Aboriginal Peoples and Colonization

Aboriginal Peoples and Colonization

Solar Storms by Linda Hogan Page 1

Solar Storms , a novel that describes the Canadian government 's hydroelectric project 's dams that flood First Nations ' lands . In Solar Storms , Hogan 's novel about five generations of Native American women in the harsh landscape of the Boundary Waters between Canada and Minnesota art echoes life . In her story , conquest , enforced change , and assimilation become a means for transformation even as they all function as engines of self-devastation and destruction of the tribes . Just as Hogan prevailed because

of her closeness to the land and other tribal values , so her Native protagonist is transformed . From white-imaged genocidal victim she evolves into the more traditional Native woman who establishes a secure identity by immersing herself in the ritual life of the community . At the heart of Solar Storms is the vision quest of Angel Iron , a young woman who - returning home in 1972 at the height of the Red Power movement - comes to feel that spiritually and politically she is something back in place (29

Solar Storms dominates human activity . Its wildness , its stubborn passion to remain outside [the government surveyors '] sense of (123 , asserts Angel , ensures that nature will be a primary balance in her universe and any human attempt to change that relationship brings repercussions . The Europeans had trapped themselves inside their own destruction ' of the land , Angel says , and their legacy ' was the removal of spirituality (180 ) from those things the Indians thought were alive . Although the land has been colonized , she implies that it will inevitably prevail

Indigenous cultures have long survived , as Hogan makes clear in Solar Storms , because of their relationship to land . As Angel comes to realize , her heart and the

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beat of the land , the land [she] should have come from , were becoming the same thing (236 . Like her , Angel says , it was native land (224 , a transcultural space that has always been vulnerable and in endless flux . But it had survived (224 , she continues , because within the mutability of both land and its inhabitants lie vitality and the ability to change . Regardless of what awaits their future , in Solar Storms Hogan presents an ideological struggle in which the Indians attempt to live within a fluid , ever-changing place of shifting boundaries (118 . In contrast , the Euro-American world , with its limited (315 , authoritative way of life , attempts to reverse the [natural] world ' and thus deny possibilities of rebirth (289 . Although Angel knows that in time , all things would break and would become whole again ' the Euro Americans lived in a world that honored only endings , not creation , and so would force her people into containable territory where the only Indians were vanishing or of the past (325 But in her richly imagined Indian world , which Angel knows has no map to show [her] where to step , no guide to tell [her] how to see (346 Hogan suggests that cultures are capable of still returning (325

Although Solar Storms...