I’ve come late to Linda Hogan’s writing. I’ve now read two of her books – Solar Storms and People of the Whale – and in the middle of a third – Mean Spirit. I can’t help but know what is apparent. The message they hold is for all time, but especially now when we’re called upon to pay attention and determine how we shall live. We are called upon to be distinctly cognizant that what we do matters.
The common theme has to do with the clash of cultures. One honors the Earth, all ways of life, and practices a sacred sense of reciprocity. The other is intensely focused on accumulation that can’t be satiated and complete disregard of all life…for the benefit of a few. One is life-giving. One is depleting. There’s no subtlety and here no overlap. It’s the Great Divide for purpose: Pay attention. Heal.
The books involve Indigenous characters who experienced separation from traditional ways of living to varying degrees, and those who remain in touch. Through outside western influences, they’ve had their birthright nearly or completely destroyed. Through manipulations, they’ve borne murder, blurring of identity and loss of homeland. Hogan points so well to the insidiousness of these shenanigans that caused people to fall away from their True North over time, almost without noticing.
What I so appreciate about Hogan’s writings is her willingness to dive deeply and excavate struggle, confusion and collapse at the individual and communal level. But equally she leads the search for a way out that also involves struggle and confusion. But the shift involves direction aimed toward – and does produce – a return.
In People of the Whale, certain sentences popped out to me over the course of the novel that, just in these, told the whole story.
…They do not feel the spirits that once lived in the fogs and clouds around them. The alive world is unfelt. They feel abandoned...
…For every inch of skin, there is memory...
…He was waiting for something to open, but it wasn’t the door...
…they are answers to questions not yet even asked...
…he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place...
…There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe...
…Then he sings an old whale song he has never learned...
…Tradition had been waiting their return.
It’s of Mythic stature and, of course, this is what we now engage.
The Lifepath Dialogues 