Revitalizing Indigenous Food Systems in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes

English (OpenAlex)

This study examines Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999) in terms of its parallelisms with the Lebanese ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan’s works as a pioneer of the local food movement and heirloom seed-saving practice. Drawing on the spiritual heritage of her indigenous culture, Silko displays the consequences of settler colonialism on Native lands, particularly through agricultural knowledge loss and disappearing food diversity. Featuring a character, Indigo, who counters this erasure through the seeds she collects from her domestic and transatlantic journeys, Silko offers a model for recovering Indigenous foodways. Similarly, leading many research projects, coordinating farming alliances, and having been a motivational speaker about the significance of “place-based” foods, Nabhan dedicates himself to recover native food traditions in the American Southwest. The fictional landscape where the Sand Lizard people live and the areas Nabhan conducts his research among Indigenous communities both take place around the lower Colorado River basin and the Sonoran Desert borderlands. I argue that Indigo, as the protagonist of Gardens is a literary foreshadowing of the ideal models Nabhan imagines to achieve biocultural restoration, due to her transnational seed collecting effort during her travels. With her dream of planting the seeds back in her own land parallels to Nabhan’s own practice of local food and what he advocates putting into practice in Where Our Food Comes From) (2008), to revitalize food security and sustainability on a global scale.