THE LINGUISTIC REPRESENTATION OF INDIGENOUS IDENTITY IN LOUISE ERDRICH’S TRACKS AND LESLIE MARMON SILKO’S GARDENS IN THE DUNES

Abstract

The article examines the linguistic representation of Indigenous identity in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes. The purpose of the study is to determine how recurrent lexical and semantic patterns construct Indigenous identity through the interconnected domains of land and ethnicity. The research combines conceptual, lexicalsemantic, contextual, comparative, and quantitative methods. It also draws on Cognitive Linguistics, Cultural Linguistics, and Indigenous approaches to place and relationality. The corpus consists of the two novels, from which lexical units associated with land, territory, home, people, tribal belonging, language, ancestry, and colonial classification were selected and interpreted in context. The findings demonstrate that identity is represented not as a fixed individual attribute but as a relational formation grounded in ancestral territory, communal memory, kinship, ecological knowledge, and cultural continuity. In Tracks, the land domain is shaped primarily through the discourse of dispossession: woods, lake, reservation, allotment, paper, and taxation form a lexical network that contrasts Indigenous continuity with colonial administration. In Gardens in the Dunes, botanical and spatial vocabulary – garden, seed, river, dune, plant, and home – constructs a model of mobility, regeneration, and the transmission of ecological knowledge. The ethnicity domain is verbalized through ethnonyms, collective nouns, kinship expressions, references to Indigenous languages, and colonial labels. The opposition between self-designation and imposed naming exposes the unequal power relations involved in defining Indigenous peoples. Quantitative data support the qualitative interpretation: the most frequent units are Indian, people, Chippewa, earth, and ground, while context shows that frequency alone does not determine conceptual centrality. The novelty of the research lies in integrating lexical-semantic evidence with culturally grounded interpretation and in comparing two distinct linguistic models of Indigenous identity: Erdrich’s model of threatened territorial continuity and Silko’s model of ecological resilience. The study concludes that the two semantic domains function as an integrated network through which literary discourse preserves, negotiates, and transmits Indigenous cultural knowledge.