Solar Storms by Linda Hogan

People say that in the beginning was the word. But they have forgotten the loneliness of God, the yearning for something that shaped itself into the words, Let there be. Out of that loneliness, light was conceived, water opened across a new world, and people rose up from clay, there were dreamers of plants and deer. It was this same desire in me, this same longing for creation, and Bush's spare words were creation in itself. I had been empty space, and now I was finding a language, a story, to shape myself by. I had been alone and now there were others. I was suspended there on the island of snails and mosses, snow and windstorms, and I was quiet for days on end, but like Bush's wolverine bones, I was partaking of sacred meal and being put back together.

My Indijanuary continues with Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, a book about a young woman who moves in with her indigenous family on the Boundary Waters between Minnesota and Canada. Angel arrives with half her face scarred for reasons unknown, knowing only that it was her tempestuous mother who somehow afflicted her with them many years ago. Her mother is away in far northern Canada, but when she arrives at the Boundary Waters, she finds a whole family waiting for her: Bush, the former wife of her grandfather and adoptive mother, Agnes, her great-grandmother, and--get this--Dora-Rouge, her ancient and wheelchair-bound great-great-grandmother. Over and over, Angel describes the experience of returning to this place "moving toward herself," and in the company of these women she's able to recapture an identity rooted in her family, and the lands and waters that surround them.

There is a particular story I see again and again in these books by indigenous authors: an indigenous person, often of mixed heritage, must resolve a battered psyche by returning home and reconnecting with their family and homeland. It happens in Ceremony; it happens in A House Made of Dawn; it happens in Winter in the Blood; it happens to some extent in Joy Harjo's poetry collection An American Sunrise. What these stories know is that the psyche is not an independent actor, but one constrained by context; it cannot be healed except by being integrated into community and a relationship with the world. Furthermore, they know that individual traumas are the tail-end results of capitalism and commodification. The healing process always has a geographic character, one that goes in reverse, undoing diaspora, and maybe even reversing Indian removal. (Other books do this, too, like Song of Solomon, except that a return to a teleological homeland--Africa--can only be gestured toward at the end of that book.)

In Solar Storms, this movement-in-reverse carries Angel in several stages: first to the Boundary Waters, and then farther out onto the remote spit of land where Bush lives called Adam's Rib. There, Bush engages in a kind of literal healing, piecing together models of animal skeletons to be sold to museums. But soon the process carries her, along with Bush, Agnes, and Dora-Rouge, in a canoe up through the rivers of what seems to be Ontario, back toward the "Fat-Eaters" who are Dora-Rouge's--and thus Angel's--original community. (Hogan is careful to make the characters seem indigenous-ish, but never gives them a specific tribal identity. They're not Cree, not Ojibwe; as best I can tell the "Fat-Eaters" are totally made up. This gives the novel a sort of blurred spiritual nature I decline to evaluate.) Their goal is to take Dora-Rouge here so that she can die where she was born. It also happens to be where Angel's mother lives.

There's a too-easy version of this story, one I was dreading when I saw Barbara Kingsolver's blurb on the back of the book. But the return north is not easy or simple. Instead of heading toward healing, the trip leads the women into crisis. The rivers of the north are being dammed and diverted, one by one, threatening to obliterate towns by flooding, or drain the lakes that people have relied on for time immemorial. The damming threatens not only the tiny towns of the north, but Bush's house at Adam's Rib, which will be destroyed even though it's a two-week canoe ride away. (Appropriately, I was reading this part at the same time I came across this article describing Canada as a front for destructive resource extractors.) Angel and her forbears become embroiled in a desperate protest against the dams, and the personal becomes political. How can Angel be healed by a return to her ancestral community when the community itself is so existentially threatened? It's this question, perhaps, that makes the book so rich and so fraught, and distinguishes it from similar ones.

Angel's mother, too, is something of a bust, too spiteful and toxic to provide any kind of closure, though her daughter has traveled so far to find her. Her mother, Hannah, becomes a kind of twin to the forces of destruction that dam the rivers, a senseless and devouring force that no one has been able to contain. (We discover that Angel's scars are bite marks.) Strangely, Hannah's malice seems to come from a deeper, darker place than the evil of the river-dammers. It's a mystical, even supernatural evil, without rhyme or reason. Can Hannah heal by returning? Of course not--she's been there all along. Is her kind of evil worse, or scarier somehow, than the river-dammers'? Or is she a force of nature, an expression of its balance, that is equally endangered, like the legendary whirlpool at Adam's Rib that swallows drunks and skidoos?

Anyway, this book was a pleasant surprise. I set my expectations low because of the "healing company of women" stuff; that one's probably on me. But I was surprised by its complexity and its rejection of simple narratives.