Gardens in the Dunes (review)

Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko. Simon and Schuster, 1999

Once Leslie Marmon Silko came to this university as a guest lecturer for a week. That was before the university became virtual. I was asked to have coffee with her until time for whatever class was benefiting from her lectures that week. So for a week we had lattes (it is the Northwest, you know). I listened while she talked about writing Almanac of the Dead. It was an unparalleled experience for me to be able to hear a talented storyteller working out the characters and happenings of a lengthy narrative.

Gardens in the Dunes is not the Almanac redux. Why tell the same tale twice, especially when the makings of so many stories are all around? In the time when Gardens is placed, the indigenous people of the U.S. Southwest and the Mexican Northwest were experiencing what was intended to be the fatal impact of the final solution on their continued existence. The native people were driven from their homelands to exile on federal reservations in the United States and to hacienda peonage in Mexico. Those who, for whatever reason, escaped being marched to reservations or haciendas moved to the degradation of shantytowns outside towns along the railroad. There they could supply cheap labor for the townspeople. Women could sell baskets to tourists at train stations. The women could also sell their bodies to whomever paid. They could fill in the rest of survival by scavenging and begging.

In the United States, federal soldiers and federal Indian police guarded the reservations and sometimes conducted sweeps of the shantytowns. Anyone they caught was marched to a reservation. Children were routinely kidnapped and taken to carceral federal boarding schools to be held at the pleasure of the school superintendent. On the reservations and at the schools, Christian missionaries of approved denominations were assigned to preach their interpretations of the New Testament and the Bible to the people held on the reservations and to the children held in the schools. Indian police and soldiers stood ready to enforce the missionary rule also.

It was not all shantytown degradation, boarding school imprisonment, military prison camps, and economic and sexual exploitation. The Ghost Dance religion brought hope. The Messiah and the Holy Mother were coming. The aliens and the Indians who tried to be like them were going to disappear. Silko makes a point not often cited, that poor Mormons also danced the Ghost Dance. They were an oppressed people who saw a similarity in themselves and the native people. Joseph Smith, their prophet, had been murdered by a mob in Illinois; they too needed deliverance from the sorrows of this world.

Silko recognizes that the final solution was also being applied in the Mexican Northwest; the Yaqui Wars in Sonora had been going on since the first twenty years of the Spanish invasion of Mexico. Silko gives a historical account of Delena, the card reader and dog-circus woman, who searches for money to purchase arms and ammunition in Tucson to take to Sonora. The historical reality was much less romantic. All of the Yaqui settlements in the United States paid a tax to collectors who would buy the weapons of resistance in Tucson. Then ten-man squads carried the guns and ammunition south to the Bacatete Mountains, where the Yaqui guerrilla groups had their strongholds. If they had taken them to Hermosillo, as Silko would have it, the Mexican Rural Mounted Police, the infamous Rurales, would have been waiting for them just across the border, because there were spies in Tucson watching Yaqui activities and reporting to the Mexican military and the Rural Police. The smugglers would have been shot and the arms rerouted to the Rurales' barracks.

Gardens in the Dunes is centered on a group of women who are descendents of the Sand Lizard people. These people had lived for many centuries in a sand...