Indigo is a young girl of the (presumably) fictional Sand Lizard tribe, living in the Colorado River region where Arizona, California, and Nevada meet. When her family is swept up by soldiers during a Ghost Dance ceremony, she's separated from her mother, grandmother, and sister, and placed in a brutally repressive Indian school. She escapes, and finds a place to hide near the home of Hattie, a clever young woman expelled from graduate school for her unorthodox ideas about the early Christian church, and her husband Edward, an older naturalist living with the disgrace of a failed commercial expedition to South America. They take Indigo in to prevent her from being reabsorbed by the Indian school, and soon Indigo finds herself on a train bound to New York, and from there, a steamer to Europe.
Gardens in the Dunes is an interesting contrast to Leslie Marmon Silko's most famous novel, Ceremony, about a Laguna man suffering from PTSD after World War II. In that novel, Tayo learns that healing can be found in reconnecting with the rituals of his Laguna culture. Gardens in the Dunes is a more outward-looking novel, a global one, in which Indigo grows by being exposed to the wider cultures of the world--though like Ceremony it suggests that there is a power and safety in return. Indigo makes friends with a monkey and a parrot, and wherever she goes, there are gardens, from which she quietly takes seeds for her collection. When, at last, she returns to the "gardens in the dunes" of her Grandmother's country, she plants these new seeds, it is perhaps a symbolic expression of Indigo's going out and return. She brings the best things of the world back with her, and integrates them into her homeland. This is in contrast, maybe, with the rapacious pursuits of Edward, who sees in the natural resources of the world--orchids, citrus trees, iron meteorites--things to be purchased and sold for profit.
What I found most interesting about Gardens in the Dunes was the connections it draws between the Ghost Dance religion that developed in the 19th century and other unorthodox forms of Christianity. Wherever Hattie, Edward, and Indigo go, they are confronted by signs and symbols of repressed religion, including, in England, mysterious Druidic artifacts. Hattie has been dismissed because of her thesis, which emphasized the primary role of Jesus's female followers over the male disciples. Silko draws a direct line between beliefs and practices like these and the Ghost Dance, which was popularized by a "Messiah" figure named Wovoka in the late 19th century. Indigo has been taught to associate Wovoka explicitly with Jesus Christ, and in the great churches and chapel gardens of Europe, she insists again and again to Hattie and Edward that Jesus Christ was not crucified as the stories say, but traveling with his followers in the Americas. The Ghost Dance legend is another story of return and restoration: Wovoka, the Messiah, promised that the dance would bring back the many dead and lost who perished in American wars of conquest. It's no wonder that Indigo, torn from her family, holds tight to this belief--as meaningful in its way as any orthodox form of Christian theology.
I didn't quite expect a book like Gardens in the Dunes, having only read Ceremony. Ceremony is an inward book, a complexly layered story of memory and inward healing, but Gardens in the Dunes is a kind of adventure story. Its suggestions of erudition, its wide-ranging scope, and its 19th century setting, reminded me most of A. S. Byatt. Like Ceremony, it's more complex than it looks, introducing several minor characters--a Black cowboy cook, a thieving Mexican radical who operates a dog circus--whose presence make the book shaggy and strange. I'm not sure how I feel about the novel's final chapters, which feel somehow both anticlimactic and too pointedly dramatic--but it left me a lot to think about.
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