This passage is adapted from material published in 2001.
For Paula Gunn Allen, a Laguna Indian writer, the traditional Laguna stories that appear in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony (1977) constitute evidence of improper publication of secret clan material. Silko herself has stated that the source of these stories is Laguna oral tradition, a tradition she experienced directly growing up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. Yet though Silko may have recalled the gist of any number of such stories prior to writing Ceremony, it is also the case that all but two of the traditional stories in the novel are known to have been taken, sometimes verbatim, from preexisting ethnographic print texts rather than immediately from remembered oral performance. Even if we agree with Gunn Allen that the original performers and transcribers of these stories might have been guilty of violating clan secrets, the fact that such texts exist in print outside Ceremony, and existed well before Silko was born, puts a very different face on the charge of giving away cultural property. Rather than revealing clan secrets, Silko is repatriating Laguna "artifacts," rescuing them from their status as lifeless ethnographic museum pieces and returning them to circulation as part of an ongoing, living story