Ceremony (58-142)

We get poetic installments of the Hummingbird tale on p. 42-45, 49-50, 65-66, 76, 97, 104-105, 140 (to this point) How might you relate this story to Tayo’s?

The poetic installments of the Hummingbird tale relate to many aspects of the story Tayo tells. When Tayo and Josiah admire the spring Josiah explains that people curse droughts because then they have no food but every part of the drought is just as much a part of them "the wind and the dust, they are part of life too" so cursing those important aspects of life is just the same as cursing water and rain. Tayo relates this to the tale of the Hummingbird because the people forget to praise corn and mother nature because they are focusing on other insignificant things. I think Tayo relates these because people are so quick to blame anything but themselves for things that have gone wrong, but it's when you get outside of what is real that that starts to happen. Just as in the Hummingbird tale, the people don't show enough affection and praise to the things that are actually helping them live and instead they are spending time focusing on thigns that can amuse them.



P. 62-63 covers the theme of Christianity as a coercive force of assimilation. By what means does this occur and what feelings does it evoke?

Chrisianity was brought by the "fifth world" and "tried to crush the single clan name." The European world suddenly took over and everything had a different meaning and had a different way of being done. Instead of their being a mother where everyone was her children and they all held pieces of eachother, now their was a Jesus Christ who saved "only the individual soul." When people like Little Sister would go against the Catholic Priest everyone that was a part of her clan felt her falling away from them. This feeling was evoked because they were connected in a different way than just Christianity. They all had the same mother and were a part of eachother which made assimilation very difficult because those feelings don't just go away.





We learn of Josiah’s new cattle business and of the almost wild Mexican cattle he buys. What symbolic associations do the Mexican cattle carry? (Consider breeds and breeding, contrast with Herefords, where they go, and relation to nature, fences etc).

The Mexican cattle that Josiah buys are very symbolic. In the story Josiah says how their is nothing worse than scared cattle that don't move around because if you keep them together and pinned up they will remain scared and won't eat the right things or get the right feel for the land. Josiah says that the mexican cattle will roam, they aren't afraid, and they will eat much more food and grow bigger than the white mans cattle. This whole scction is very symbolic to views on the white man versus the Idians. The white men follow a strict social order, they conform out of fear. The Idians become a part of the land and are considered wild by the Europeans, they have more advantages because of their extending boundaries.