The End

Drugs and Alcohol 

Tayo’s long ceremony is almost to an end.  A ceremony is a series of transitions that helps one get to a better state of mind.  Tayo did what old Betonie said: he found the stars, the cattle, the mountain, and the woman.  There were many obstacles and distractions along Tayo’s journey, including drugs, alcohol, friends, and family.  Tayo learns that western medicine is only a temporary way out from facing life challenges.  “…the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him.  He never knew how long he had been lost there, in that hospital in Los Angeles”(Silko 213).  The medicine acted like a scapegoat from his PTS and only made his problems larger.  Alcohol acts in the same way, by clouding Tayo’s mind from the war in the Philippians and the deaths of Josiah and Rocky.  Tayo eventually learns by watching Harley and Leroy drink their pain away and pass out drunk, that alcohol is a procrastination of facing fears.  “The foam was warm; it stung his tongue…He gripped the can tight, trying to squeeze away the shaking in his hands”(Silko 222-223).  Even when Tayo drinks with his “buddies” Leroy and Harley, it leads to him throwing up, being lost, with his buddies turned against him.  “Suddenly it hit him, in the belly, and spread to his chest in a single surge: he knew then that they were not his friends but had turned against him, and the knowledge left him hollow and dry inside, like a locust’s shell”(Silko 225).  Throughout Tayo’s ceremony, he is constantly fighting against family and friends.  He deals with the demeaning stories of his mother, his unforgiving aunt, his evil cousin Emo, the deaths of Rocky and Josiah, and his drunk, backstabbing friends.  Tayo eventually comes to an understanding that evilness is caused by witchery and that it resides in individuals, not races or groups. 

                                                                                                    Betrayal 

            The witchery manipulates people to think they are more or less superior to others.  All of the exaggerated stereotypes of the drunken Indian and all of the transferred oppression in the world are caused by the witchery.  “It was difficult then to call up the feeling of Ts’eh and old Betonie.  It was easier to feel and to believe the rumors.  Crazy. Crazy Indian.  Seeing things.  Imagining things”(Silko 225).  The witchery pushes Tayo to fade into his past life of staying at the white hospital and binge drinking alcohol.  As Tayo watches Emo, Leroy, and Pinkie torture Harley to death, he feels the anger and need to lash out against them.  But, Tayo realizes that, “There was no way the destroyers would lose: either way they had a victim and a corpse”(Silko 233).  No matter how bad Tayo wants to consume to the witchery, he prevents himself.  The witchery wanted Tayo to stab Emo, to complete its plan.  “The witchery almost ended the story according to plan…He would have been another victim, a drunk Indian war veteran settling an old feud”(Silko 235).  Tayo is able to see past the witchery and leave the situation.  Tayo’s journey then comes to an end and the ceremony is complete. Tayo realizes that in order to heal, one needs community, storytelling, and nature.  “He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together-the old stories, the war stories, their stories-to become the story that was still being told.  He was not crazy; he had never been crazy.  He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time”(Silko 229).  Tayo understands that as the world changes, one must transition through it and make changes to adapt.  Nature and community help one recognize his or her self, and stories help prevent history from happening again.                   

                                                          Storytelling 

                                                          

Nature 

The Quest

Tayo is on a quest to find the mountain, the stars, the cattle, and the woman.  The mountain helps Tayo with his PTS, the stars help Tayo connect to the sprits, the cattle give Tayo recollection of Josiah, and the woman represents Ts’eh.  Tayo first runs into Ts’eh while riding his horse across a field.  Ts’eh seems to look different than many other women.  She has light brown skin, ocher eyes (earthy color) that slant up with her cheekbones “like the face of an antelope dancer’s mask”(Silko 164) and “she is wearing a man’s shirt tucked into a yellow skirt that hung below her knees”(Silko 164).  She did not seem to care what she looked like, unlike many other women who dress and put makeup on to fit in with society.  She wears her hair down and has moccasins with rainbirds carved into the silver buttons on the side.  The rain triggers Tayo’s PTS, but the birds help him connect back to Nature and heal him.  Tayo has dinner at Ts’eh place as the sunsets and the stars come out.  “He got up from the table and walked back through the rooms.  He pushed the porch screen door wide open and looked up at the sky: Old Betonie’s stars were there”(Silko 166).  As Tayo observes the stars, he becomes at one peace with himself.  He is able to recognize his surroundings and appreciate what he has.  Tayo sleeps with Ts’eh that night and then voyages out to the mountains the next morning to find Josiah’s cattle.  Tayo wakes up looking at the morning stars, smelling the distinct kinds of snow, and lastly, smelling the horses from the corral.  “Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time”(Silko 168).  Tayo is now recognizing the present and using his senses with his current surroundings, instead of flashbacking to past memories.  Tayo saw the sunrise as a new beginning, to be able to start over.

Tayo takes a mare up to the mountain to find Josiah’s cattle.  Tayo already found the stars and “Betonie’s vision was a story he could feel happening-from the stars and the woman, the mountain and the cattle would come”(Silko 173).  Tayo is skeptical about this journey at first, but he is now coming to terms with it.  He follows a steep mountain trail that is too narrow to even turn around.  He reaches the top of a sand rock mesa and looks out towards the vast country.  Tayo observes the river below is cut off by a deep arroyo, and the valley land is full of cities. White civilization controlled the land below, but the mesa was untouched; “But from this place there was no sign the white people had ever come to this land; they had no existence then, except as he remembered them”(Silko 171).  The mesa is untouched by the destroyers, however, as Tayo continues up the trail, the land becomes fenced off by white ranchers.  Tayo did not understand how Josiah’s cattle ended up inside a white man’s property, “only brown-skinned people were thieves; white people didn’t steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted”(Silko 177).  Tayo then realizes the lies and the witchery of society. “He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself.  The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what hey were doing to each other”(Silko 177).  The lie is that some races are more superior to other races.  Tayo grew up learning that white people are the most civilized, because of their wealth and great technology, but they are truly no better than any other race.  They like to contain everything they can get their hands on.  They built their nation off stolen land and take things that are not theirs to own.  The misdoings of white people are then blamed on Mexicans or Indians because of transferred oppression.  For example, Tayo hesitated when accusing a white person from stealing Josiah’s cattle, but didn’t hesitate when accusing a Mexican or Indian.  Tayo cut a twenty-foot gap in the fence and began his search.  As Tayo walks up and down ridges and through vast clearings, he realizes that, “He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years.  Hunting was good for that. Old Betonie was right.  It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too”(Silko 178).  That was the true reason to find the cattle, to take his mind off the past.  Tayo eventually finds the cattle, but loses them when he falls of his horse and passes out on the lava rock of the mountain.  Two white ranchers approach Tayo to arrest him for trespassing, but soon leave him to hunt the mountain lion that helped Tayo find the cattle in the first place.  He lied in the rock lost and with great pain, “but lying above the center that pulled him down closer felt more familiar to him than any embrace he could remember, and he was sinking into the elemental arms of mountain silence…He could secure the thresholds with molten pain and remain; or he could let go and flow back.  It was up to him”(Silko 187).  Tayo finds the mountain.  He is able to connect to the nature of the mountain and control his PTS.  He can now go through pain and suffering without triggering past memories of pain and suffering.  Tayo eventually comes down the mountain to find the cattle at corralled at Ts’eh place.  Tayo has found the stars, the cattle, the mountain, and is about to find the woman, Ts’eh.   

Living in the Present

Tayo leaves Betonie’s with a new mindset.  He must learn to not dwell on his past memories, but to live in the current moment.  Tayo begins his new journey walking down the side of the highway with no real direction.  “He didn’t want any more rides.  He wanted to walk until he recognizes himself again”(Silko 143).  Tayo is trying to connect to his surroundings and the present; he is finding his current self and not being caught behind with his past actions.  Some old friends driving by soon interrupt Tayo from his walk: Harley and Leroy.  Tayo wants to keep walking, but he has no choice in refusing a ride from them because they would have drove alongside of him until he got in the car.  Tayo sees that they brought a woman with them named Helen Jean.  He notices that she is wearing heavy mascara, her hair is tightly curled, and she keeps applying red lipstick.  “Leroy and Harley…didn’t watch her the way Tayo did.  Her perfume was close and heavy; breathing it was like swallowing big red roses; it choked him.  He turned his face to the fresh air rushing in the window”(Silko 144).  Helen reminded Tayo of his mother, with her clothing, red lipstick, and her overall personality.  Tayo is looking for a woman he can love, not to have lust for.  He knows that only bad can come from lust and sex for money, like his mother coming home completely naked and disorientated with only a purse and red lip stick.  Tayo tries to leave Harley’s rez car (an old, junky, makeshift car that white people sell to Indians) again, but Harley grabs him by the arm.  Tayo realizes that Harley and Leroy are his only friends left, no more Josiah or Rocky.  He gets back into the car and starts drinking.  However, Tayo is not drinking to escape the past, but to feel the sensations of what’s going on around him.  “He didn’t have to remember anything, he didn’t have to feel anything but this; and he wished the truck would never stop moving, that they could ride like that forever”(Silko 147).  Tayo is beginning to live more in the present and

not in the past.

Tayo, Leroy, Harley, and Helen eventually end up sleeping at a bar off the side of the road.  Tayo wakes up to Harley and Leroy all beaten up and a white man telling him to leave.  Tayo begins to wonder how long Harley and Leroy can survive this kind of lifestyle of getting constantly drunk, passing out, and getting beaten up.  “How long before one of them got stabbed in a bar fight, not just knocked out?  How long before this old truck swerved off the road or head-on into a bus?  But it didn’t make much difference anyway”(Silko 156).  Tayo begins to realize the severity of their PTS and how the witchery has fooled them.  They represent the stereotype of the drunken Indian: sleeping wherever they passed out, rolling over women, vomiting what they had drank the night before, and not caring where or when they will die.  “The drinking and hell raising were just things they did, as he had done sitting at the ranch all afternoon, watching the yellow cat bite the air for flies; passing the time away, waiting for it to end”(Silko 156).  Tayo can now see the life of Harley and Leroy from an outer perspective and can relate it to his own life.  He finds that getting drunk constantly to pass the time does not make it easier to live life, it only makes it more painful.  Tayo sees that Harley had thrown up all over himself and one of them had pissed their pants in the car.  Tayo pulled the car over and, “pushed the door open, and something gave way in his belly.  He vomited out everything he had drunk with them, and when that was gone, he was still kneeling on the road beside the truck, holding his heavy belly, trying to vomit out everything-all the past, all his life”(Silko 156).  Tayo wants to purge out all of his life before this moment and to have a fresh start.  He does not want to live the life of Harley or Leroy anymore and realizes that, “they tried to sink the loss in booze, and silence their grief with war stories about their courage, defending the land they had already lost”(Silko 157).  Tayo knows that he must make changes to become whole again, that he must continue his journey until he finds what old Betonie told him to find: the mountain, the cattle, the woman, and the stars.     

       

Healing

Tayo for the first time is confronting his past and is starting to heal his sickness.  He travels a far distance with his uncle Robert to meet a new medicine man, Betonie. Tayo is doubtful that any medicine man can understand him, but he notices that Betonie does not act like any other medicine man.  Betonie is much different than old man Kush in the sense that he is a current medicine man, where as Kush is a very old and a traditional medicine man. Betonie integrated the traditional ways of a medicine man with western medicine.  He understands that healing and medicine have to change with time.  “In the old days it was simple.  A medicine man could get by without all these things.  But nowadays…”(Silko 111).  Healing and ceremonies are meant to evolve with time, not to stay completely stagnant.  “They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done great power unleashed…but long ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation singing chants”(Silko 116).  At a time it was fine to preform traditional ceremonies, but once the white people came, ceremonies need to be changed due to the shift in ages. Betonie is able to integrate and adapt to these changes.  Betonie teaches Tayo that he can be one with nature and machine.  All of the cardboard boxes filled with old cloths, rags, telephone books, reddish willow twigs, dried sage and mountain tobacco are an example of combing nature with materials.  Betonie is “comfortable” living with poverty and trash all around him because he is connected to the land of his ancestors.  “We know these hills, we are comfortable here…not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills”(Silko 108).  Betonie sees it as the Navajos were here in Gallup first and this land will always be theirs; it is the white people’s city that  

is out of place.

Tayo begins to let out his thoughts about Josiah, Rocky and Emo.  Tayo tells Betonie about how he let Josiah die in the Philippine jungles with the rest of the Japanese soldiers, even though it was impossible for Josiah to physically be there.  Betonie goes on to tell Tayo that he is not crazy for thinking that; “It isn’t surprising you saw him with them.  You saw who they were.  Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done: you saw the witchery ranging as wide as this world”(Silko 114).  Betonie explains how we all come from the same place; we are all human.  This goes along with what John Trudell said in Reel Injun, that humans created the concept of race and other differences between them.  White people and Native Americans are social constructs that separate humans based on their skin color.  This causes people assume that all White people or Indians act the same way and have the same characteristics.  Tayo sees all white people as thieves and destroyers of their homeland, while all white people see Indians as second-class citizens that are not as civilized.  Betonie tells Tayo, “nothing is that simple…you don’t write off all the people, just like you don’t trust all the Indians”(Silko 118).  One can’t use overlying stereotypes to judge an individual; evil does not come from a race or a group, but from an individual.  Emo is an example of an individual that represents evil.  Emo believes that, “the land is no good, and we must go after what they have, and take it from them”(Silko 122).  Emo thinks that Indians have nothing compared to white people and that Indian ceremonies cannot help in this day and age.  But, Betonie explains how the evilness or the witchery, “want us to believe all evil resides with white people…but white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs”(Silko 122).  This goes back to explain how one has to transition through time and change to survive; “There are balances and harmonies always shifting, always necessary to maintain”(Silko 120).  Tayo is beginning to understand evil resides in individuals and that change is necessary to life.