Chapter One
FROM THE CENTER OF TRADITION An Interview with Linda Hogan
Barbara J. Cook
This interview was planned for early June 2002; but the wildfires began raging in Colorado, and we mutually agreed that we would conduct our discussion via e-mail. This electronic process was preceded by several phone conversations during which Linda Hogan was very gracious. We shared stories about our children, our work, and our everyday lives, including her horses and her new puppy and our daughters.
BC: Can you talk about the spiritual and political united in your work? How does that create a space for change, transformation?
LH: For Native peoples there is no difference. Decisions are made based on the spiritual, and they may be political decisions. In Solar Storms, for example, the traditional people have to fight in court for the termination of the dam that would destroy their land, their traplines, and their future grandchildren. This was based on the true event-the Hydro-Quebec energy grid. They showed up without warning to tell people to leave their homes, as they were going to bulldoze them, and the Natives had no paper ownership. Since the people knew all the plants, animals, even the purposes of insects, they made a museum exhibition to show people all that was sacred to them, and they won in court. It took twenty years and monumental environmental impact statements. But the land was loved, is loved, is spirit. That is why they wouldn't sell it.
BC: Your three novels are based on actual events. Do you see them as a series? Why start from a historical event?
LH: No, I don't see the novels as a series. I just have been closely aware of the issues facing us, and so I have used those events. They are still fiction.
The canoe trip in Solar Storms was fictionalized. I had to go over maps, portage areas, waterways, and go up there and do it myself to write it. What a wonderful thing. What muscle after carrying all that stuff for days and days. But these are the things that concern us the most, that we care about, and they are our way of survival.
With Mean Spirit, much of it was family history, but I completely fictionalized the place. It is in reality a grassland, but I made it much more like the area around my family allotment lands. This bothers people, but it is fiction and that is hard to accept. The murders are real, as are the names of the killers. Some of the children of survivors knew the killers. They were let out of jail early, and two women in Ponca City told me they had lived near them all their lives and not known.
I pick these events and make them stories because only then will people listen. If I carry a sign, I am ignored. So I do it in the work.
BC: Does Oklahoma influence the way you approach other locales? Florida and Canada are so different from each other and Oklahoma. Why other biosystems?
LH: Each biosystem is held in the stories. Ceremonial literature contains an entire ecosystem, what is now called a textbook for knowledge. American Indian knowledge systems have been ignored until recently. And for each book I had to read and study all of the literatures, the stories, and I interviewed people for Power. I interviewed the attorney of the man who originally killed a panther. It was not like in the book at all. He killed it late at night-drinking, poaching-then took it to a number of other people's houses to get a photo, then took it home and barbecued it. When the wildlife and police officials arrived, they found parts of other endangered animals. There was a four-year effort to charge him and put him in jail, but he was acquitted. I read the court transcripts in Florida. He was the chief of the Seminole, James Billie, and he now passes out info about the Endangered Species Act but keeps two declawed panthers for tourists to see.
In addition to all this, I love the land. I love the glades and the mangrove swamps. Just as I love the land in Oklahoma. This means I learn it.
BC: You changed the narrative quite a bit in Power.
LH: I can't control what my books do. I know there are writers who work with outlines, but for me the books seem dictated from something within even if they are first based on interest and research.
BC: You have mentioned being involved in Native Science Dialogues in the past. I am fascinated with Husk and his interest in tracking scientific discoveries that only reinforce traditional tribal beliefs. Michael Horse and the Hog Priest seem to begin to develop that idea. Can you talk about the connections?
LH: What has been most interesting to me about Native science, or I call it indigenous traditions, is that it does account for and hold scientific theory. The new Gaia theory credited to white scientists is old knowledge on this continent. We know everything has a purpose and deserves to be. We understand astronomy. How else could people have been so brilliant to make the sun dagger and other observation points? We know agriculture and had to teach European arrivals about planting. I always wonder what happened in Europe that made such a hole in the knowledge system. Study that time in history and you find people who watched torture for entertainment-people who had deforested and worn the land thin on their continent. After how many years of habitation. What happened that there was no one observant enough? That is the question.
As for the science dialogues, Native people gather to talk about such knowledge systems and the unique way of thinking that so differs from that of non-Indian people. I do, however, recognize that there have been shifts in this-that some non-Indians are thinking, yes, this world is alive; that some Native peoples are now in imitation or for economic reasons are breaking spiritual laws. There are traditions and laws that are beyond human. Just because it is drawn up on a piece of paper doesn't make something right, legal, ethical.
I consider my own work to be traditionally centered.
BC: In a Frontiers article from the 1980s you said you don't identify as a feminist because "what affects the women also affects the entire community." Yet much of your work seems based in a feminine tradition. Some ecofeminist theory is grounded in concern for community. Would you say you see yourself as an ecofeminist?
LH: Frontiers: I forgot all about that interview. There was a lot of conflict in those days, and I'll tell you that for us, we were in despair, poverty, and with little recognition as people. We have had a very long history to recover from. When feminists went to the reservation and took off their shirts for equal rights or invaded the Yaqui reservation looking for Don Juan, it just didn't go over very well. Our struggles were separate from theirs. And the right to not wear a shirt was hardly an issue at all when we were watching enforced sterilization of our women, all children born in one time frame given up for adoption, hunger, etc. This, truly, was a continuation of genocide. And when people wanted to lay claim to our spiritual identity without having the knowledge systems to back it, that was another theft.
However, much has changed in the many years intervening, and I am more of a feminist mind now. I especially think of it in terms of economics, work, and the ever-increasing number of violent crimes. Even the ones on television are primarily women. And when two women like Thelma and Louise fight back, the movies become threatening to the men! What is this? I saw it with Terry Tempest Williams, and afterward, to tell the truth, we were very noisy in the car. I had no idea that the movie would be so berated by the male critics. This says something to me.
BC: You have mentioned anthropologist Michael Harner's work in the past. He has established a network of classes on soul loss and shamanism. Although he approaches this respectfully, isn't it appropriation?
LH: You mention Michael Harner. One night he was traveling through and stopped at the Indian center where I was in Minnesota, and he asked us to come in the room a minute. Then he tried to drum everyone's spirit animals. All the people were too polite to even laugh. But as soon as there was a break, no one returned. I do think what he does is appropriation, yet some of his background may be grounded in scholarship. I no longer like to judge people because there are worse crimes than trying to drum spirit animals; for instance, people killing herds of animals, such as in the North with Hydro-Quebec. I'd rather the administrators of those types of projects be like Harner.
For instance, with Maria Sabina, she lived in absolute poverty while she was being "sold" here in books, films, and textbooks. Other poets tried to imitate her. She tried not to become bitter as she aged, but she did say that everyone had lived off of her and there she was at home, nothing more than a dog to pee on.
BC: Your work is filled with images of glass, mirrors, and crystal. Do they signify something for you? Are they placed as signifiers? How do they function?
LH: I had no idea I wrote about glass, mirrors, and crystal. Maybe if you gave me an example. Well, I suppose in Solar Storms the broken mirror reflected a broken face. But that is only a superficial reading of the story. One of the things that happens with readers is that they focus on something of significance to their own reading and ask me about it and why I did it, said it, created it, and I just simply can't account for it. Like I said, I am a student of the book being written. When one of the characters in Solar Storms died, I was very unhappy with that because it wasn't, in my mind, the way it should have worked out. When a writer writes, if she is doing it well it is from magic, another place and world.
BC: I guess as literary critics we want to find special meaning in all of the metaphors.
You have talked about the stages of development a writer goes through; you have written in a variety of genres and on a variety of topics. Do you feel pushed to try something new each time?
LH: Pushed to try new things: no, I never do feel pushed. Mostly I just desire time to write. I have so much to write. That is the only push. Most of my time goes to business, etc., and very little to writing. I am always loving whatever it is I am working on. Right now I am on hold. Well, I wouldn't call it hold exactly. I write every moment I can. I am working on two novels, and one is very heavy, a Vietnam vet whose daughter comes to find him and ends up living on a fishing boat with his former girlfriend, another legal-ecological novel. But then, too, I am working on one about a girl who takes off with a circus and her life as a trick rider. What I would really like is for them to come out at the same time so everyone would be confused about what kind of writer I am!
BC: What else are you working on now?
LH: I have finished a book of poems and not yet sent them out. I don't know why. They are in final draft. It just doesn't seem like the right time yet. A writer has to trust those feelings. So there they are in my oven where I keep my work, since it would (I hope) be the last place to burn in a fire. Most writers I know use their freezers. Unfortunately, I don't have one. I have a 1937 refrigerator. If I want ice I have to buy it and bring it in and put it in a cooler in my tiny kitchen. The place I live is quite amazing and quaint and historic. However, the whole place is incredibly small.
Until you go outdoors! I can handle a miniature home because I live in a forest valley, a house I always wanted to buy, the house where Bush in Solar Storms lived. Luck. Fate. Whatever. One day I was walking my dog, and the realtor was putting a sign up and I got in his car, rode to his office, and bought it. Then I was shocked at myself. Buyer's remorse. But here I am with my beautiful mares.
Speaking of them, it is time to go hose them off so they can roll around in the ground and be cool and clay-covered.
Chapter Two
"HOW DO WE LEARN TO TRUST OURSELVES ENOUGH TO HEAR THE CHANTING OF EARTH?" Hogan's Terrestrial Spirituality
Katherine R. Chandler
Environmentalism, Native American culture, theology, feminism, social justice-Linda Hogan's writings range widely in issue as well as genre. Viewing these concerns as inseparable, Hogan consistently directs attention to the principle that weaves them together: spirituality. Significantly, this is the quality she considers most lacking in today's world. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995) is her most developed discourse on the undividable relationship among the human, the natural, and the spiritual. Although this is a collection of discrete essays, the essays are associated by their "lessons learned from the land" (12). Hogan's preface to Dwellings explains that her work "connects the small world of humans with the larger universe, containing us in the same way that native ceremonies do, showing us both our place and a way of seeing" (12). Throughout the book Hogan demonstrates that it is possible to revive an "ecology of mind ... that returns us to our own sacredness" (60), and this essay explores how Hogan demonstrates that reawakening process for readers. Hogan's aim is to decipher the language of a spiritual universe within the natural world; my aim is to examine how Hogan reaches into the natural to attain the spiritual.
Hogan opens with a fundamental question: Why have many of us "forgotten the mystery of nature and spirit, while for tens of thousands of years such things have happened and been spoken [of] by our elders and our ancestors"? (17). Believing that humanity's diminished relationship with the natural world is a significant cause of the lack of peace many feel, she describes in "The Feathers," her first essay, mystifying incidents in her life associated with eagle feathers. Logically, we do not understand how an eagle feather kept in a box can be the means by which a lost valuable is located, but Hogan experiences such an occurrence and concludes that the power is a form of "sacred reason ... linked to forces of nature" (19). Clearly, her Chickasaw heritage influences the directions in which Hogan turns, but she does not limit her search for answers to her own traditions. She investigates a wide range of twentieth-century sources and offers her observations with a wide audience in mind.
Explanations about why modern cultures have forgotten connections between nature and spirit are familiar, repeatedly articulated by contemporary philosophers, anthropologists, theologians, sociologists, and environmentalists, including Hogan. In "A Different Yield"-her essay meditating on listening, language, and variant means of communication-Hogan cites the work of psychologist C. A. Meier as evidence that the "whole of western society is approaching a physical and mental breaking point," adding that the "result is a spiritual fragmentation that has accompanied our ecological destruction" (52). Working toward reestablishing healthy connections with the natural world, Hogan does not flinch when claiming those connections are sacred. The question, difficult even for her to answer, is, How do we access a spiritual realm?
Helpfully, in Dwellings Hogan's ponderings do not remain at the level of lament. Her major focus is on resolutions for the troubling results. As she investigates the trying territory of personal, familial, and tribal losses, she relies on language to help her sort it through. Peggy Maddux Ackerberg concludes that Hogan turns to writing about these issues because of "the nourishing and ordering effects of words and language" (11). With the essays in Dwellings serving as moments set apart, as places in which to contemplate, as words that imagine, Hogan commences revising her own attitudes and practices. She considers solutions and portrays processes. Reflecting on topics as diverse as the Anasazi, DNA, and NASA-as well as those generated by what she encounters in nature, including snakes, caves, and porcupines-Hogan claims we are "the wounders" of ourselves, our culture, and the natural world. Rather than merely pointing a finger, though, Hogan asserts that we are also "the healers" (151). Her deep concern for nature and her view of wilderness as "sanctuary" provide Hogan with starting ground for embracing a philosophy of life that includes a spiritual dimension. The ways in which Hogan initiates her developmental process-listening to and learning from the earth-are not, however, techniques commonly taught in our schools or homes. Fortunately, the essays in Dwellings reveal how Hogan perfects her ability to learn about the spirit by listening to the land.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From the center of Tradition Copyright © 2003 by University Press of Colorado . Excerpted by permission.
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