Spatializing Storytelling and Recontextualizing Native American Identity and Resistance in Silko’s "Ceremony"

<p class="ql-align-justify">By foregrounding the central role of the land in the Native American Pueblo life, this study examines how Silko’s Ceremony exhibits bioregional identity as inseparable from the land, and how place-based stories operate as acts of resistance and resilience to colonial power. Through Tayo’s journey of reinhabitory redemption, Silko shows that reconnecting with the land and the stories of the land makes it conducive for the Native people to recontextualize their identity, challenge cultural destruction, and ensure the continuation of their traditions. This reclamation is not merely personal but collective, as Tayo, by immersing into the landscape and the Native stories, re-establishes the balance that is ruptured by colonial violence and war-time trauma. Thereby, Silko situates storytelling as a living ritual that connects individuals to their physical landscape, strengthens communal bonds, and sustains cultural continuity even in the face of ongoing dispossession. This understanding accentuates how stories and place are mutually vital within Indigenous worldviews. However, this profound connection is incessantly threatened by the enduring effects of colonization, which alienates many Indigenous communities from their ties with their land of origin. Consequently, storytelling emerges not only as a cultural practice but as a powerful act of resistance through which Indigenous people assert their continued presence, reconstruct fractured identities, and reclaim their bioregional relationship to land in the face of historical and ongoing colonial erasure.</p>