The Necessity of Lived Resistance: Reading Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes in an Era of Rapid Climate Change

Abstract

In its complex readings of a range of fictional gardens, gardeners, and gardening practices, Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1999 novel Gardens in the Dunes1 engages with and foregrounds Indigenous relationships with the Earth as powerful alternatives to the unsustainable and damaging ways that many Euro-American and European societies live today. Set at the close of the nineteenth century, Gardens focuses primarily on a single all-female Indigenous Sand Lizard family, the only group still using the traditional dune gardens. Told from the perspective of the young Sand Lizard child Indigo, the story follows Indigo and her older sibling Sister Salt once they are captured by Indian agents after their mother goes missing at a Ghost Dance in Needles Arizona, and their grandmother, Grandma Fleet, dies and is buried by her granddaughters at the old dune gardens. Declared ‘orphans’ by the state, the sisters are separated with Sister Salt sent to the Parker Reservation on the Colorado River while Indigo is sent to Indian boarding school in California. The story then follows two separate strands: Sister Salt’s life as a successful ‘business entrepreneur’ offering laundry services at the site of the construction of a new river dam; and Indigo’s successful escape from Indian school, her temporary ‘adoption’ by the EuroAmericans Edward and Hattie Palmer, and her subsequent tour of the eastern United States then Europe. While both sisters battle to understand the socio-political situations and geographical locations in which they find themselves, both nonetheless show constant resistance as they aim constantly to return to the gardens in the dunes and to a future with one another guided by Sand Lizard cosmologies. In this context, Silko’s depiction of Indigo and Sister Salt clearly shows how the sisters’ ability to “remember the past and imagine futures” helps them and Silko’s readers “to think critically about the present” (Streeby, 2018: 5). As a counterpoint to the depictions of a series of ecologically damaging Euro-American ideologies and worldviews, Gardens foregrounds Indigenous Sand Lizard gardens and gardening practices as an articulation of alternative sustainable ways of being (and of seeing) for an extratextual world informed by the realities of climate crisis. In this context, Gardens demonstrates the necessity of an everyday lived resistance to the dangerous and potentially fatal way that we are encouraged, perhaps even