Title: The author of Solar Storms is not Hulk Hogan’s wife.
1The author of Solar Storms is not Hulk Hogans
wife.
2Solar Storms
3Chickasaw--Oklahoma
4Barbara J. Cook has suggested that in Solar
Storms, Hogan purposely omits the name of the
tribe to which the characters belong in order to
avoid this expectation of translation (43)
because, as Hogan has said in an interview, she
is fictionalizing the tribes I'm writing about
so nobody feels like they're being invaded once
again (qtd. in Cook 43).
5Discussion ?s--important motifs--significance
of maps--food--dualities--AIM--memory (and
maps!)--mirrors--religion--Native
American/American Indian novel--ecocriticism--th
e body/scarring--fear--setting driven novel?
6The late 1960s and early '70s witnessed a
publishing explosion for Native American
studiesThe acceptance of Native American
literature as literature, and not as ethnography
or anthropology, was a crucial move in this
formative stageOwens's comment about the
thoroughly 'Indian' story and discourse of
House Made of Dawn touches upon one of the most
fiercely contested issues in Native American
literary studies today what makes a book, a
poem, a story, an author authentic or native?
A number of writers have protested the assumption
that native literature must be about braids,
beads, and buckskin (Owens, Mixedblood 13) or
Mother Earth and Father Sky (Alexie 13) to be
considered native. In fact, Sherman Alexie,
responding to this issue, in a less-than-generous
moment declared to an interviewer, We've been
stuck in place since House Made of Dawn (9).
7Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary field of
inquiry that has developed over the past twenty
years in response to growing academic concern
about the responses of literature and literary
theory to the global crisis of environmental
degradation. Both ethically and practically,
ecocriticism decenters humanity's importance in
nonhuman nature and nature writingand instead
explores the complex interrelationships between
the human and the nonhuman (a biocentric view).
Despite this deemphasis on humanity's place
within the world, ecocriticism does not ignore
ethical or practical concerns for human readers.
Analogous to the decentering of patriarchal
assumptions and values enacted by feminist theory
and practice, ecocriticism's biocentrism instead
allows writers and critics to explore the
interconnectedness of all nature, human and
nonhuman, rather than merely looking at nonhuman
nature as setting and/or metaphor for the human
condition. As Cheryll Burgess-Glotfelty explains,
ecocritics ask questions like 'How does
literature function within the ecosystem?' or
'How does a given textual representation affect
the way we treat actual nature?" (2).
8Ecofeminism (ecological feminism) is a
philosophy that draws a connection between the
domination of sexual, ethnic and social
minorities, and the domination of nonhuman
nature.
9Ecofem scholar Ynestra King emphasizes that
the main goals of ecofeminism, human liberation
and the liberation of nature are inextricably
connected, as are the ecological and the social
crisis (730).
10American Indian and First Nations texts like
Hogans lend themselves perfectly to this kind of
reading (see Fighting for the Mother/Land An
Ecofeminist Reading of Linda Hogan's Solar
Storms by Silvia Schultermandl.
11When ecofeminist critic Mary Daly asserts that
everything is connected (11), she does so with
the implication that racism, sexism, and
ecological domination are products of the same
hierarchical structures within society.
12Through the course of the novel Angel is
Reestablishing the initial bonds within her
cultural, geo-political, and spiritual world
13In this sense, Solar Storms treats matrilineage
as gynocratic principle of cultural resistance
against Western domination of Native American
tribes and lands. As Paula Gunn Allen argues in
The Sacred Hoop (1986), physical and cultural
genocide of American Indian tribes is and was
mostly about patriarchal fear of gynocracy (3).
In the gynocratic society of Solar Storms, the
individual members cherish their bonds with each
other and their bonds with the animals, plants,
and natural elements around them equally. This
depiction of a female, environmentalist society
emphasizes the importance of inter-female
relationships for the preservation of the
ancestral culture. Women in Hogan's writing are
not better equipped to assume environmental
responsibility, they simply are the leaders in
the community, and the connections that count . .
. are those between women (Tarter 143-44). In
Solar Storms, Hogan interconnects Angel's
environmentalist concern with her fight for the
continuity of her matrilineal heritage.
14This helps to understand how important it was for
Angel to reconnect with her mother, how forgiving
she is. In her ability to look at her mother
beyond the normative ideals of motherhood/
womanhood imposed by a patriarchal society, Angel
liberates herself from the Euro-American society.
15Writing Deeper Maps Mapmaking, Local Indigenous
Knowledges, and Literary Nationalism in Native
Womens Writing by Kelli Lyon Johnson, Studies
in American Indian Literatures
16European maps have long been taken as
transparent, scientific, objective, and
universal--as if they were merely precise
representations of actual space in the world.
17As many Native nations assert their inherent
sovereignty, they insist on controlling their own
territory and thus seek to map it through the use
of their own nation-specific conventions.
18A full understanding of Native maps relies not
on a European understanding of scientific
geography but of the context--and the
narrative--that accompanied each Native-made map.
19Cocoons "we are cocoons who consume our own
bodies and at death we fly away transformed and
beautiful" (89).
20Discussion ?s--important motifs--significance
of maps--food--dualities--memory (and
maps!)--mirrors--religion--the
body/scarring--fear--setting driven novel?
21Debbie Reese!