Understanding Time and Space in Linda Hogan's 'Solar Storms': Exploring Native Time Sense, Lecture notes of Poetry

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CAROLINE GARCIA DE SOUZA

When All Boundaries Fall Apart:

The Experience of Time in Linda Hogan’s Power and Solar Storms

Porto Alegre

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Instituto de Letras

Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras

Estudos de Literatura

Sociedade, (Inter)Textos Literários e Tradução nas LEM

When All Boundaries Fall Apart:

The Experience of Time in Linda Hogan’s Power and Solar Storms

Caroline Garcia de Souza

Orientadora: Dra. Rita Terezinha Schmidt

Dissertação de mestrado apresentada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul como requisito parci al para a obtenção do título de Mestra em Letras.

Porto Alegre

To all Indigenous peoples

EARTH

Wholeheartedly, I thank my parents and sister for providing me with a sustaining

ground, in this and all other occasions.

WATER

I thank my friends and the Sangha for reminding me of the fluidity with which

apparent obstacles can be overcome.

FIRE

To all Indigenous peoples throughout the world, past and present,

I bow in reverence and gratitude.

Thanks for helping me see, like never before, the incessant flame of life and creation.

AIR

A special thanks to my advisor, Professor Rita,

whose company and words have helped me expand my horizon of knowledge.

Your wisdom is an inspiration.

RESUMO

Linda Hogan é uma autora Chickasaw cuja extensa obra inclui romances, contos, poesia, drama e ensaios. Da mesma forma, ela é uma ambientalista cujo ativismo se baseia em uma compreensão Nativo-Americano da natureza e das relações entre os seres humanos e não-humanos. Focando em dois de seus romances, Solar Storms (1995) e Power (1998), a presente dissertação explora os processos de cura de suas protagonistas, Angela e Omishto, respectivamente. Em ambos romances, as personagens se engajam em um movimento de abandono do modo de ser Euro-americano – um modo de ser fortemente orientado pela ideologia do Destino Manifesto – , em direção a um reencontro com sua ancestralidade nativa e a uma apreensão tribal da vida e do mundo. Especificamente, esse trabalho explora o gradual engajamento das personagens no que a autora Laguna Paula Gunn Allen (1992) define como um senso de tempo cerimonial – a ceremonial time sense : uma experiência temporal particular que engendra uma integração psíquica, e se opõe à experiência cronológica e mecânica do tempo, a qual produz fragmentação no sentido de fortalecer a sensação de separação entre tempo e espaço, pessoa e lugar, natureza e cultura. Esse trabalho analisa como o movimento das personagens em direção a um rico autorreconhecimento enquanto indígenas (OWENS, 1994) representa um movimento de abertura aos fluxos do mundo, bem como um processo de dissolução de categorias fortemente enraizadas, tais quais sujeito e objeto, eu interno e mundo externo. Além disso, a presente dissertação examina de que forma um senso de tempo cerimonial se conecta à noção de sacred hoop (Plains tribes) – uma unidade abrangente que abarca a existência como um todo, e na qual todos os movimentos estão conectados e se relacionam entre si.

Palavras-chave: Literatura indígena norte-americana, Linda Hogan, Solar Storms, Power, Tempo ameríndio

“Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. She thought of her sisters, Nau’ts’ity’I and I’tcts’ity’I, and together they created the Universe this world and the four worlds below. Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now I’m telling you the story she is thinking.” Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 : “American Progress,” by John Gast (1872)…………………………………………………… 14

Figure 2 : Image extracted from Being Alive , by Tim Ingold (2011)…………….………………...7 5

Figure 3 : Image extracted from Being Alive , by Tim Ingold (2011)…………….………………...

First and foremost, I would like to emphasize that I write as a non-

Native willing to learn, understand, and experience the world

through the wisdom of Native knowledge.

I write as an outside apprentice desiring to come closer, with an

ultimate respect and reverence, to the Native peoples and their

ways of apprehending and living the world.

I write as one of the many ones in this multitude of beings made ill

by the lack of wisdom, and by the oblivion of our organic

connection to the land and all other beings.

I humbly approach their ancient knowledge in the hope that this

encounter will bring healing to me and to all those in need, in the

hope that the opening of one’s eyes will invite and help others to do

the same.

May we learn to reconcile and may balance be restored.

Introduction^1

I was an undergraduate student at UFRGS when the first encounter took place. A discipline specially focused on Native American literature was being offered that semester, and I decided to take it, by then completely unaware of the deep connections I would gradually start to develop with this body of knowledge. Working with literature can be truly magical. Even in the academic field, where things are expected to be more objective and formal, literature still has a powerful and transformative effect. As the semester advanced with its readings and discussions, I felt a flame eagerly growing behind my eyes. I felt an earnestness taking shape and becoming captivation, genuine wonder. I was

(^1) This thesis was sponsored by Coor den ação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).

not know how to use it. The climate change is such an enormous phenomenon, that we are unable to picture it with clarity, and to understand how it affects us in subtle yet profound ways. Traditional peoples posses a largely rich and varied body of knowledge. Despite the many differences among the numerous Indian cultures throughout the Americas, they are all similar in that they are nature-centered. Their knowledge is a knowledge rooted in the land, in the acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of all things and beings – all my relations. It is, therefore, a knowledge based on experience, and it finds its validity and purpose in the maintenance of this connectedness, in a balanced and sustainable manner. In order to establish a dialogue, however, first it is i mperative that we become aware of who are the people who comprise, in reality, the vastly diverse groups of individuals that we address by such labels as Indian Americans, Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, and the likes 4. In his classical Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century (1996), Fergus Bordewich claims that “[few] other Americans, and perhaps none, have been so reshaped and so crippled by the events of the past, and at the same time so distorted in the national vision by myth and illusion” (p. 30) as the Indians. Throughout his work, he presents and examines the several layers of stereotyped visions that have shaped Euro-Americans’ perception of traditional peoples throughout the centuries. Among the most common ly held views, there is the nineteenth century depiction of the Indian as a barbaric element destined to be conquered by the westward advance of modern civilization – a belief that was synthesized by John Gast’s widely popular painting “American Progress” (1872), in which a white-dressed Columbia leads American settlers from enlightened sunrise toward west, while a group of Indian savages runs away into what remains of darkness. There is also the portrayal, largely disseminated nowadays by the New Age movement, of the Indian as a tragic victim of history, as well as an innocent child of nature. As a result of this movement, Native American spiritual traditions are being appropriated, distorted, and

(^4) In what regards the terminology, I decided to employ the terms “Native American,” “In dian American ,” and “In digenous” interchangeabl y. Each author with whom I work has her or his own preference – and sometimes none in particular. Furthermore, none of these terms seems to be fully accepted as the most appropriat e: the terms “Indian” an d “Indigenous” comprise a misnomer inasmuch as they originate from a historic mistake (from Christopher Columbus’s belief that he had reache d Asia); an d as for “Native American”, it “implies that other people born in the United States are somehow less ‘native’ than, say, a Yaqui immigrant from Mexico or than someone who may be only one-thirty-second Cherokee by the measure of ‘blood quant um’ but who nonetheless meets the criteria for membership in that tribe” (BORDEWICH, 1996, p. 19).

sold by non-Native people, in the same way that their art, jewelry, clothing, weavings, and craft had been appropriated and commodified before (SMITH, 2004, p. 128).

Figure 1: “American Progress,” by John Gast (1872)

With all this in mind, I perform the task of writing this thesis as a ceremony. The purpose of a ceremony is to reinstall balance through the bringing together of broken-off pieces. In a ceremony, we remember the interdependence of all things, that everything in the universe is connected. “The intention of a ceremony is to put a person back together by restructuring the human mind” (HOGAN, 2007, p. 40). In this sense, I hope to engage with the reader in a journey, following the thread of Hogan’s narratives toward new ways of thinking the self and our place in the world. I also hope that this work will contribute to the spreading of a fairer, more complex, and more realistic portrayal of American Indian cultures and knowledge, and their dynamic and vivid persistence up to the present.

can be found in the process of attaining balance again, of being in harmony with the universe and its motions. The dances and rituals are a rendering of this process, “by which one enters into timelessness – that place where one is whole.” (ALLEN, 1992, Kindle edition).

In chapter two, I begin my explorations through Solar Storms (1995) and Power (1998), focusing on the protagonists’ personal healing processes and their engagement in a sensual participation with nature. Following Angela’s and Omishto’s physical as well as inward journeys, I examine how this movement toward a rich self recognition as Indians engenders a gradual abandonment of a mainstream American way of being and a clock- based experience of time, prompting instead an integrated and holistic perception of the self. Their journeys thus represent the healing of a displacement engendered by colonial imperialism. As Allen suggests,

[T]here is some sort of connection between colonization and chronological time. There is a connection between factories and clocks, and there is a connection between colonial imperialism and factories. There is also a connection between telling Indians tales in chronological sequences and the American tendency to fit the Indians into the slots they have prepared for us. The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times. (1992, Kindle edition) Throughout this process of psychic integration and gradual opening , the false boundaries that used to define their experience of the world als o subside, along with deep- rooted dualistic oppositions such as mind and body, animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman, and so on. As they engage in an intra-activity with the landscape, the limits between time and space fall apart and they gradually blend together, giving rise to a new kind of awareness. Moreover, I suggest a possible reading of Power through the light of Elaine Jahner’s conception of event structure (1979), and I also explore the ceremonial dimension that underlies the narrative. My analysis is grounded on the works of Native American thinkers such as Paula Gunn Allen, Gregory Cajete, and Louis Owens, as well as non -Native authors such as Elizabeth Grosz, Benjamin Whorf, and others.

In chapter three, I broaden the analysis developed in the previous chapter and explore how a Native time sense is connected to an ethically -informed epistemology built around the conception of ceremonial worlds (HESTER & CHENEY, 2001). From this perspective arises a notion of responsible truth, a truth that rings true for everybody’s well- being, and which is no longer characterized as the correspondence between discourse and a ready-made world beyond discourse. Based on Tim Ingold’s (2011) theorization about the “animic way of being” and the attitude of openness that it entails, I suggest that Ingold’s conception of a meshwork of relations bears many resemblances to the Plain tribes’ idea of a sacred hoop, or a medicine wheel. Both comprise the understanding of an all-encompassing unity in which all movement is related to all other movement, and in which things and beings exist not as individual components, but as the very relations in which they engage (Ingold defines this as the relational constitution of being ).

practices, and thus remain oblivious to the initial basis on which our understanding of their behavior must be founded” (1977, p. 15). This process establishes a unilateral relatedness, and therefore hinders the possibility of actual communication. For this reason, chapter one is meant as an attempt to establish the proper ground on which our understanding of Native American literature should take its roots. I try to give as much voice as possible to those people actually legitimated to speak of the subject, those people who carry this ancestral knowledge in their blood, their experience, their identity. This is a political statement of paramount necessity in face of a long scholarly tradition that has produced narratives ‘about’ Indian history and Indian knowledge without taking into account the viewpoint of the individuals such narratives intend to portray 6. I also invite to the discussion selected non-Native authors who have lived with – and/or closely experienced – Native communities, and whose works preserve the centrality of the Indian perspective. The present chapter lays out a basic theoretical background, thus creating the possibilities for the emergence^7 into this world.

1.1 Nature and Knowledge

In order to engage in a genuine dialogue with a Native American literary work, it is necessary to make use of a particular kind of attention. Indigenous cultures all over the world are similar in that they are nature-centered: all things in nature, be they “animate” or “inanimate,” are alive and sacred and interact with one another in a dynamic and creative dance. Humans are but a part of a greater whole, and as such they must seek to maintain balanced and responsible relationships with all other participants. Gregory Cajete explains that Native peoples practice “a culturally conditioned ‘tuning in’ of the

(^6) See Donald L. Fixico (2009, p. 8): “Too often, studies about American In dians have been produced from the non-Indian point of view. In the history of Indian-white relations, understanding the native perspective or comprehending the In dian point of view can be referred as th e three dimension s of constructing new American Indian history (which are basically the First Dimension of g eneral narrative description ‘about’ In dian history, the S econd Dimension of historical analysis of the dynamics of Indian-white relations, and the Third Dimension consisting of historical an alysis of the Indian point of view).” 7 I feel the need to expl ain my ludic use of the term emergence in this instance: throughout Native America, emergence myths are the stories that relate how a specific peopl e first entered this worl d. In Linda Hogan’s Power , for example, the fictitious Taiga people hold it that in the beginning anhinga birds opened a hole in the sky through which Panther, the first person , emerged into the world. She was then followed by the first humans, the ancestors of the present-day Panther people.

natural world” (2000, p. 20), which means that they operate on a level of deep connection with nature. “The body feels the subtle forces of nature with a heightened sensitivity. The mind perceives the subtle qualities of a creative natural world with great breath and awareness” (p. 20). Such an acute perception engenders what he calls a sensual participation with nature: the person hears, sees, smells, and tastes it with an intense sensitivity. Cajete emphasizes, nevertheless, that this sensual participation is not “supernatural” or “extra-ordinary.” It is actually “an ancient and culturally conditioned response to nature,” (p. 20) and the enactment of a natural capacity of the h uman mind. Everything is hence perceived as having energy and intelligence, even those things we usually classify as inanimate: rocks, mountains, natural forces, and so on. This is the basis of what is generally addressed by anthropologists as “animism,” a general term that synthesizes the Native way of apprehending the world, and which I choose to avoid along this work due to its ethnocentric bias. 8 Such a deep and organic participation with the motions of nature lies at the heart of the American Indian ways of knowing. In contrast with the Western tendency to hold propositional knowledge as more valid and true than other kinds of knowledge, knowledge for Native Americans is based on experience. As Brian Yazzie Burkhart explains, propositional knowledge is presented in the form “that something is so.” It can be conveyed through statements or propositions, and is generally thought to have permanence (BURKHART, 2004). In Western thought, this kind of knowledge is held as the “pinnacle of philosophy” (2004, p. 19). It is founded upon abstraction and tends to detach itself from the empirical reality which gave it meaning in the first place. “[T]he origins of things are lost as knowledge increases and general statements are made using syllogisms containing concepts of which we have little knowledge” (DELORIA, 2004, p. 7). Native knowledge, on the other hand, never loses sight of experience and cannot be severed from the specific empirical background that gives it validity and purpose. “Knowledge in experience,” as Burkhart calls it, is a knowledge deeply imbedded in everyday life; it is something “we carry with us,” it “allows us to function in the world, to carry on our daily tasks, to live our lives.” “Whatever we call it, this kind of knowledge is

(^8) “Along with words like ‘primitive,’ ‘ancestor worship,’ and ‘supernatural,’ animism continues to perpetuate a modern prejudice, a disdain, an d a projection of inferiority toward the worl dview of Indigenous peoples.” (CAJETE, 2000, p. 27)