NATIVE, NATURE AND NEGOTIATION: AN ECO-LITERAL STUDY OF CONCILIATION OF PAST AND PRESENT WITH REFERENCE TO LESLIE SILKO’S NATIVE AMERICAN FICTION GARDENS IN THE DUNES

Abstract

The indigenous cultures all over the world are strongly interwoven with a range of natural components. All these indigenous and aboriginal worlds including Native Americans are known for their holistic tradition as they love and revere a variety of ecological elements such as the Mother Earth, foliage, waterway, deep marine, and downpour. In the Native American fiction Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko, the author weaves a spectacular narrative to convey the story of nature, home, mother, memory, exile, and return. Silko portrays this strong bonding while depicting the close relationship between Nature and
various Native American characters. As the Native American culture believes in the deep bonding between its nature and its community members, their varied forms of farming and gardening become integral to their cultural identity. The recurrent recollections of Indigo’s mother, her Grandmother Fleet, Sister Salt, and above all, the image of the Old Garden represent the recreation and reconstruction of her cultural memory and its association with the Mother Nature. The protagonist Indigo’s love for gardens brings back the mythical memory of the Biblical ‘Garden of Eden’ which is the ‘Garden of God’ as described in the Book of the Genesis. The displacement of Indigo from her indigenous garden becomes a representation of the man’s dissociation from nature and Indigo’s homecoming to her native garden denotes man’s perpetual longing to reconcile with Mother Earth. Thus, this paper seeks to analyze the re-establishment of a negotiation between old and new, past and present and most importantly the man and the nature in the backdrop of colonization with reference to Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko.