Ceremony Summary

Tayo is sick in bed, his thoughts all jumbled up. He does his best not to think about being in the jungle on a Pacific Island, but he can't help remembering the time they had to shoot a bunch of Japanese soldiers. One of them had his uncle Josiah's face—a vision all the more disturbing because we know that Josiah actually did die while Tayo was away at war. The doctors say Tayo is suffering from "battle fatigue," or what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

At home, a drought has been going on for six years. Tayo feels responsible for the drought, because while he was in the jungle he had prayed for the rain to stop so his cousin Rocky's wound would heal.

Tayo's friend Harley shows up on a burro (donkey) and convinces Tayo to try to get to the nearest bar on muleback. Both Harley and Tayo have developed a drinking problem since the war, and their families have holed them up in a remote place to try to keep them out of trouble. Clearly this plan isn't working.

When Tayo first got out of the hospital and came back to Laguna, his Auntie took care of him. Tayo and his Auntie have a strained relationship. She took him in when he was 4 years old because her sister wasn't able to take care of him. But he was always a reminder of the shame his mother brought on the family by going out with men who weren't Indian.

Tayo isn't getting better at Auntie's house, so old Grandma insists they call a medicine man, old Ku'oosh. He performs a ceremony given to warriors after they kill an enemy, even though Tayo doesn't remember killing anyone. The ceremony helps a little bit, but old man Ku'oosh says it hasn't been very effective for any of the men who came home from WWII. This new war was too monstrous—the old ceremonies don't work anymore.

After the ceremony with old Ku'oosh, Tayo no longer cares about living. He goes drinking with the other war veterans, Harley, Leroy, and Emo. The alcohol is like medicine for them, helping them forget the trauma of war. The friends drink beer and tell stories about their glory days as soldiers in the U.S. Army, when they were accepted in white society. Most of the stories are dirty and crude and involve going out with white women. The stories and the drinking are like a parody of traditional Laguna rituals.

Tayo bitterly reminds his friends that the good times are long gone—now that the war is over and the government no longer needs them to serve as soldiers, racism is back in full force. Emo hates that Tayo is ruining his fun, and we see that there's a deeper antagonism between the two men: Emo hates Tayo because he is half white.

Emo carries a bag of human teeth around his neck that he knocked out of the corpse of a Japanese soldier. He's a truly violent person who enjoyed killing and torturing people during the war. Emo's love of violence disgusts Tayo so much that, one day while the men are performing their drinking ritual, Tayo leaps across the table and stabs Emo in the belly with a broken beer bottle. Emo lives, and Tayo is sent back to the mental hospital.

Before the war, Tayo's Uncle Josiah had paid five hundred dollars for some spotted Mexican cattle on the recommendation of his girlfriend, a Mexican woman and former cantina dancer named Night Swan. Josiah planned to use these tough, rangy cattle to develop a new breed that would be better able to survive the droughts of the New Mexican landscape. Auntie disapproved of Josiah's relationship with a Mexican woman and was convinced Night Swan tricked him into buying worthless cattle, but both the cattle and Night Swan seemed to make Josiah really happy. To each his own, right?

One day Josiah asked Tayo to deliver a note to Night Swan and Tayo went to bed with her. Night Swan had hazel eyes, like Tayo, and seemed to have some sort of indefinable power. She told the boy that, though he may not understand it yet, he was a part of some sort of change. Tayo never saw her again, because Night Swan left after Josiah's funeral during the war.

Old man Ku'oosh tells Tayo he has to get more help because the ceremony didn't help him or the other war veterans. Auntie's husband Robert takes Tayo to Gallup, a city where lots of Indians from the reservation go to look for work but end up living in the streets, addicted to drinking.

In a slum of Gallup known as Little Africa, prostitutes and their children live in shelters made of tin and cardboard. Many of the children are of mixed race, since the Native American women's customers are often white, black, or Mexican. We experience life in the slum from the perspective of one little boy, who has to learn how to fend for himself from a very early age. Sometimes his mother disappears or is taken away by the police, and if he isn't taken to "the Home," he has to survive on his own while he waits for her. We figure out that this little boy is Tayo. Bet you didn't see that coming, did you?

Robert takes Tayo to see the medicine man, old Betonie, a Navajo who lives in another slum in the hills north of the Gallup Ceremonial Grounds. Betonie is a little weird, and many people don't trust him because he makes changes to the old ceremonies. But Betonie explains that the ceremonies have to be changed, because the kinds of evil, or "witchery" they have to contend with have changed since the arrival of white people from Europe.

Betonie tells Tayo a story about how Indian witchery invented white people, thus unleashing the greatest evil the world had ever seen. The evil brought by the white people would bring about massacre, disease, drought, atomic war, and eventually the destruction of the whole world. That seems a little heavy handed to us, but we'll roll with it for now.

After Betonie guides Tayo through the ceremony, Tayo dreams of the spotted cattle that have been missing since before Josiah's death and knows that he needs to find them. Betonie tells Tayo that the ceremony isn't finished yet, that he should watch out for a special constellation of stars, the spotted cattle, a mountain, and a woman. He also warns Tayo to be careful because the witches will be trying to stop him from completing the ceremony.

Tayo is distracted from his quest by his drinking buddies Harley and Leroy, but eventually he realizes that the alcohol is a trap and gets back on track. When he sees the stars in the sky, he starts to follow them. They lead him to the base of Mount Taylor, where he meets a woman with ocher eyes. They sleep together, and Tayo feels happier than he has in a long time. At dawn he sings a ceremony for the sunrise. He watches the woman at her work—she seems to be some sort of medicine woman and knows a lot about plants and rocks. He then sets out in search of the cattle.

Tayo rides up Mount Taylor, which has mostly been taken over by white ranchers. It's the last place he'd expect to find the cattle, because he can't imagine a white man stealing them. After all, only Indians and Mexicans steal things—white people have money to buy anything they want. But when Tayo finds the cattle on a white man's land, he realizes that he was wrong, and calls this idea "The Lie."

Tayo cuts a gate in the super-strong fence and after an exhausting night manages to herd the cattle through it. But he falls from his horse and injures his head while trying to escape two cowboy patrols. The cowboys are about to arrest him when they are distracted by mountain lion tracks and decide to go hunting instead. Tayo manages to get away under the cover of a snowfall that he knows will also protect the mountain lion by erasing its tracks. On the way down the mountain, he meets a hunter who, as it turns out, happens to live at the woman's house. Tayo assumes the hunter is the woman's husband. Um…awkward. (Don't worry, he turns out to be her brother.)

The woman has managed to catch the cattle as they came down the mountain. Tayo finds out a few more things about her, like the fact that she seems to have some mysterious power over the weather. When Tayo returns to the house later to collect them, the woman and the hunter are gone, but the cattle have been well cared for.

Tayo can't stop thinking and dreaming about this woman. He's in love. In May he goes to stay up at the ranch and finds her camping by a spring that he knows. The woman, whose nickname is Ts'eh, seems to have the same visionary powers as Night Swan and Betonie. She teaches Tayo about plants and the earth. She also explains some things about "the witchery," like the fact that there are things worse than death. The witchery tries to gut people alive, causing them to live without feeling—like Tayo did in the hospital.

Robert comes to warn Tayo that Emo has been spreading rumors that he's crazy. Ts'eh tells Tayo that Emo will bring doctors and the police to try to take Tayo back to the hospital, and then the witchery will have won.

That night Tayo starts running. He hides in the woods, hoping to hitch a ride out of town, but the first car that comes down the road belongs to his friend Leroy. At first Tayo is relieved that his friends have come to help them, but then he figures out that they've betrayed him. Psh, some friends they are. They've been looking for him to turn him over to Emo or the authorities.

Tayo escapes from Leroy and Harley and goes to hide in an abandoned uranium mine, which he recognizes as the center of the witchery that is trying to destroy the world. While he's hiding there, Emo drives up with Leroy and Pinkie, Tayo's cousin. They have Harley in the trunk and are torturing him for letting Tayo escape. Tayo nearly comes out of hiding to try to put a stop to it by killing Emo. The moment passes, however, and Tayo retreats. Emo, Leroy, and Pinkie put Harley's body into the trunk and drive away.

Tayo has survived the night without killing Emo, and he knows he has been victorious over the witchery. He goes to see the old men in Laguna and tells them his whole story. They celebrate because he has seen "A'moo'ooh," the she-elk, whom we associate with Ts'eh.

Tayo gets news that not only Harley, but also Leroy and Pinkie have died in suspicious accidents. The old men of Laguna tell Emo to go away and never come back.

The novel ends with a poem that tells us that the witchery has turned on itself. It is dead…for now.