Solar Storms

Linda Hogan

There are stories that once you hear the final words of the tale, you find a part of you deep inside the crevices of bone which seem to hum. Maybe even a tear may gather in the corner of your eye, though you want to smile. And you can't for the life of you explain why you fee this, when the stories are so very simple in their telling. Nothing unbelievable happens. They are simply tales of people and their everydayness.

Such is with Linda Hogan's second novel Solar Storms. Once again, as she did in her first novel, Mean Spirit, Linda (I call her Linda, since she is a former writing instructor of mine) uses her poet's eye, insight and voice to bring us a simple story of Native American people in their everydayness. But as with Mean Spirit, the times in which these people live are ones of sudden change, conflict over natural resources, and struggle to save ways of living and perhaps to overcome the harms of the past.

At the center of this narrative is Angel, a rebellious, hurt and literally scarred teenaged woman. It is through her eyes and voice this story of five generations of Native American women is revealed to us. Abused and given up by her equally abused mother when very young, and moved from foster home to foster home, Angel sets out to the Boundary Waters between Canada and Minnesota to find her birth family, her mother and herself. She reunites with Agnes, her great-grandmother; Dora-Rouge, her great-great-grandmother; and Bush, the "island" woman who adopted Angel's mother and raised Angel when she was very young.

Just as Angel begins to accept this town called Adam's Rib as her new home, she finds she must journey once more. Dora-Rouge wishes to return to her ancestral homelands to die. There are reports that Angel's mother is with their ancestral tribe, and these are also the early 1970s. Indigenous land is once again being taken, hydroelectric dams are draining rivers and lakes, and submerging sacred islands and meadows. The People are cut off from one another by Government Officials and construction crews, who fear a violent rebellion against their projects. So, partly as a pilgrimage, partly to assess the changes being forced upon the land and the People, this family of women set off in a canoe, following the old waterways north, to the land of the Fat Eaters, their ancestral tribe. Along the way and once there, the women find themselves caught in the chaos of ravaged land and water, two tribes at odds with "progress," and their own pasts. But as with the land, something older than we understand seems to reawaken in the midst of the conflict, bringing strength and wisdom.

As with her other novels, Linda has created a story that speaks of how our worlds, natural and human, are in pain and ill. She speaks of ancient ways, contracts between humans and animals, land and water, understandings that have been forgotten and broken, and the harm resulting. But she also speaks of hope, and of how no matter how we may try to forget the agreements struck between nature and ourselves, the old ways reassert themselves, and those who remember and keep the contracts survive.

Linda has also written a gentle coming of age story. Angel becomes not only a woman, but learns to accept what is echoing from within her; learning to be, as Linda says, "Human." Linda has also created a novel/poem. I found myself re-reading passages many times because of the intense imagery conveyed in single phrases or passages. This book is like a poet's travel diary.

This is a simple story of these four women's lives at a particular time. But as with everything in Nature and throughout the Cosmos, there is complexity in simplicity. Perhaps this is why Suzanne, Shawna and I all found ourselves with unexpected and unexplained tears sparking the corners of our eyes, as we closed the book. It is a journey which hummed awake something resting in our skin and our spines.