Spiritual Disorientation: A Study of Place in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms from the Perspective of Human Geography

Abstract

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw writer grown up in the Native American Renaissance, who feels much obliged to figure out an effective way of guiding the colonized native people out of ecocide and ethnocide wrought by the Euro-American colonization. As an author wholly drenched in the indigenous cosmology, Hogan bestows great concern on the issue of place in the literary creation, which is a pivotal cosmological element in the native epistemological system and thus can be taken as a means for her to decolonize her people. This paper is to investigate the issue of colonization and decolonization through the lens of place in the register of human geography by exploring the spiritual disorientation attributed to land loss represented in her novel Solar Storms (1995). Based on detailed textual analysis, it is unfolded that the spiritual disorientation in the Indian community has been overtly embodied in two aspects: native men’s alcoholism and their conceding to white masculinity, and child abuse conducted by women for their suffering from intergenerational trauma, which truly represents the mental or psychological crisis of indigenous peoples triggered by and attendant to the land loss. In conclusion, the decolonizing process in Hogan’s fiction necessitates reviewing the horrible outcome of the native people’s land loss history so as to enhance their recognition of the communal place, stimulate their sense of community and develop new sites and strategies of resistance.