Ceremony

Content Warning: This section references alcohol addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical violence, sexual violence, torture, sex work, ableism, anti-Indigenous slurs, and anti-unhoused and anti-Indigenous biases.

A verse section details the creation of the world. Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, thinks up the world as a story to tell. Tayo’s story is a story within a story of the larger world. An unnamed “he” (possibly Betonie) says that stories like Tayo’s are necessary to keep death and illness at bay. He says that “they” seek to destroy stories in order to destroy the listener’s people (presumably the Laguna Pueblo) but assures the listener that the stories remain alive and growing inside him (the speaker). An unnamed “she” (possibly Ts’eh) then says that the only good cure is a ceremony. The following page is blank except for the word “Sunrise.”

Tayo awakens in what he thinks is a Japanese prisoner of war camp, though it is actually his home on the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Tayo experiences flashbacks to his service in World War II, including his participation in the execution of Japanese prisoners of war. Tayo relives this particular scene over and over because one of the prisoners looked like his uncle, Josiah, who died while Tayo was deployed.