Leslie Silko, Indigenous dispossession, local foodsheds, the “garden” as a manifestation of “botanical imperialism,” and “the many worlds entwined with the global networks of plants”:
In a 1998 interview with Ellen Arnold, in advance of the release of her third novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), Leslie Marmon Silko explains how she became interested in plants: “They come from all over the world, and they’re also another way of looking at colonialism because everywhere the colonials went, the plants came back from there.” Breaking from her initial plan to write a “nonpolitical” novel after her angry, intensely political previous work, Almanac of the Dead (1991), received harsh criticism, Silko confesses that “it wasn’t too long before I realized how very political gardens are .... I had actually stumbled into the most political thing of all -- how you grow your food, whether you eat, the fact that the plant collectors followed the Conquistadors.” The pages of Gardens evidence Silko’s keen interest in the relationship between plants and colonialism, and she dramatizes the historical contexts of Southwestern Indians’ struggles for food sovereignty and environmental justice.
Set in the 1890s, the final decades of the Indian Wars in the West, Gardens revolves around the colonization of indigenous minds and bodies through a variety of processes under the flag of manifest destiny: the loss of land and natural resources in general and the disruption of Native foodways in particular. [...] Moreover, it problematizes the privatization of food commons and its negative impacts on local communities from the Gilded Age to the present. [...] Silko, a writer of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and Anglo-American ancestry, employs the trope of the garden as a means of critiquing and revising modern America’s ecological imperialism, which has attempted to naturalize the conquest of Native lands and foodways. [...]
[...] [T]hree journeys in the novel [...] take place in different geographic locations: the privatization and enclosure of Native lands and the loss of traditional foods in the American West; the commercialization of indigenous plants in Latin America; and open source seeds exchange and transnational community organizing in Europe. [...]
On one level, the novel presents the garden as a window into U.S. settler colonialism and the advent of modern agriculture. However, the garden also provides a communal space for unexpected encounters and knowledge and seed exchange, which leads to self-transformation and transnational environmental organizing in latter portions of the novel. Drawing on what feminist science studies scholar Anna Tsing calls “patchiness,” I argue that tracing various forms of the garden in Silko’s novel -- from the desert garden in Arizona to gardens on estates in California and New York to the English and Italian gardens in Europe -- invites us to appreciate the precarity of the environment and the many worlds entwined with the global networks of plants.
Though reading global history in relation to culturally situated, site-specific indigenous knowledge is often challenging and unpredictable due to problems of scale, Silko skillfully weaves these “unruly edges” through her garden narratives and asks us to cultivate “arts of noticing.” From this perspective, [...] Silko’s project in Gardens not only allows us to read the relationship between the development of Western science and modern capitalism and the expansion of settler colonialism around the globe but also opens up new possibilities for thinking and remaking the world with others, both humans and nonhumans.
--
Yeonhaun Kang. “The Garden in Motion: Botanical Exchange and Transnational Collaboration in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.”
