Ceremony 56-105

In this part of the story we are starting to see the good and evil people have inside of them. The boys are drinking at a bar and Emo's true colors are shown when he starts talking about the war. " 'We were the best. U.S. Army. We butchered every Jap we found. No Jap bastard was fit to take prisoner. We had all kinds of ways to get information out of them before they died. Cut off this, cut off these'  Emo was grinning and hunched over staring at the teeth"(Silko) 56. Emo was telling Pinkie, Harley and Tayo about the ways they would torture the Japanese soldiers. He looked at war differently then the other men, he enjoyed killing people. "Tayo could hear it in his voice when he talked about the killing- how Emo grew from each killing. Emo fed off each man he killed and the higher the rank of the dead man, the higher it made Emo"(Silko 56). Emo would feed off of killing other people and he liked to kill the men with high authority because it would make him feel superior. The way Emo was talking about killing was getting under Tayo's skin at this point and he kept drinking the more Emo would talk. Throughout the story Tayo will have flashbacks of different memories when he gets put in a bad situation. He goes from listening to Emo talk to think about a memory in an old mans field. "Tiny black ants were scurrying over the shattered melons; the flies were rubbing their feet on fragments of pulp and rind..."(Silko) 57. Tayo is thinking about a time when the ants were eating a melon that was decaying. He thinks about the circle of life and how decay and death happens. He uses this memory to try to distract him from the things Tayo is talking about.


Assimilation and Integration are also shown when Tayo is looking back on a memory with Rocky. They're discussing the different ways to raise cattle. Rocky is reading books about how cattle should be raised and asks Tayo of his opinion. "The problem was the books were written by white people who did not think about drought or winter blizzards or dry thistles, which the cattle had to live with"(Silko 69). Tayo is telling Rocky that the books are written not from the perspective of people who have actually raised cattle or from people who have lived through and seen the conditions that the cattle go through. Then Rocky argues that they are scientists and they know what they are talking about. "These books are written by scientists. They know everything there is to know about the beef cattle. That's the trouble with the way the people around here have always done things- they never knew what they were doing"(Silko 70). This is the where assimilation vs. integration comes into play again if the scientists were to take the information the Native people could give to them and integrated the two different sides everything would work better. The fact that Rocky wasn't seeing it like this made Tayo sad. " Tayo was suddenly sad because what Rocky said was true. What did they know about raising cattle? They were scientists"(Silko 70). Tayo is sad because thats the way everything has been; assimilation and not integration.