violence and cruelty of history. Silko uses trauma and prejudice to tell her story, and it brings a lot of the ugliness of humanity to light. Tayo's trauma also serves as a story telling medium. The reader learns about his past through these flashes of memory, and it allows for a deeper experience within the story. Tayo's trauma manifests in visual reproductions, causing him to relive the same horrible experiences over and over again. Upon his return home, Tayo reacts to his survivur's guilt as many have before him. By finding his way to the bottom of bottle after bottle. The white doctors can't help him, and the Natives can't either until he meets Betonie. This healer helps Tayo get through his dark thoughts and even turns it around so that Tayo plans to become a native healer as well. Hybridity A major theme of Ceremony focuses on the struggles that stem from the mixed-race heritage of Tayo. Tayo is a half-white half-Pueblo Laguna Native American man who grapples with his identity after he returns home from WWII. As he comes to terms with tragic events he faced during the war, he must also navigate his assimilation back into society as a Native American man. Hybridity is also encountered in the landscapes of the novel. After serving in the tropical wet Philippine Islands during the war, Tayo returns home to find the Pueblo people in a drought. Tayo had cursed the rain as a soldier, but returns to find his home in need of it. Other themes involving hybridity include the loss of land and a forced assimilation into society. Tayo and his family must interact with the land in ways that are forced on them by a history of colonization while trying to maintaining their cultural traditions. Hybridity is something that Tayo struggles with heavily over the course of the novel. Constantly at war with the two sides of his heritage, Tayo has to figure out how to be both white and Laguna without losing the other part of himself. Matriarchal culture In Ceremony and in the Laguna culture, a matriarchal society, there is a matriarchal hierarchy. The rules of matrilineal descent dictate that a bride continue to live with or near her mother, and not her husband's family, even after the bride's marriage (matrilocal residence/matrilocality). The husband must then move into his wife's - and mother-in-law's household, and