Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan was born in 1947 in Denver, [[boulder|Colorado]]. Her father was Chickasaw, of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma; her mother was white, with Nebraska family roots. Her childhood moved between Denver and Oklahoma, and the dual rootedness — in [[san-francisco|the city]] and on her father’s land — has been a continuing thread in her work.

She came to literary work later than many of her contemporaries. The family was not academic; she worked as a horse trainer, a nurse’s aide, and other jobs into her late twenties before completing an MA at the University of [[boulder|Colorado]] in 1978. Her first poetry book — Calling Myself Home — appeared the same year. She has been writing continuously since.

The work

Hogan’s published volumes span more than four decades. The principal ones:

• Calling Myself Home (1978). Her first poetry collection, drawing on Chickasaw memory and the Oklahoma land.
• Seeing Through [[sun|the Sun]] (1985). Second poetry collection.
• Mean Spirit (1990). Her first novel; about the Osage murders of the 1920s (the same historical material later treated by David Grann in Killers of the Flower Moon); finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
• The Book of Medicines (1993). Major poetry collection; finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
• Solar Storms (1995). Novel; centers on hydroelectric development in northern Quebec/Labrador and its impact on a Cree community.
• Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995). Her major essay collection; widely taught; one of the most-read articulations of indigenous-ecological-spiritual writing in contemporary American letters.
• Power (1998). Novel; centers on Florida panther conservation and Native sovereignty.
• The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001). Memoir.
• People of the Whale (2008). Novel; centers on the Makah whale hunt of 1999 and the contested return of indigenous whaling.
• Rounding the Human Corners (2008). Poetry collection.
• Indios (2012). Novel.

What her work does

Several recurring threads:

• The land and the body. Hogan writes consistently of the body and the land as continuous, animated, related. Her essays in Dwellings repeatedly attend to the body’s response to particular places, the felt sense of relation between flesh and the earth.
• Trauma and recovery. Hogan does not idealize. Her work consistently addresses violence — historical (removal, the Osage murders, residential schools, environmental dispossession) and personal (her own difficult life, the suffering of women in particular). The writing holds the trauma without flinching and works through to a difficult, hard-earned grace rather than easy resolution.
• The more-than-human as kin. Without using the academic term animism, Hogan’s prose consistently treats animals, plants, weather, and place as composed of persons. Her essays on the bear, the wolf, the panther, the whales, the bees are essays with these beings, not about them.
• The political and the cosmological. Her novels are politically engaged — Mean Spirit on the Osage oil murders, Solar Storms on hydroelectric dispossession, Power on conservation politics, People of the Whale on the Makah hunt — but the political is held inside a cosmological frame in which the land itself is a participant.

Dwellings and its essays

The 1995 essay collection Dwellings deserves separate mention. The essays — “The Bats”, “Walking”, “Caves”, “Plants”, “Workshops, Lessons in Patience”, “The Snake People”, “What Holds the Water, What Holds the Light”, and others — are short, lyric, often meditative, and have been widely taught in environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and indigenous studies courses. The essay “Dwellings” (the title essay) is one of the most-read shorter pieces in contemporary American nature writing, alongside passages from Annie Dillard, [[wendell-berry|Wendell Berry]], and [[robin-wall-kimmerer|Robin Wall Kimmerer]].

What this gives the platform

Two contributions:

1. A continuing Chickasaw voice in the major American literary tradition. Hogan’s work has substantial recognition in the mainstream literary world (Pulitzer finalist, NBCC finalist, multiple National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award) without losing its distinctive Chickasaw rootedness. [[0mn1one|The platform]] takes seriously the model of indigenous voice in mainstream institutions without assimilation.
2. An articulation of indigenous-ecological-spiritual integration in lyric form. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s commitments are made vivid by writers like Hogan in ways the directly-political literature cannot achieve. The essays are themselves part of the substrate of the contemporary regenerative-cultural conversation.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[spirituality]]
• Parallels: [[animism]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Linda Hogan. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. Norton, 1995. Source class: book / primary essay collection.
2. Linda Hogan. The Book of Medicines. Coffee House, 1993. Source class: book / primary poetry.
3. Linda Hogan. Mean Spirit. Atheneum, 1990. Source class: book / primary novel.
4. Linda Hogan. Solar Storms. Scribner, 1995. Source class: book / primary novel.
5. Linda Hogan. The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. Norton, 2001. Source class: book / primary memoir.
6. Brewster E. Fitz. Linda Hogan: A Critical Companion. Greenwood, 2002. Source class: book / scholarly study.

Lenses still to grow

• The Chickasaw Nation as a continuing community — currently underrepresented in this wiki.
• The Osage murders as a piece of history (the Mean Spirit / Killers of the Flower Moon historical event).
• Dwellings chapter-by-chapter; the essays each deserve closer engagement.
• Hogan and the Native women writers’ tradition — her place alongside [[joy-harjo|Joy Harjo]], Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Patricia Smith, others.
• The Chickasaw writer-in-residence program as a model of tribal nation literary support.