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The Diseased and the Decolonized: Travel and Disease in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Tracks

This paper examines the correspondence between travel and disease in Native American novels Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko and Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich. Juxtaposing the novels' protagonists, Tayo and Pauline, it focuses on the detrimental effects of their dislocation from the tribal matrix and their contact with the dominant world. Whereas Tayo's identity quest is centripetal and in itself represents a "homing--‐in" journey, a ceremony of convalescence from the painful emotional ramifications of World War II trauma and his alienation from the Pueblo tradition, Pauline's voyage to the all-white community of Argus leads to a complete mental imbalance and disintegration. In her attempt to assimilate, Pauline becomes obsessed with racial purity and Christianity, and engages in malicious and dysfunctional behavior. Struggling to deny her Anishinaabe background and purge herself from "its evils, " she harms and kills other people, starts practicing bizarre rituals of asceticism and bodily mortification, and ultimately descends into madness. Observing the two characters' different understanding of indigenous epistemologies, and interpreting their bodies as constructs "imprinted by history" and "disciplinary discursive practices, " the paper attempts to expose the correlation between disease and colonization, i.e. healing and decolonization.

Disease ; travel ; Leslie Marmon Silko ; Ceremony ; Louise Erdrich ; Tracks ; Anishinaabe ; decolonization

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