In the novel Solar Storms by Linda Hogan, traditional indigenous lands and cultures are being destroyed to make room for infrastructure development, like dams. Hogan portrays Native Americans similarly to the idea of the ecological Indian, an extension of the term “noble savage,” and demonizes Euroamericans. The ecological Indian is a term used to describe Western Indian cultural representations, seeing the Native American culture as a face for the conservation and environmental movement. The term generalizes indigenous populations and cultures inhabiting the New World as primitive communities without civilization, who live in tandem with wildlife and leave no trace of themselves behind (because they are a part of the wilderness).
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Americans came to idealize the Native American culture, seeing it as a way to return to a simpler and more honorable past. The creation of the National Park Service shed more light on what indigenous communities view as a “pure” environment in contrast to the thoughts of Euro-Americans; America considers wilderness to be “untouched” by humans, humans being a threat to pristine natural environments. Native Americans live in harmony with the land with sustainable interactions with nature; this requires complex land management strategies with fire to mold the area to provide abundant food and plants. These facts were ignored because these practices did not fit into America’s idea of “wilderness.”
Hogan represents her protagonists in Solar Storms as possessing the ability to innately connect with the land, becoming naturally closer-to-nature than Euro-Americans. There are consistent parallels between the main characters Angel, Agnes, Dora Rouge, and Bush to plant, land, and animal spirits. The first example shown is Agnes and her blue bearskin coat that symbolizes Agnes’ connection with the wilderness; the blue bear was brought into her life when Agnes was twelve years old and she immediately bonded with the animal, feeling its pain and suffering as he was in a cage being mistreated. When Agnes goes to put the animal out of its misery they share a very humanistic interaction, “Its eyes were grateful. I saw that. She stroked the big animal. I saw it with my own eyes. That bear put a paw on Agnes and stroked her in return” (Hogan 47). This interaction is similar to one with a domesticated animal, except the bear is a wild animal not used to human interactions and Agnes tames the bear. Throughout the novel there are uncountable references made that describe Agnes as a bear, especially when she is wearing the blue bearskin coat, “She sat erect in the canoe and looked once again like a bear” (203). She takes on the personality and physical expression of the bear she killed as a child.
Nearing the end of the journey to the Fat-Eaters, Agnes becomes extremely ill and even the possession of her blue bearskin coat does not lift her spirits. Several days later Agnes dies and Angel must follow her dying wishes, “‘Listen, if something happens to me, I want you to let me lie out for the wolves and birds; would you?’” (188). This is an interesting request for Agnes but due to her strong feelings in association with animals, specifically the bear, it was not shocking to Angel nor the reader; it signifies the circle of life, you die as one and live again as another. In Angel’s culture, there is no hierarchy between animal and human and they are seen as equals, “One day, a full tailed fox moved inside the shadows of trees, then stepped out into a cloud. New senses came to me. I was equal to the other animals, hearing as they heard, moving as they moved, seeing as they saw” (172). Angel also reflects on the merging of wilderness all together,
I was under the spell of wilderness, close to what no one had ever been able to call by name. Everything merged and united. There were no sharp distinctions left between darkness and light. Water and air became the same thing, as did water and land in the marshy broth of creation” (177).
As Angel assimilates into Adam’s Rib, her internal dialogue shifts from a focus on material objects, such as the appearance of the town and self-consciousness of her scars, “Weary houses were strung along it in a line, and all of them looked dark brown and dreary to me. In a glance, I was sorry I’d come” (24) to refer to herself as a part of nature, with little to no focus on physical appearance:
You would see how I am like the night sky with its stars that fall through time and space and arrive here as wolves and fish and people, all of us fed by them. You would see the dust of sun, the turning of creation taking place. (Hogan 54).
Along the voyage from Adam’s Rib to the Fat Eaters, Angel discovers a generational skill of being a plant dreamer, meaning she possesses the ability to sketch and locate medicinal roots and herbs. “‘I knew there’d be another plant dreamer in my family someday,’ Dora-Rouge said. Her mother, Ek, had been an herb woman. I got it from blood, she said. I came by it legitimately” (171). These supernatural skills and the existence of a sixth sense, the ability to communicate with the voice of nature that Euro-Americans find threatening. Along the journey, the women also experience many moments of communicating with nature; when the maps produced by conquerors failed to track the ways the land would change, Bush was forced to trust Dora-Rouge’s instincts and place their fate in “the hands of nature” (172). The women reach an equilibrium of sorts during the trip, Angel describes them as one single unit,
The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it… Before, my life had been without all its ears, eyes, without all its knowings. (177)
This scene shows the inherent connection Angel and the others have with nature, wildlife, and each other – something that is central to the idea of the Ecological Indian.
Hogan employs the figure of the Ecological Indian juxtaposed with the exploitative white society of the Euro-Americans, and the text is explicit about who is responsible for the devastation. They are portrayed as morally corrupt and without spirituality, as their Christian God is viewed as violent “The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah” (169). Settlers are essentially the antagonist of the novel, they enter Angel’s story forcefully and unwanted,
They had heard about plans to build a dam, a reservoir. This year, he told us, the government and a hydroelectric corporation had decided to construct several dams… Agents of government insisted the people had no legal right to the land. No agreement had ever been signed, he said, no compensation offered” (57).
Learning the information about the damn is what inspires the women to canoe to the Fat-Eaters, where Dora-Rouge is excited to return because it is where she grew up and plans to die. Unfortunately, due to hydroelectric projects initiated by settlers and construction of a military base, the land that Dora-Rouge once knew has been demolished, “The animals were no longer there, nor were the people or clans, the landmarks” (225). The wildlife and forestry were nonexistent, loggers cutting up and taking pieces of the trees with them and leaving the remaining unwanted parts behind; similar to how the people inhabiting the land now feel, “It was murder of the soul that was taking place there. Murder with no consequences to the killers. If anything, they were rewarded” (226). Native Americans did not just lose the lands they lost their whole way of life and sense of purpose in the world, leading to an increase in stress, health impeded by no longer having access to growing crops, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicide attempts.
At the town meeting regarding the proposed hydroelectric plan to move the Salt River in order to give the town access to electricity. The conversation between Angel and her relatives with the young white men from New York City was nearly all one-sided; Hogan expresses the frustration of not being heard, as an ethnic group and as a woman, “They ignored our existence until we resisted their dams, or interrupted their economy, or spoiled their sport” (283). The Euro-American materialistic values of the greed of power and desire to control any and all persons of perceived inferiority dominate being sustainable if it impacts their profits in the slightest,
And when the officials and attorneys spoke, their language didn’t hold a thought for the life of water or regard for the land that sustained people from the beginning of time. They didn’t remember the sacred treaties between humans and animals. Our words were powerless beside their figures, their measurements, and ledgers… They saw it only on the flat two-dimensional world of paper. (279)
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This quote connects Euro-American’s with the maps that Bush was attempting to use earlier for a safe route from Adam’s Rib to the Fat-Eaters, settlers attempted to consolidate and control the land by placing them in tangible pieces on a piece of paper. Through the journey North, the maps were proved inaccurate because they failed to incorporate how the land is physically altered by wildlife and nature’s reactions to changing seasons. After the town hall meeting, everyone in Tulik’s house is woken up in the middle of the night by white men driving machinery surrounding their home:
Outside that one door, I understood, were all the cut-down trees and torn-apart land. Starvation and invasions were there, in the shape of yellow machines. The men were shielded inside their machines’ metal armor, certain nothing could touch them, not in any part of themselves, certain that this was progress. They would tear the land apart and break down our lives. It would be done. (Hogan 284)
Angel explicitly expresses her hatred towards the Euro-Americans in this scene:
I felt the beginning of hate. This was the worst thing, i knew later, learning to hate. I thought I had hated before, families, social workers, people who had hurt me, even my own possessed and damaging mother, but this was another kind of hatred, one that would lay itself down inside me a bit at a time throughout my life, like poison with no antidote. (Hogan 285)
The way Angel describes this hatred growing inside of her is extremely similar to the pervasive but elusive effect of slow violence, slowing unfolding over time and generations. This scene specifically places the responsibility of destroying the Native American lands on settlers, not through their desire for infrastructural development, but through their belittling and lack of empathy for the families and communities living in the areas they see as only a source of commodities.
Hogan’s choice to use Angel as one of the main narrators is a complex and strategic move; she arrives at Adam’s Rib from Oklahoma a very different person, reflecting several American values such as materialism and the focus on physical appearance:
And all I carried with me into this beginning was the tough look I’d cultivated over the years, a big brown purse that contained the remaining one-dollar bills Agnes had mailed me, the makeup I used, along with my hair, to hide my face, and a picture of an unknown baby. (Hogan 26)
She is immediately forced outside of her comfort zone but must prevail in order to piece together her family history and personal past to make sense of her life. This is done through the art of storytelling, learning ancestor history orally passed down from generation to generation; Hogan also does this with a purpose to show another consequence of the disappearing lands, the cultures, and the orally told history that dies along with the elders. Angel participates in the reinvention of her ethnicity by developing personal perspectives on current Native events, past and present, and how she deals with them. The journey from Adam’s Rib to the Fat-Eaters is one full of challenges and dangerous setbacks, symbolizing Angel’s psychological healing process, as well as a “mythical journey connecting Angel with the land and its tribal history” (Grewe-Volpp, 275). Angel transforms from a seventeen-year-old girl who saw her past as nothing, “I remembered so little of my life that sometimes I thought I had never really existed, that I was nothing more than emptiness covered with skin” (74), to a woman who saw herself as a part of something bigger than just herself and her past. My interpretation of Hogan using the character of Angel is her way of telling the reader that while these two cultures are seemingly complete opposites, a combination of both has the possibility to thrive, Angel being the catalyst.
In the fictional novel Solar Storms, Linda Hogan uses the Ecological Indian framework to base her characters off of in order to envoke a sense of empathy for not only the loss of land but the trauma and discrimination indigenous tribes have experienced as well. As Dora-Rouge says when first seeing the destroyed land where she grew up, viewing the desperation and deep depression of the people,
Most were too broken to fight the building of the dams, the moving of waters, and that perhaps had been the intention all along. But I could see Dora-Rouge thinking, wondering: how do conquered people get their lives back?” (226). Beginning with “when the crying children were taken away from their mothers or when the logging camps started and cities were built from our woods, or when they cut the rest of the trees to raise cattle. (Hogan 40)
This quote is referring to the boarding school experience for Indian children that began in 1860 (Professor Ho lecture, 4/2); created in order to use education as a tool to assimilate Indian tribes into mainstream civilization, the focus being on “civilized,” because Euro-Americans saw Native Americans as people who had to have their savage ways tamed by Europeans. Boarding schools took children away from their families and culture, teaching them English and prohibiting their Native languages, absorbing the ideologies and people who did not fit their idea of “civilized.” Angel serves as a child who was taken away by her biological mother to Oklahoma and raised within white society, but she returns to her birthplace to investigate her heritage, continuing her ancestors’ tales and igniting a sense of self-empowerment and self-worth. Angel does not accept her identity as simply “no one,” with no history, she creates a new strong self-defined identity; with this sense of self Angel pursues political activism for what she believes is right, speaking on the radio against popular opinion and participating in protests (secretly destroying the Euro-American’s food storage). As the novel is based on true events, Hogan creates a personal narrative to evoke a sense of emotion in the readers. Attempting to have them imagine what it would feel like to have your children, home, land, religion, and culture taken from you without your consent.
Works Cited
- Grewe-Volpp, Christa. “The Ecological Indian vs. the Spiritually Corrupt White Man: The Function of Ethnocentric Notions in Linda Hogan’s ‘Solar Storms.’” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 47, no. 2, 2002, pp. 269–283. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41157732.
- Lawhorne, Alison E. “Everything we Need is here”: Restoring Environmental Bonds through Activism in Solar Storms by Linda Hogan, Potiki by Patricia Grace, and Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver.
- Debunking the myth of the noble savage, Cro, Stelio. The Noble Savage : Allegory of Freedom, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucb/detail.action?docID=685576
- Hames, Raymond. “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 36, 2007, pp. 177–190. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25064951.
- Castor, L. Virginia. “Claiming Place in Wor(l)Ds: Linda Hogans Solar Storms.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, pp. 157–180., doi:10.1093/melus/31.2.157.
- Clarke, Chris. “When Green Groups Fought Native Rights: The Timbisha Shoshone in Death Valley.” KCET, 30 Jan. 2017, www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/when-green-groups-fought-native-rights-the-timbisha-shoshone-in-death-valley.
- Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. “The Problem With The Ecological Indian Stereotype.” KCET, 7 Feb. 2017, www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/the-problem-with-the-ecological-indian-stereotype.
- “History and Culture – Boarding Schools.” Native American History and Culture: Boarding Schools – American Indian Relief Council Is Now Northern Plains Reservation Aid, Northern Plains Reservation Aid, www.nativepartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=airc_hist_boardingschools.
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