Essay Questions

Gardens in the Dunes is Leslie Marmon Silko’s exploration of the concept of imperialism. Support this statement using illustrations from the novel.

In the Gardens in the Dunes, Silko explores the concepts and themes that she had previously highlighted in her other novels focusing on imperialism as well. The novel, set at the end of the nineteenth century focuses the reader’s attention on the days succeeding the open-combat stage of the Indian warfare. Leslie Marmon Silko in Gardens in the Dunes uses the image of the garden as an emblem and symbol of imperialism at both international, national, local and domestic scale. Silko splendidly accomplishes this by intricately contrasting the aesthetics of nineteenth century native American gardening as well as ideologies with the clan’s subsistence farming (Sand Lizard’s).

Through the magnificent and almost flawless conjointment of the stories of the novels characters Indigo and Hattie, Silko manages to bring to light how the white women as well as the native women managed to survive in their time through careful circumventing of the particular system that had been purposefully designed to coerce, subjugate and suppress them into submission.

While Joni Adamson notes lightly with regards to the novel that “the garden is a powerful symbol not only of nature but of livelihood or the right of humans to derive a living from the earth,” in the novel, it becomes clear that the native Americans have this right even though quite vulnerable. It is a right that is easily violated, a concept that Indigo learns later in New York, when the land that Maytha and Vedna purchased from their aunt is on the verge of being seized by their white neighbors. It becomes clear that the seizing of the native Indian’s lands which is of utmost importance to their survival is a way of exterminating them, a necessary evil that has to be endured as a consequence of progress.

Indigo personifies Native American civilization’s in Leslie Marmon’s Gardens in the Dunes. Illustrate the truthfulness of this statement.

In Gardens in the Dunes, Silko splendidly presents the most significant of themes including the clash of civilizations, the hypocrisy of religions and the cultural imperatives of imperialism. In the novel, Silko carefully uses characters who embody these particular traits as a way of bringing to the readers attention their impact. In Gardens in the Dunes, Indigo personifies the concept of native American civilization and the particular struggle against the domination and oppression by whites in the days following the Indian open warfare.

Silko intricately models the variations in Indigo’s life as an emblem of this particular facet of the novel. Indigo is used to symbolize how an individual or societies way of life can destroy another irrespective of whether they are well meaning or not. After the US military raids the gardens of the natives, Indigo is separated from her family and is later sent to an Indian boarding school. Indigo undergoes cultural whitening and Hattie becomes one of the people who steer her in the way of assimilation. Her life can thus be visualized as a personification of the native American people’s civilization.