The Nineteenth-Century Garden: Imperialism, Subsistence, and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes

Gardens are "the most political thing of all—how you grow your food, whether you eat, the fact that the plant collectors followed the Conquistadors," Leslie Marmon Silko told Ellen Arnold on the eve of the publication of Gardens in the Dunes. "You have the Conquistadors, the missionaries, and right with them were the plant collectors" (Arnold 164). Gardens in the Dunes is a subtly crafted history of nineteenth-century European and American imperialism. Silko intertwines the stories of heretical scholar Hattie Palmer, her botanist husband, and Sand Lizards Indigo and Sister Salt to demonstrate the ways in which white European and American men have sought to dominate all other human beings and all of the earth's landscapes. Imperialism in Gardens in the Dunes is as intricately rendered as the spiderwebs that readers encounter in Silko's other works; it encompasses the conquest of the Americas, botanical piracy, genocide, forced Christianization, and acts of violence against women, indigenous peoples, and the earth. "Genocide . . . starts at home," Jane Tompkins warns in West of Everything (204). Silko's gardens demonstrate that imperialism begins in our own backyards.

Gardens in the Dunes returns to themes that Silko develops in her earlier novels and in her nonfiction. "In Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko revisits the American mythos of the conquest of the continent from a Native American vantage point," asserts Rachel Stein (193). Set at the end of the nineteenth century, Gardens fixes the reader's attention on the years following the open-combat phase of the Indian wars. In Gardens Silko uses the image of the garden to illustrate imperialism on international, national, local, and domestic levels. She accomplishes this by pointedly contrasting nineteenth-century American gardening aesthetics and ideologies with the Sand Lizards' subsistence farming. In doing so, Silko reaffirms the authority of Native lifeways—what Stein, referring to Ceremony, calls the tribe's "compact of reciprocity with nature" (203). And by conjoining the stories of Hattie and Indigo, Silko describes the ways in which both Native and white women survived by circumventing a system designed to subjugate or destroy them.

The Elemental Sacred

Gardens opens with Sand Lizard survivors Sister Salt and Indigo laughing and tumbling naked over the dunes, delighting in the delicious gift of rainfall. The girls' names signify their elemental relationship with their ancestral home. Salt, a mineral essential to life, betokens the dry earth of the Sand Lizards' native desert habitat. Indigo, the name of a desert plant, alludes to the younger girl's spiritual rootedness in her native ground. Indigo's name also suggests her relationship to the sacred. Later in the novel, when Indigo is invited to Susan James's annual gala, "The Masque of the Blue Garden," Silko notes, "Indigo understood immediately: blue was the color of the rain clouds" (177). As in Ceremony, rain clouds in Gardens are sacred; Indigo understands that they carry the spirits of departed loved ones as well as the power to nourish the people and their crops. Clouds, in a whirlwind of snowflakes, also bring the Messiah, whom Indigo will seek throughout her travels. Even in the midst of Susan's party, Indigo is thinking of the Messiah. The moonlight and white blossoms remind her "of the Messiah and his family and all the [ghost] dancers in their white blankets all shimmering in the light reflected off the snow" (196). Indigo is never spoiled by material comforts or distracted from her goals: to return home to her sister, seeds in hand, and to find her mother and the Messiah along the way.

Much later in the novel, Silko demonstrates Indigo's relationship to the sacred when the girl glimpses the Messiah and his Mother in a vision on a schoolhouse wall in Corsica. "She could make out the forms of the dancers wrapped in their white shawls and the Messiah and his Mother standing in the center of the circle—all were in a beautiful white light reflecting all the colors of the rainbow" (319). The term "rainbow," used here to indicate...