Purely by coincidence, I read Solar Storms during the week that included Columbus Day — a holiday that made me uncomfortable for some time and now makes me sick. Solar Storms is set amongst Native Americans living in northern Minnesota in 1972-73 as their lands are being overtaken for development. Author Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw writer, uses her gifts for language and character development to tell a spellbinding story of connectivity, brokenness, environmentalism, and spirituality with a focus on four incredibly strong and thoughtful women who each have their own personal quest to fulfill.
Our primary narrator is Angel Wing, a 17-year-old who is returning to her hometown, Adam’s Rib, after being away since she was very small. We know that Angel’s mother Hannah was unfit and that Angel carries horrible scars on her face as well as in her heart and spirit. Angel has spent time in and out of group homes and foster care, but she wishes to reconnect with her grandmothers in order to re-establish a link to her past. Angel is on a quest to find and know Hannah and in doing so, to know and understand herself. The first person she meets is her paternal great-grandmother Agnes Iron who greets her after the ferry drops her off. Agnes cares for her own elderly mother, Angel’s great-great-grandmother Dora Rouge, who is still mentally sharp if physically disabled. Agnes wears a bearskin coat all the time and sings a particular song that connects her to the bear’s spirit and to animals. The story of the bear coat’s origin is rooted in white European encroachment on the native lands and abuse of animals. We learn that at one time, there was a connection between humans and animals, a sort of agreement, a pact of mutual support that was violated with European settlement and over-hunting. Agnes longs to reconnect with the animals, with the bear in particular. Her mother Dora Rouge’s quest is to return to her people — the Fat Eaters of the north — in order to die. Dora Rouge possesses a wealth of knowledge — of stories, of plants and their remedies — and still communicates with the spirit of her dead husband Luther. Dora Rouge is a vibrant and delightful woman. Angel feels her energy immediately.
She was tiny. She’d looked larger than she was, but her body seemed too light to contain a living soul. I think it was because her radiance was bigger than her body. Like the light of fox fire, it was the fire of life burning itself beautifully away.
In Dora Rouge’s perfect words: I am gloriously old. I am ripening.
And finally, Angel’s fourth grandmother Bush, a woman who is not related to her by blood but rather by a bond of love. Bush was married to Agnes’ son Harold, but Harold ran off with a woman named Loretta and had the child Hannah (Angel’s mother), who turned up at Adam’s Rib at the age of 10, from out of the lake during a storm. Bush took on Hannah as her own child even though Hannah was strange and difficult, a child whom others feared and suspected to be possessed by bad spirits. Hannah’s mother’s people were the Elk Islanders, desperately poor natives whose hunger drove them to consume the bait left for capturing wolves; they were a people whose scent was reminiscent of poison, of cyanide. Hannah had been physically abused, but even worse was the emotional/psychological abuse, one might even call it a possession or a spiritual psychosis, that she endured. Bush refused to abandon Hannah and tried to get her help from native healers, but there was little they could do.
Everyone had a name for what was wrong. Dora Rouge said it was memory and I think she was closest … it was what could not be forgotten, the shadows of men who’d hurt Loretta, the shadows of the killers of children.
As Angel says, My mother walked out of the rifles of our killers.
Bush’s gift is her ability to love and to put things back together, but if Hannah’s illness is rooted in the destruction of native ways and lands, rooted far in the past, how does one heal that? When Bush learns that in the north, developers are moving in to re-route rivers and construct hydro-electric dams, destroying natural habitat, migration routes, burial grounds and ancient communities, she resolves to go north and join the protests there. All four women set off together with two canoes, supplies and a map.
The journey north is a fabulous story. Hogan employs what I will call “spiritual realism,” as opposed to “magical realism”; each woman demonstrates a kind of spirituality unique to herself to assist in their travels. Dora Rouge, despite the many decades since she was last home, remembers the routes to get there and is more accurate than Bush’s map. She says, Maps are only masks over the face of God. Dora Rouge also has the ability to talk to the river and negotiate a safe passage. Angel discovers that she has the gift of dreaming plants — dreaming of plants that she does not know but that Dora Rose and later the elder Tulik recognize and help her find; these are plants with great healing powers.
Once the women reach their destination, they take up with Dora Rouge’s relatives and become involved with the Native American protests against development. Hogan’s descriptions of the devastations wrought due to development are tremendously moving and tragic. Communities swept underwater, forests and fertile land lost, a way of life erased. The demonstrations serve at first to bring the native people together, but with time and the entry of soldiers and young white men fighting for paying jobs, the community suffers fissures. Some wish to respond with violence, some think it’s time to accept a monetary settlement, some want to continue non-violent resistance. While some welcomed the arrival of electricity, Angel sees that with that light comes a new kind of darkness; she speaks of the “speed of darkness” in contrast to the “speed of light”:
…it was a darkness that traveled toward us. It was a darkness of words and ideas, wants and desires. This darkness came in the guise of laws made up by lawless men and people who were, as they explained, and believed, only doing their jobs.
Angel struggles at times to not let her anger get away with her, and she does not believe that the whites who come in to build are evil; rather they are “backward,” lacking in vision.
… I wondered how these men, young though they were, did not have a vision large enough to see a life beyond their jobs, beyond orders, beyond the company that would ultimately leave them broke, without benefits, and guilty of the sin of land killing.
I’m not revealing any spoilers (as long as you know US history) when I tell you that the protests are not successful in the long run. Yet, for our four strong women, the question is whether or not their quests have been fulfilled. Although there is much to mourn in Solar Storms, Hogan leaves us with a hopeful message, a possibility.
Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see.
I could write pages more about this incredible novel. I haven’t even touched on the male characters and their secondary (but important) role in the action, or about the theme of cannibalism, or about the importance of knowing where things begin. Solar Storms is a rich novel and should be read and savored and considered deeply. This is a good read for winter, when the world is a little darker and quieter and we have time for reflection.
