Linda Hogan (writer)

Linda K. Hogan (born July 16, 1947) is a poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.

Quotes

Blessed are they who listen when no one is left to speak.
- “Blessing,” in Calling Myself Home (New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1978), p. 27. Also in The Remembered Earth, ed. Geary Hobsen (Albuquerque, N. Mex.: Red Earth Press, 1979; reissued Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), p. 55.

The literature contemporary Indian women write is a necessity. It is existence and survival given shape in written language. It is more than poetry and prose. It is an expression of entire cultures and their perceptions of the world and universe. It is often a transmission, through written language, of the oral traditions that were, and still are, passed on by word of mouth.
- "Native American Women: Our Voice, the Air" in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Autumn, 1981)

By incorporating history, by remembering, Indian women continue to define themselves. It is through this remembering that we survive. It is through this speaking out that our history is preserved more whole and intact than it was in the past.
- "Native American Women: Our Voice, the Air" in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Autumn, 1981)

Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society.
- "Native American Women: Our Voice, the Air" in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Autumn, 1981)

The desperate need to articulate this was what went into these early poems, the need to say what hadn't been spoken, to tell an untold story of our lives. They are home speaking through me. Home is in blood, and I am still on the journey of calling myself home.
- Introduction to Calling Myself Home, in Red Clay: Poems & Stories (1991)

For American Indian people the journey home is what tells us our human history, the mystery of our lives here, and leads us toward fullness and strength. These first poems were part of that return for me, an identification with my tribe and the Oklahoma earth, a deep knowing and telling how I was formed of these two powers called ancestors and clay.
- Introduction to Calling Myself Home, in Red Clay: Poems & Stories (1991)

Together we created an illustration of how the oral becomes the written, how life becomes a story, how new angles and layers of information create a form of energy that lets the story enter.
- Introduction to My Father's Story: The Black Horse, in Red Clay: Poems & Stories (1991)

Writing is a way to uncover and discover a new truth. It comes from, and speaks to, the deepest well-spring of the human being, the place that is the source of our inner knowledge, intuition and instinct.
- Introduction to 'My Father's Story: The Black Horse, in Red Clay: Poems & Stories (1991)

Mean Spirit (1990)

"The law is on their side because it's their law." (p111)

Love, Lettie thought, it hurts and gladdens us no matter what a woman's age. (p177)

He thought that even a prophet, even a warrior, could not survive the ways of the Americans, especially the government with rules and words that kept human life at a distance and made it live by their regulations and books. (p219)

Uncle Sam was a cold uncle with a mean soul and a cruel spirit. (p219)

"I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?" The priest shook his head. 'It doesn't say that. It says man has dominion over the creatures of the earth.' "'Well, that's where it needs to be fixed. That's part of the trouble, don't you see?'" (270)

"Hearing Voices" in The Writer on Her Work, Volume 2 (1991)

As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life.

How we have been pulled from the land! And how poetry has worked hard to set us free, uncage us, keep us from split tongues that mimic the voices of our captors. It returns us to our land. Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. It is a lockbox of words to put an ear to as we try to crack the safe of language, listening for the right combination, the treasure inside. It is life resonating. It is sometimes called Prayer, Soothsaying, Complaint, Invocation, Proclamation, Testimony, Witness. Writing is and does all these things. And like that parade, it is illegitimately insistent on going its own way, on being part of the miracle of life, telling the story about what happened when we were cosmic dust, what it means to be stars listening to our human atoms.

A friend's father, watching the United States stage another revolution in another Third World country, said, "Why doesn't the government just feed people and then let the political chips fall where they may?" He was right. It was easy, obvious, even financially more reasonable to do that, to let democracy be chosen because it feeds hunger.

When I sit down at the desk, there are other women who are hungry, homeless. I don't want to forget that, that the world of matter is still there to be reckoned with. This writing is a form of freedom most other people do not have. So, when I write, I feel a responsibility, a commitment to other humans and to the animal and plant communities as well.

writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America.

Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?

Solar Storms (1994)

Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)

I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken.
The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me...
- beginning of chapter one

Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room. (chapter three, p51)

At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn't dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I'd entered, however (chapter four p78)

"Your mother was a door...Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering."
Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing.
- chapter six, p96-7

From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life. (chapter seven, p107)

I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)

What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn't, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. (p123)

I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turnings of other worlds. (p179)

I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things--birdsongs, the moon, even my own life--grow from rich and splendid silence. (p265)

But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)

"Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)

Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this year that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern. For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, come back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. (p325)

There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love. (p344)

Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995)

A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. (p15)

Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves. (p30)

There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger. (p41)

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others. (p60)

What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. (p66)

Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself. (p106)

Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. (p159)

Power (1999)

It’s as if everything breathes, hard and desperate, the land, the house, the water. (p28)

The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature. (p28)

Believing and knowing are two lands distant from each other. (p40)

I think again of breath, and how we Taiga people have that word -Oni- for breath and air and wind. It is a force. Oni is like God, it is everywhere, unseen. I think I heard this word spoken in the rush of weather. I’m sure of it. The wind said it’s own name, “Oni”. (p41)

it has always been Ama’s skill to live with the world and not against it. (p47)

I have already forgotten such things as music exist. Ama doesn’t hear it, though, she only hears the deer walk. “Listen to its hooves,” she says, and I wonder how, always, she puts this world away as if it never happened and how she hears the little feet of the deer. (p54)

It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world. (p55)

I feel watched. By nature. I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do. (p59)

“What do you know and what do you just believe?” I thought about that for the longest time. I know nothing, I only believe in things. (p67)

Whatever has ended, whatever has begun, is strong in the air. (p73)

I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me. (p94)

bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time. (p95)

Two worlds exist. Maybe it’s always been this way, but I enter them both like I am two people. Above and below. Land and water. Now and then. (p97)

resurrection ferns that wait for a rain like dead things and then open up new and green and beautiful like they are doing right now out on the hurricane felled trees, like they didn’t know it was catastrophe that gave them life. Maybe, I think, I am like those ferns. Ama’s like the rain. (p101)

It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm. (p105)

I hate the smell of school, but I’ve been good at it, this world where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life. (p105)

at school I have learned there’s no room in sky for my mother’s heaven; there’s no room at the center of the earth for hell, either. It is new worlds I will have to look for. (p106)

The people, are watching Ama, studying her. She’s a curiosity. She is a human being of a different kind. She makes them doubt, I see that. (p134)

They still hold themselves in a beautiful manner; that’s what we used to call it, “a beautiful manner.” It’s the way of living that holds tight to memory, creation, and earth. You can see this goodness of life on their peaceful faces, on their skin. (p154)

The place itself seems alive. Here, the land itself seems to have a sound, the soft brush of a breeze. (p159)

But in reality I know that history is nothing more than the after shock of men’s fears and rages and the wars those two feelings create. It’s a tidal wave that swallows worlds whole and leaves nothing behind. (p170)

Would it have been a different world if someone had believed our lives were as important as theory and gold? (p179)

The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001)

Mystery is part of each life, and maybe it is healthier to uphold it than to spend a lifetime in search of half-made answers. Still, as humans, we want truth. We are searchers. Our stories, our courthouses, our lives, contemporary anxieties and depressions are all searches full with this desire. Humans want truth the way water desires to be sea level and moves across the continent for the greater ocean. "Memory is a field full of psychological ruins," wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. For some that may be true, but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says "I remember," all things are possible. (p 15)

there is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples. (p 16)

Worlds are made of lies and dreams (p 200)

There is always, to everything, a before and after. (p 201)

I feel the air as if I could move through it with my ancestors' wings. (p 202)

We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse. (p 204)

We feel it, long for them, without even knowing what it is that we feel and yearn toward. We try to replace what is lost with possessions, with belief, with false hope. Longing, as poet Ernesto Cardenal said, for something beyond what we want. (p 204)

we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories (p 205)

We are, in part, the body of earth (p 206)

Nowadays, it seems we are always trying to match the world to ourselves instead of ourselves to it, the way it truly is. Yet human smallness is only too apparent. In such great universes as ours, we should try to match ourselves to the outside world (p 206)

Foreword to How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova (2007)

edited by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, Amber Lacy (2007)

For Native peoples, our systems of knowledge are not about beliefs but about ways of knowing and how we know, through experience itself. It is not what is taught in books, not in ordinary classes, but what lies beneath all the new ideas.

The anthropologists and those studying tribal peoples too often write their own interpretation of what is said because they are unable to see larger, to think beyond their own thinking enough to come to what is really spoken, meant, and known about the world. For indigenous peoples, each place has its own intelligence, its own stories.

The physical space we all share may be the same, but the philosophical space isn't.

Even when we have been sent away from that place or have not learned our own languages, we still have it; from subtle gesture and learned ways of being, it is passed down to us. This is "How It Is." The knowledge is in the manner of being, even when the words are not spoken. Our philosophies come of being from a place and a community, of knowing a place and respecting its boundaries.

Most of us think of the earth as a living being and that we must live upon it with care and love and respect. The idea of subjugating the earth is the product of another mind. Even environmentalists, she maintains, are of another mind because they are not concerned so much with the sacred as with the idea of stewardship.

We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Diversity is a way of being, and the attempt to find an absolute is yet another part of the separate matrixes. Tribal peoples do not require a sameness of thought or belief. We come from different stories, different origins, and we respect the differences.

Even today we focus on diversity as part of Earth's creativity while Euro Americans still search for the universal, an absolute, something that can be understood, spoken, be assimilated into their own system of knowledge. The Native understands the world as more complex and not the static that is implicit in an absolute where all communication remains within a narrow circle of like-minded. One group emphasizes the individual as part of the whole. The Euro emphasizes the individual. There is "we" and there is "I."

community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human.

People of the Whale (2008)

Even the land gives in to history. (from Prologue)

Part One

The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there.
But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it...
- p15

During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him.
[He] is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can't escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And [he] harbors too many secrets.
- p25

Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. (p45)

lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places. (p53)

The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64)

"Why don't you go out more?" her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had hap¬ pened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. (p65)

She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper. (p76)

Part Two

All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one. (p116)

He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He'd studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too. (p164)

[He] wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods. (p165)

Part Three

It is a still day, everything silent. Even the wind isn't blowing. There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe. (p281)

Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest. (p288)

Walk Gently Upon the Earth (2010)

let your roots grow outward meeting and intertwining with other roots of those all over the planet consciously connecting for the same reason of maintaining peace and compassion. Feel the strength and support we give to the planet while connected with intent. (p 203)

Nature is the most profound multimedia event that you will ever experience. Why not turn off your television and go witness the greatest show on Earth. (p 152)

When we learn to align our own energy with that of the Earth's, we will move forward effortlessly. When we slow down and allow our senses to open, great transformations occur. Living on the planet Earth becomes living in the Garden of Eden. (p 212)

Introducation

Each morning when I step outside my door I walk into the Garden of Eden. "O Great Spirit, thank you for this beautiful day." There has not been one day in the past 20 years that I have not started my day this way and really meant it. When you are truly connected to Mother Earth and Spirit, you see as much beauty in a cold, gray, sleety, December morning as a warm, sunny day in June.

What a joy to share what I loved most with those I loved most.

I was struck by the fact that Native American tradition is to recognize Spirit in everything. I started to look at the natural world a little differently.

The gifts of the Earth are so precious and they are free. Mother Earth puts on a constant show and never charges admission. What I now see is incredible. I know that, as I continue to be in nature, I will be gifted with more and more sight.

We are moving so quickly in today's world that our experiences are blurred. We need to slow down so that our senses will awaken and our hearts will open. When we learn this and reconnect to nature we are able to receive her energy and the many gifts she has for us.

from Interviews

It's not my purpose to please all people. It's my purpose to write the most honest feeling work I can, work with integrity and respect for life.
- in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1990)

thinking about plot and character development is a much more linear way of thinking than it is to be in a poem. To be in a poem means you drop deeper down into yourself and your subject. And it's more resonant. I like the experience of writing poetry a lot better than composing fiction...I love to do poetry because it's so-- the experience of it is like a whole body experience and not just an exercise that's mental.
- in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1990)

There's nothing that can really prepare a person for a novel. It's not, for me, a static form of writing, but a process of seeing what will unfold, even a novel rooted in history as this one is.
- in Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter 1990)

It really is true that the history of your people and your land is in the human body.
- in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 1999)

The native tradition of respect for other species, for the land, and for the water, is a view of the world that informs my work. The more I study, the more I see that the traditional stories, the traditional ceremonies, and the ways of living in the world are superior to what has developed from the Western view. I use that word "superior" with hesitation. I mean that there isn't room for species extinction, for exploitation of the land or water. One thing that indigenous people on all continents have been able to do is to keep a balance between all the relationships of what is now called ecology.
- in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 1999)

There are traditions and laws that are beyond human. Just because it is drawn up on a piece of paper doesn't make something right, legal, ethical. I consider my own work to be traditionally centered.
- in From the Center of Tradition edited by Barbara J. Cook (2003)

I pick these events and make them stories because only then will people listen. If I carry a sign, I am ignored. So I do it in the work.
- in From the Center of Tradition edited by Barbara J. Cook (2003)

When a writer writes, if she is doing it well it is from magic, another place and world.
- in From the Center of Tradition edited by Barbara J. Cook (2003)

in Survival This Way by Joseph Bruchac (1987)

The poetry writing was very important to me. It was a way of trying to define who I was in an environment that felt foreign. I realize now that writing had everything to do with my life and my survival.

I discovered Kenneth Rexroth and I was really excited about him. It was the first contemporary poetry I read, and it was alive for me. It became a kind of model for how I wanted to write.

One life does not fit neatly into the other always. Creative work is a way to order it.

I search for the words that will speak the feelings inside my body and hope they touch those feelings in others. At the same time it is a celebration and sacred song given back to those of whom I speak, especially the animals who are made stronger by our acknowledgment of them.

The U.S. is organized socially and politically and economically in ways to keep people without vibrance or energy. To keep them working hard, thinking they will "make it" if they work harder, all at the expense of their real lives.

My own particular circumstance guaranteed that I'd never feel normal or manage to fit into mainstream life. Until a person knows that, from the mind, they feel crazy. Now I see there's no need to fit. You know, it's not that Indians are different from the dominant culture. We are the same with the same needs and loves and heartaches. It's just that most Indians know time and space well enough from the heart to know that life is for living. Because we are short in our span here and we are not the most significant of lives on earth. We share the planet with plants and animals equal to ourselves, and we are small in the universe. So the daily strivings fall into place. I feel that poetry is a process of uncovering our real knowledge. To manipulate the language merely via the intellect takes away the strength of the poem.

People believe they are secure and own their land, their houses. American history shows us that is never true. White people are shocked when their homes are taken away. It's unjust. But Indians have known that in their DNA. This government has broken over 300 treaties. Why believe them?

Most of the things that I did as a child and even as an older growing person were outdoors and were alone. Outside was my church, my place of vision and dreaming.

the land, is the oldest part of me and the wisest. The part that can survive. All of us Indian writers are historically a part of the whole body of our nations' histories and places, wherever we may do our writing, in New York City or at Rosebud.

That balance between the spiritual and the physical and the mental-a lot of people who become interested in the spiritual tradition become very silly. They go off so far there is no balance or no footing, and our feet are very important in spiritual life touching earth. We're here on earth with our bodies. We're not meant for outer space physically or spiritually. People who go into the mental can go off too far into the mental. I don't know many people who can go off too far into the physical (I don't mean athletically or sexually, I mean awareness of body), but the physical draws down the other two, the spiritual and the mental. I suppose physical labor is real good for that reason-chopping wood and doing whatever work you have to do in the world. It seems to me that is a very important aspect of tradition, to have that balance and keep and maintain it as much as you can. I think when people lose it is when they get caught up into the other things-when they lose that balance.

American people need to revise their ideas about spirituality. Spirituality ends up being very much like capitalism. It ends up being a force to control other people or to make yourself look good-to give yourself a position of power and integrity.

We are here to rejoice with our full selves. We didn't come here to deprive ourselves. We aren't made for deprivation. We came here with work to do-balancing the forces-and with great capacities for love and joy to fulfill with/in our full selves.

In tribal culture every person has their place and one who speaks more clearly with spirits than others is not a better person or is not in a higher position but simply performs one of many functions for the people. You and I have friends who do this daily and they make nothing of it. The woman who builds the fire is as important as the woman who guides the soul.

we don't have to do anything special to have contact with the spirit world. It's just natural if you stop and listen. Just there, always. Like your own heartbeat.

being "traditional" means you have a great deal of responsibility. Rather than people cutting themselves off from white communities to be traditional, the more I think about it in my life the more I have thought that breaking down those barriers is much more important than building them up. Any kind of racism at this point is not good for any people. And to become anti-white is a mistake. It's self-destructive for those who do. Talk about a balance of things-talk about head and heart or head and soul-somehow I think that merging the two cultures in a really healthy way, not as done in the past, might be an integration in the way that we were talking about earlier. Indians have already begun that process. Years ago. Now I see white people integrating in that way. Mostly women at this point.

All cruelty is needless. All fighting. Now do we need to build real estate in the Everglades or on migration lands or drill the earth? We have everything available to us for full, good lives, for peace. We must just simply step into it. Anyway, I just started thinking that being silent was in some way not being honest and that I did not want to be silent about the things that were very important and that our survival is very important. We've gone on-this progression is a very straight line progression into total destruction (Meridel LeSueur says this also), and we're just on the border now. Like the earth is square again and we stand on her edge. I guess I feel, if I'm going to be killed and if my family is going to be killed, at least I don't want to go quietly. I want to feel as if I have done something and not just passively accepted it.

in Winged Words (1990)

edited by Laura Coltelli

Spirituality necessitates certain kinds of political action. If you believe that the earth, and all living things, and all the stones are sacred, your responsibility really is to protect those things. I do believe that's our duty, to be custodians of the planet. What has amazed me is that after the first bomb, you would have thought all war would stop forever, and that they could find a way to resolve all conflict.

(about humor) It's a survival technique, too. People who are in poverty, people who are in very difficult situations and in pain, have to develop humor or die of despair.

I teach in American Indian studies at the university and I find that many of the non-Indian students are desperately searching for spirits, for their own souls, that something in the contemporary world has left many Euro-Americans and Europeans without a source, has left them with a longing for something they believe existed in earlier times or in tribal people. What they want is their own life, their own love for the earth, but when they speak their own words about it, they don't believe them, so they look to Indians, forgetting that enlightenment can't be found in a weekend workshop, forgetting that most Indian people are living the crisis of American life, the toxins of chemical waste, the pain of what is repressed in white Americans. There is not such a thing as becoming an instant shaman, an instant healer, an instantly spiritualized person.

Once a people are victims, they have to struggle hard to politicize themselves and to be able to break the cycle, to be able to somehow, as they say today, to empower themselves once again, to get back their health and their wholeness.

I think it's easier for a non-Indian to write a book about Indian people and get it published than it is for us. Our own experiences and our own lives don't fit the stereotypes.

with Missouri Review (1992)

included in Conversations with American Novelists (1997)

the evidence of healing is all around us. A scar, for instance, is evidence that a wound has healed. But the poems are also about wilderness; they're about animals that live in the wilderness and humans who go into the human wilderness, and who also fear the wilderness outside them. In some ways the poems are an investigation of the depths of people, the history of land.

(asked about poetry and fiction) the two genres are very connected in some way, because they're both doing the same thing. It's a descent into something older, deeper and more powerful than our everyday being or reality.

Simon Ortiz says, "It's fiction and you'd better believe it." I always loved that line. Another way to say it is that fiction is a vertical descent; it's a drop into an event or into history or into the depths of some kind of meaning in order to understand humans, and to somehow decipher what history speaks, the story beneath the story.

People who write about wilderness and the environment are going away from themselves to do it. They don't look at the inner wilderness and what motivates people to be destructive. I think everything is connected, that I'm a part of the destruction; we all are. Investigating why we're sometimes apathetic is probably the best work we could do.

The humor was always there also, because even in desperate situations people are human. They still do funny things, and they still have their obsessions and habits. It bothers me when I read a book where everything is clear-cut and there isn't anything human about or in it. One of the things that often happens between cultures is the denial of common humanity.

When the stories of your people center around the name of one stone, one place, the whole land around you becomes a part of everything that you know: your religion, your mythology, your family history.

I see my everyday life in a historical context. We are living in the midst of history; it's important that somebody keeps records.

with Marilyn Kallet (1993)

in Worlds in Our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers (1997)

The exciting thing about writing is how it happens, how a story takes on life, begins to move in its own direction, surprises the writer with its growing. When it's working, time passes quickly, the characters speak inside your inner ear, the scenes are there just needing words. When it's working, the story shows you a new way to live, it offers a writer wisdom one would never have without it.

We're all affected by place whether we realize it or not. For one thing, all our stories-creation stories, myths, oral traditions-are, in part, about storied land. Stories live in the land. They "take place" in context with all the rest. Our daily lives are linked to place. One of the problems with the dominant culture is that it wants to escape this connection. As Rachel Rosenthal said in a recent performance, people use intellect and science as a tool so they won't have to dirty their hands with matter. For indigenous people, the link between the person and the land is a connecting point, not only with ordinary, daily life, but with the cosmos. It is about relationship. And relationship is the most central part of our lives, our being, not only relationship with other people, but with all things. I believe a lot of neuroses have to do with a lack of healthy relationship with the land, with self, with creation and the creative spirit.

I think protest and legal actions lack the emotions, the feelings of the people, and story is a way to touch the heart. It often carries a weight that the grey language of law lacks.

Home was always, in my heart, Oklahoma. I can feel even now the stillness of the land, the smell of it. But I've lived a long time in Colorado, so I believe it is home too. Especially since I know the stories there, the land, the animals, and the people in our community. But I am thinking that home is larger than this. As the earth has grown smaller and we know its fragility, it is important for us now to expand our view of home to a larger space, a global community, and to think of land, ocean, mountains, desert, as home. And we need to extend our sense of community to include animals and other forms of life.

Working at a university I've made the observation that many student writers write for the sake of writing. They are really writing for other writers, not to tell a necessary story, not out of urgency and need. I have keenly felt that writing must be more than that, that it must have a power to enter the world, to begin to change the stories people live by, to open that story into something larger, into something that helps us know how to live. This means that we have to expand not only our work but our ideas about audience. It wouldn't bother me to have academics reject my work if somebody read it and it changed their attitude about deforestation, for example. I think I began to write out of a desire to make change in the world, searching for language that would help me speak my innermost hopes and ways. Writing was something of a foreign language I learned to be fluent in so that I could communicate emotions and what I knew was important-an ethical way of thinking about the world-communicate what racism is and what it does to people.

in Conversations with the World by Phebe Davidson (1998)

The real place of writing is to make change in the world, and it's a very powerful medium.

I loved poetry. I still do. I love the process of writing it, the very sort of quiet way of being in the world. I think it's more about being than it is about thinking, and I like that...I think the poetry is a basic language for writing, the most condensed, every word cared about. It's preparation for all the other shapes and kinds of writing.

of course property is an abstract economic concept on a hidden dollar that has been the cause of the death of people...I mean this country and most others that work out of our economic system are founded on the idea of property, and most of the transgressions that take place here have to do with property. There were massive slaughters of some of the California tribes during the gold rush, and the same thing happened to the Cherokee in Georgia. So, you know, property is no insignificant thing for us to think about if we ever want to change the world.

I never wanted to be a writer, either, but I suppose we each find a calling and fall into it.

The planet is so much smaller than we ever thought in the past I think of the whole planet as home, a whole ecosystem that seems important to our growth as people and our survival.

the more I observe the world, the more I learn about it, the more I think that there's a vast terrestrial intelligence all around us.

First books, for many people, seem to be sort of autobiographical incursions into who they are, and what it means to be who they are.

I love all animals and nature. I just find that the more I learn about the world the more exciting and fascinating it all is.

Language is really connected to place. In native languages, indigenous languages, for example. One of the things people don't think about very often is that English is a very small language. It has only a tenth, sometimes less, of the vocabulary of some of the native languages and for indigenous people who come from a place, an ecosystem- the relationship to that place is actually embedded in the language itself.

It's been in the western history of science that the abstract has been idealized over matter. Until recently. As spirit has been preferred over body in the religious systems.

I think place has been a mentor for me, and nature. I have always mostly been interested in this world around us, and that's not always the human world. I believe these things have been directions for me more than individual people have been. They have been maps to my growing mind, religions to my heart.

I sometimes think that when we imagine we know something, that it's mostly conjecture, and that it actually diminishes the world and the animals around us when we imagine that we know what they're about. A more open mind is called for. We're very limited. We have very limited minds. Our equipment for understanding the world is not very evolved.

(The childishness of that attitude - that insistence on "mine" and "my way only" - is rather frightening.) Right. Torture and genocide are based on such small words as those.

When I discovered writing, it was...like being dropped into water and finding that you're an excellent swimmer - that you love the water and you love to swim. I think when I discovered poetry it allowed me to step into my real life, my real self- the body, heart and soul of being alive.

"Story" is significant here, the stories we tell ourselves, those we learn. So I think stories contribute to what we will continue to allow to happen in and out of our world. I've observed that when people do political work, they might go and talk to people about You need to speak out about this, or You need do that, and everyone gets excited and they're ready to do it. Then a day or two later they go back to their lives and business goes on as usual. But when there's an emotional element, a story, with characters you grow to care about, then I think it actually makes a difference in the world, and that's why I write. Because story has a power. Because I've seen it make a difference, seen it change people.

I suppose it takes a life-time of reflection and thought to move a writer in a certain direction.

with Terrain.org (1999)

If someone is going to be a writer, they’ll be a writer no matter what they do. I don’t think I have any advice. I used to think I did, but if somebody loves to write they will be a writer.

It took men quite a while to have the courage to look at things differently.

I’m very concerned with human, animal, and plant survival, traditions that are ecologically sound, and indigenous knowledge systems, and how to convey these understandings of the world to a wide readership.

I see so many disappointing environmental writers who are not writing about the environment at all. They’re writing about themselves in the environment, and they often don’t understand the world they’re writing about. There are clearly writers who are more concerned with traveling around and checking everything out than they are with long-term survival of the habitats that they’re working in. In some ways, the writing I do is politically centered because it is about a world view that can’t be separated from the political

Don’t you think that civilization is a confusing word? It seems that it always implies Western civilization and certain kinds of behavior and ways of being in the world that are in conflict with the environment...That particular one needs to be rethought, especially if you look over the history of the European knowledge system and mind. One of the things I’m most interested in is talking about indigenous traditions and looking at the differences between the two. If you take a system of agriculture that was in place on this continent at the time of first contact and how well it was working, and then you compare it with the agriculture of Europe at that time, there’s simply no comparison. Something happened in Europe, in Western civilization, that created a breakdown of a healthy knowledge system and a healthy relationship with the rest of the world. I spend all of my time reading, writing, thinking about what it is that created people who thought they were civilized but really were the harshest and cruelest people in any time and any place from the beginning.

I feel that, as an Indian woman, it’s important to hold to our integrity about our relationships with all the other species, including plants, and that they not be endangered. They are part of our cultural heritage and part of our spiritual life and our well-being, in terms of keeping our tribal lands and ecosystems intact.

My characters actually create me instead of the other way around.

I find that my process usually isn’t that I’m full of intention. It’s usually that I’m just open, and something comes to visit and tells me the story and creates it.

I feel like I owe the future to my children and grandchildren, that the work I do, I hope, will help sustain them in the future...My family’s important to me. I think you feel that even more when you’re an American Indian. You see your children, and you want them to know the tradition, to know the language to follow in some way, and yet, you still have to live in America. I think that’s my priority in my life. My work is all dedicated to those babies and children.

in Superstition Review (2013)

We live in a world of many intelligences. Human language isn't all that is spoken in the world around our lives. Other documented and studied languages exist in the animal world. They surround us, also, in the plant world, where trees have the ability to call helpful underground bacteria toward them from distances, to communicate with one another through hormonal and chemical means. Cedars and junipers even store moisture to release for hardwoods during times of drought. We are surrounded by voices intelligent and in need of respect.

I write to put words together in ways that express what can’t be said in the ordinary use of language, particularly the way a poem feels, goes not only through the mind, but through the heart and body, as well. With poetry, I’d like it to first bypass the mind and give off a particular feeling, then if someone wishes, they can return to it with their mind. I want it to be accessible, also, to every person and not just to other poets or people who have studied poetry.

Stories have the capacity to make change in ways that other forms of activism don’t...Sometimes I think of them as a form of activism, sometimes as an expression of love, or the meaningful humanity of our daily lives.

How absolutely amazing all the life forms and their origins.

Everything that happens in one country is carried away to others, through air, through ocean. Radioactivity shows up long distances away. Our plastics travel in the ocean to other continents. Now there is plastic sand, the ground-down drinking bottles of America, which have become the dead beaches on islands in the Pacific. These were once places the indigenous people depended on for food sources and which are now completely dead. We forget how small the planet has always been and it becomes smaller with each catastrophe. We also now have ways to communicate across and beneath oceans, to know what is happening not only to our embodied planet, but to people in other locations, attacks on innocent protesters, wars we might not have known existed, and that has allowed us to become more conscious humans on this earth, to know we have kin everywhere and the earth, as a living body, is one.

We can’t control the earth’s response to our actions, only our own behaviors.

All of the animals I have known enter into my writing, become it. They are inspiration, research, and also my love.

It is more about murder and theft, the true stories of what happened during the Oklahoma oil boom.

I always think of Lewis and Clark, their story. It is not really their story at all. It is the story of Sacajawea who knew the way, took them along, saved them from mishaps, kept them fed, negotiated their entry into different tribal territories. The story, really, is hers. And she was still just a girl. Yet, women have been omitted from Native histories and so little is found that it is an effort to find information, even for scholars. So I like to center stories that are also history, with women as integral forces within the story.

Whatever it is that people believe about the lives of writers only applies to writers who have great incomes, I believe.

with Southern Review of Books (2020)

I used to tell students that whatever is inside the psyche will come to the fore in poetry and writing and not to think too much about wanting to say something, about wanting a theme. It is already there. Given the chance, words will come with their own will. A poem knows what it wants to do even without the mind of the writer intervening. Writers can’t create it on their own behalf and make it right. It is more like putting together a basket. The shape happens as the maker weaves...That is my key way of knowing; It Comes to Me.

(Your writing is rich with love and compassion – how do you stay rooted in those qualities when dealing with such tragic themes as the destruction of our environment and the treatment of Native Americans?) What other choice do I have? It doesn’t mean I have no anger about injustice. I do. I throw myself down when it is violent and painful. But it is also a matter of how to work against that injustice. I haven’t seen it succeed by fighting, yelling, rage, or outward anger. Think of those yelling faces you see on the news, mouths wide open. They lose. Their anger, their hatred has the opposite effect of what they are reaching toward.

For me, and maybe I am wrong, fight has more than one way to exist. Change has to happen. Maybe a book does make a difference, I hope. Maybe words can make change. They have in the past. So I search for the right ones. Maybe it is not of use, but sometimes it is.

I began writing fiction because our lives are made up of stories and a story can change a life.

Quotes about Linda Hogan

Her verses teach us how to live with dignity in a world bent on destruction."
- Ana Castillo, blurb for A History of Kindness (2020)

Linda Hogan's career in writing spans a quarter century of work that is, by any standard imaginable, impressive for its quality as well as for its variety of genre.
- Phebe Davidson, Conversations with the World (1998)

Linda Hogan's work is rooted in truth and mystery.
- Louise Erdrich The Radiant Lives of Animals (2020)

one of our best writers.
- Leslie Marmon Silko, blurb for The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001)

In recent years I read much more Native American women's work than anything else; for example, Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan. I feel an affinity within to these women's work. Their writings run closer to the Chicano experience, given the fact that we both have native roots here in the United States.
- Cherríe Moraga interview in Chicana Ways (2002)

Linda Hogan writes: "We Indian people who had inhabited the land had not been meant to survive and yet we did, some of us, carrying the souls of our ancestors, and now they speak through us. It was this that saved my life"
- Cherríe Moraga A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (2011)

She is a compassionate witness who reminds us: 'When a person says, "I remember," all things are possible.
- Brenda Peterson, blurb for The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001)

Linda Hogan is one of the most important environmental writers of our time. In this troubled and dark world, I am grateful for the wisdom, light, and love found in these poems.
- Craig Santos Perez, blurb for A History of Kindness (2020)

Poems offer gratitude for sustenance, awareness of the complicated interaction between hunger and survival, as Linda Hogan reminds us in "Milk," “Something must hold me this way,/and you,/and the thin blue tail of the galaxy,/to keep us from leaving/as life unfolds behind us.”
- Melissa Tuckey Ghost Fishing : An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (2018) p108

There is no one like Linda Hogan. I read her poetry to both calm and ignite my heart.
- Terry Tempest Williams, blurb for A History of Kindness (2020)

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