Gardens in the Dunes.

• Author: Jones, Tayari

Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko Simon & Schuster. 304 pages. $25.00.

Leslie Marmon Silko is at the forefront of contemporary Native American literaure. Famous for Ceremony (Viking, 1977) and Almanac of the Dead (Simon & Schuster, 1991), she now has published another big novel, Gardens in the Dunes.

Literal gardens figure prominently in this book, and there are also metaphorical gardens--instances where characters reap what they sow. Silko integrates this biblical notion with others drawn from Gnostic theology and Celtic magic. The result is a fascinating novel of ideas, myth, and allegory.

The novel is set in the late nineteenth century. The last members of the Salt Lizard clan--Indigo, Sister Salt, their mother, and their grandmother--live in the desert near the border of California and Arizona. They survive by gardening sandy soil. In this garden, they welcome snakes and revere them as the providers of life-sustaining water. The women live peacefully here until they travel to Needles, Arizona, to perform the dance to the Messiah.

But Silko's Messiah is not the Christ of Anglo lore. He is the leader of the Lakotas who were murdered at Wounded Knee. And he appears in the dance.

"The others saw him now, but they all kept dancing, as they knew they must, until Christ reached the middle of their circle. Wovoka the Prophet came too. He walked beside the Messiah's mother; behind them came the Messiah's eleven children."

In passages such as this, Silko forces us to put aside the image of the chaste and crying Christ. Silko's Christ is a family man, a part of a community. He is not a mystery to be understood only by clergy. He comes when the people dance for him. Even those who are not knowledgeable about the fate of the Lakota, who dared perform what American historians call the "Ghost Dance," know that the people will be punished for practicing such liberating beliefs.

The dance is raided, and many people are captured and never seen again. The younger sister, Indigo, is sent to one of the infamous Indian boarding schools. Since Sister Salt is nearly thirteen, she is deemed too old to be educable. She is placed in the authority of the Indian Agency, where she is forced to perform menial tasks at slave wages.

Here, the story could have easily disintegrated into a tale of woe. But Silko adopts a Dickensian sensibility and allows Indigo to escape the clutches of the villainous superintendent by...