Bird Summary

In summarizing Gloria Bird’s article one notices immediately that Bird is using her personal life experience and the American Indian’s experience to draw from Silko’s novel “Ceremony”. In her article she focuses on topic colonization in both the story and in the lives of herself and her family which she parallels to the experiences of Tayo in ceremony. Using the story as a tool Bird tries to define the experience of colonization and gain a better understanding of it and its byproduct.

In Bird’s article she also introduces this idea of there being multiple dual consciousnesses throughout the book and in Native American thinking that all stem from the American Indian Experience in the United States. One of the first examples Bird gives of there being a dual consciousness is in the mind. She says that the only way to undo the process of colonization is through decolonizing the mind at the same time she thinks of her people as a dying people like the process intended for the American Indians to think.

Another example she give is language and how it was used as a key tool to enforce colonization. Bird acknowledges the fact that she too like Tayo in “Ceremony” has a lack of knowledge and understanding of their languages and must struggle to gather meaning of it. She identifies this as a second kind of consciousness. This being a kind of guilt because of your lack of knowledge but at the same time liberation because of your new confidence in knowing that the blame comes from that process of colonization. Through the entire article she uses many other examples but mainly focuses on the affects of the consciousness of colonization and decolonization as a way of understanding the American Indians struggle.