Silko’s Cosmopolitan Vision: Community Writing in Gardens in the Dunes

Abstract

The American Indian novel, Gardens in the Dunes, tells the story of the decline of the tribal community located on the Colorado River, the resistance of the pan-Indian community, the syncretism of the Indian-white community, and the construction of the global community in the late 19th century, which reveals the fluid character of community and Silko’s cosmopolitan vision. In the novel, Silko describes the attempts and efforts of the endangered Sand Lizard tribe to find safety in an insecure world, pointing out that the community must insist on solidifying the base as well as making innovations, incorporating new landscape into the existing body of knowledge, revising and supplementing it. Silko interprets her thought on the survival and development of the nation, calling for the coming of a harmonious, balanced, open and inclusive community in which the local and the global coexist.