Towards decolonization ot the mind and text

Gloria Bird begins the essay by talking about how people are living results of their colonization.  She talks of how stories, songs, and knowledge will be gone because of people passing away but then soon realizes that this is not necessarily true.  She recalls a song that she still knows even without the existence of the people who began it.  She then feels as though she is stealing a language because her mother was mulitlingual and she only spoke in English.  

"Readers must learn to 'see' the world differently if they want to understand this work. This is the fundamental challenge of critical fictions." (4)  This is referencing Ceremony, a novel that pushes a person to to see the world through different eyes.  She explains that the challenge is getting the reader to "view reality through the perceptions of the native other."  This means that the reader would put him or herself into the story and try to experience the story through the native's eyes.  She explains that when Silko writes Ceremony in fragments, explains how each thing belongs to something else.  This means that the fragments are connected in some way and come together at the end to have more meaning.  Perhaps Tayo never noticed little things as much as he did after going through a traumatic war experience.  "Nothing was all good or all bad either; it all depended."(4)  Gloria birds explains that we must be willing to ee the world differently and then references Ku'oosh by talking of how he uses old language to talk to Tayo.  None of the words were his own.  

Bird then discusses Auntie and how she always went to church and said she was a Christian to save her own soul.  She always went by herself.  Silko's strategy was to present Tayo and Auntie's tribal historicity.  

Gloria Bird continues to give many examples of how peopleneed to learn to see the world differently.  She explains that she now knows that Western culture has known all along of the potential for language's capacity to create." (7)