Dialogism and Native American Literature in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque in 1948 and grew up at the Pueblo of Laguna. As a person of mixed ancestry and heritage, she felt a sense of strangeness to both the Laguna community as well as to the outside world. Profiting from her internal cultural differences and calling up the richness of her mixed heritage, Silko forges a meeting point between very different cultural traditions.
Exploring the differences and similarities between Native and non-Native ways of being in the world, Silko's work can be said to enter a dialogue between cultures, in which cultural exchange as well as resistance against cultural hegemony are equally appreciated. The ongoing negotiation and communication of cultural difference that is mirrored in Silko's writings will be investigated in her lyrical historical novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999). To help focus my discussion, I will mainly concentrate on the religious aspect of cultural difference negotiated in her novel.
In the theoretical section, two ways of thinking about cultural difference will first be contrasted: Structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure's theory on language, according to which meaning arises through binary oppositions and which can be said to have laid the foundation for the binary classificatory system in cultural studies, versus Mikhail Bakhtin's theory on cultural identity formation as a dialogic exchange. Various literary critic's application of Bakhtin's cultural model on Native American literature will then be discussed.
The second part of this paper will be fully dedicated to the analysis of Silko's novel. With the example of the Ghost Dance, Silko's ambivalence between dialogic exchange and Native resistancewill be introduced. After a brief description of the historical ceremony, Silko's use of the Ghost Dance motif in Gardens will be investigated. Moreover, the Ghost Dance's dialogic function of uniting people across cultural boundaries and the retaking of the land and the peaceful nature of the struggle against Euro-American dominance will then be highlighted and parallels between American Indian and old European traditions will be established.
For the close reading of Gardens, Edward Huffstetler's stimulating essay on “Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers: The Dialogic Nature of American Indian Resistance” will serve as a starting point. As there have been very few published critical essays on Gardens, I will mainly rely on the text itself as well as on Ellen L. Arnold's excellent interview collection Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Moreover, Silko's collected essays in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit will also be consulted at times.