josiah, who died while Tayo was deployed.

Tayo lost his cousin, Rocky, during the war in the Bataan Death March. He blamed the jungle and its wet, humid environment for Rocky’s death since he could never blame the Japanese for the war. The Pueblo Laguna reservation has suffered from a drought for several years, which Tayo believes his curse caused (or brought back, as drought also plagued the reservation when Tayo was growing up). Before Tayo returned home, he spent several years in a veterans’ hospital on heavy doses of drugs that left him in a fog and unable to remember the passage of time.

Tayo now spends his days listless in bed, unable to work or participate in the world around him. He lives with his grandmother, his aunt Thelma, and her husband, Robert. Josiah spent his life’s savings on a herd of cattle before the war, but those cattle were stolen while Tayo was away, so Tayo has nothing to occupy his days. One day, his friend and fellow veteran Harley convinces him to go drinking at the Dixie Tavern. Tayo falls into heavy drinking with Harley, Leroy, and Emo (also veterans). Tayo drinks because it numbs the pain that has haunted him since the war and allows him to think about Rocky without crying. Rocky wanted to leave the reservation and earn respect and money in the larger world. He did not believe in the traditional ways of the Laguna Pueblo, like thanking a deer for its sacrifice after hunting the animal.

Tayo’s drinking causes him to butt heads with Emo, his fellow veteran who misses his years in military service. Emo carries around a bag of teeth he took from dead Japanese soldiers as a war trophy; when Tayo saw these teeth for the first time, he attempted to kill Emo with a broken beer bottle.

Tayo’s family sends for a medicine man, Ku’oosh, because of his behavior since the war. Ku’oosh is an old and highly traditional medicine man; he has no idea what combat was like in World War II and cannot comprehend the horrors that Tayo has experienced. Ku’oosh’s ceremonies and stories therefore do not help Tayo, and Ku’oosh’s subtle disdain for Tayo’s heritage makes Tayo reflect on his mother. She was a sex worker who lived in Gallup (Tayo lived there with her for the first few years of his life), while his father is a white man he has never met.

Tayo reminisces about his and Rocky’s recruitment into the military. Rocky, who always treated Tayo like a brother, wanted to join fresh out of high school. Tayo felt he owed it to his family to enlist and protect Rocky.

In the verse story of Hummingbird and Greenbottle Fly, a witch deceives the Laguna Pueblo people into using Ck’o’yo magic to fulfill all of their needs. Angered by this, Corn Mother stops blessing the Laguna Pueblo’s crops and leaves for the Fourth World, a magical place separate from our world, the Fifth World. The magic cannot sustain the people’s needs, so they and the animals begin to starve and die of thirst. The people ask Hummingbird to ask Corn Mother for forgiveness. Hummingbird agrees, as long as the people make a messenger to accompany him. The people perform a ceremony to make Greenbottle Fly out of mountain dirt to accompany Hummingbird as a messenger of the Fifth World.