The Use of Medicine to Cure Illness

This designation place holds legitimate for Tayo's adult life as well. The pureness schools Tayo was forced to attend, the Army, the quickens and the VA Hospital, both try to convince Tayo that the Native American traditions argon incorrect. The white Army doctors advise Tayo to use only western medicine: "No Indian medicine" (34). In effect, the Army doctor is telling Tayo to reject his native pueblo culture; the insinuation is that it is an lacking(p) culture, and from the doctor's dominant culture perspective, a culture with no deservingness or knowledge of real medicine or how the mankind body works. This, of course, is one of Silko's major points in the novel. European colonizers and by and by Americans devalued Native American culture, and treated them like lesser human beings.

Silko shows how the Veterans Administration doctors are wrong both in their attitude and their treatment. "American" medicine does not bring round Tayo; it just makes matters worse. He retreats from life and even consciousness. "For a long conviction he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It dog-tired into the white world?." (14). But Tayo wants to be invisible; it is his expressive style of dealing with his illness.

The author, however, does not share this view; Silko wants to bring Tayo issue of his white smoke-like state to find the means to re-establish his identity.

The Army doctors admit, that to them, "the c

The author's point of view, and hence the title for her novel, is denotative in two poems at the start of the novel. The poem empower "Ceremony" explains that stories are "all we have to fight get rid of illness and death, " and the poem, "What She Said," consists of just four brief lines: "The only cure/I know/is a good ceremony/that's what she express" (pp.2-3). In the Pueblo Indian culture, story telling and myth are part of the healing process.

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