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A review by ceallaighsbooks
Solar Storms by Linda Hogan

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

“Maybe the roots of dreaming are in the soil of dailiness, or in the heart, or in another place without words, but when they come together and grow, they are like the seeds of hydrogen and the seeds of oxygen that together create ocean, lake, and ice. In this way, the plants and I joined each other. They entangled me in their stems and vines and it was a beautiful entanglement.”

TITLE—Solar Storms
AUTHOR—Linda Hogan
PUBLISHED—1995
PUBLISHER—Scribner Paperback Fiction (Simon & Schuster)

GENRE—literary fiction
SETTING—Boundary Waters, Indigenous land—colonized as Minnesota & Canada—& north across Turtle Island; mid-1970’s
(Note: the specificity of tribe names is deliberately vague in service of the larger, universal Indigenous themes of the story)

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—homecomings, reawakenings, & re-indigenization, the old ways, inheritance & heritage, stories &/as knowledge, indigeneity in all its facets, complexities, & fundamental certainties, anti-colonial resistance, Indigenous spiritual philosophy & realities, Nature & stunning nature writing, atmospheric descriptions, family relationships, grandmothers, mothering, & re-mothering, children as the future, kidnapping & displacement of Indigenous children into state-run foster systems, ecocide & extreme settler-colonial violence against Nature & Indigenous people, death, Spirit

“The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it. With my grandmothers, there was no such thing as loneliness. Before, my life had been without all its ears, eyes, without all its knowings. Now we, the four of us, all had the same eyes, and when Dora-Rouge pointed a bony finger and said, ‘This way,’ we instinctively followed that crooked finger.”

My thoughts:
My heart broke *dozens* of times while reading this book. This book was so many things. Nature spiritual historical coming of age & of ages, devastating ends, hopeful beginnings… This book contained multitudes of joy, grief, rage, despair, deaths, rebirths… Reading this book felt like cleaning off the surface of a mirror to reveal clearly truths I have only ever been able to glimpse through a fog.

I loved how the voices of the grandmothers were woven into the story in italics—their own stories passed down as history & as lesson. The atmospheric descriptions of the land, nature, water, animals, sky, seasons, & the perspective & the relationships of the people with all of these elements was some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever encountered.

I loved how the universality of oral tradition & folk knowledge rippled across the surface of the stories: echoes of the Snow Queen & hag-magic, from Psyche to Cinderella, from poison apples to the animal agency so often relegated to fables in western literary contexts reclaiming its rightful place in the timeless spiritual reality of Turtle Island.

The depiction of the main character was so intimate that, as the reader, I could not help but feel like one of the family. In fact, I thought the characterization of Angel was done in such a way as to sort of channel the reader into her perspective to the point where the boundaries between the MC & the reader become almost blurred & you end up feeling & seeing everything as if you *were* her on a deeper level than most first-person narrated novels.

Angel’s relationships with the grandmothers, with Tulik, with Grandson, & with Aurora are so tender & intimate, & then to witness the utter abject & mindlessly desperate fear of this family of literally elders & children by the white settlers who are stealing their land & destroying their world—it’s one of the most heart-shattering & simple portrayals of the settler psychology I’ve ever encountered. To understand so plainly that what the settlers are really afraid of is the consequences of their own soulloss: “It was an ancient fear, that we would retaliate for past wrongs…”

I would recommend this book to everyone. This is one of those classics I do actually think everyone should read. This book is best read in Nature.

Final note: I only just finished reading this book like two weeks ago so I’m still processing it all but… this might be *the* best book I’ve ever read. It is at *least* right up there next to Keri Hulme’s THE BONE PEOPLE. SO, so glad & grateful that the #IndigenousReadingCircle bookclub picked this for our March 2024 read. 🫶🏻

“Lately I hear something like a voice inside my ear, whispering to me. ‘Get up,’ the voice says in the morning. ‘Offer cornmeal to the morning people.’ I do it. ‘Be slow,’ it says. I do this, too.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CW // extreme settler-colonial violence against Nature (especially animal cruelty & river-damming leading to severe environmental destruction & the devestation of Indigenous lands & communities), extreme child abuse, self-harm, mental illness (possession), domestic violence, death of family members, grief (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Season: year-round

Music pairing: Buffy Sainte-Marie

Further Reading—
  • THE BONE PEOPLE by Keri Hulme
  • BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • THE NARROWS OF FEAR (WAPAWIKOSCIKANIK) by Carol Rose GoldenEagle
  • JONNY APPLESEED by Joshua Whitehead
  • PERMA RED by Debra Magpie Earling
  • Louise Erdrich
  • BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE: The Authorized Biography, by Andrea Warner—TBR
  • “[LIVE] National Day of Mourning 2023” recording on YouTube (find the link at: linktr.ee/ceallaighsbooks) from Cole’s Hill, hosted by UAINE on 11.23.23

Favorite Quotes—
“In the dream I saw your mother beneath ice in the center of the lake. I was afraid of her. We all were. What was wrong with her we couldn't name and we distrusted such things as had no name. She was like the iron underground that pulls the needle of a compass to false north…
“The thing she was, or that had turned into her, pulled me toward it. I was standing, still and upright, drawn out that way to the terrible and magnetic center of what I feared. I slid across the glaring surface of ice, standing like a statue, being pulled, helpless and pale in the ice light. Old stories I'd heard from some of the Cree began to play across my mind, stories about the frozen heart of evil that was hunger, envy, and greed, how it had tricked people into death or illness or made them go insane. In those stories the only thing that could save a soul was to find a way to thaw the person's heart, to warm it back into water.
“But we all knew your mother… stood at the bottomless passage to an underworld. She was wounded. She was dangerous. And there was no thawing for her heart.”

“There were silences when the wind died down, and all you could hear was snow hitting against the wood of the house, dying against the windows, tapping as if it was hungry and wanted in. I remember thinking of the island where she lived, the frozen waters, the other lands with their rising and sloping distances, even the light and dust of solar storms that love our cold, eerie pole.”

“I was curious about the plants. There were unguents ointments and balms-at their house, but it was the plants I wanted to know about.
"’When you were a baby,’ Agnes told me, ‘all you wanted to do was look at plants. You watched the trees move when the wind blew. You listened to them and they leaned forward to tell you things.’
“I liked hearing this. It was the first time anyone had told me something about myself when I was a child.”

“There were mornings I sat with Dora-Rouge in her little room with the antlers and turtle-shell rattles... We would breathe together the way wolves do with their kith and kin, the way they nurture relations by breathing. This breath was alive. It joined us as we were joined in so many other ways.”

“The last one. The last glacier bear. The last. They always loved the last of anything, those men, even the last people. I guess they felt safe then, when it was all gone… By then, the land was settled. No bears were there to disturb the people. But at night in the woods, settlers heard branches snap. They heard the breathing in the forest. The bear lived there still, and it lived inside their own skin and bones. Everything they feared moved right inside them.”

“…and when I slept I dreamed I fell over the edge of land, fell out of order and knowing into a world dark and primal, seething, and alive as creation, like the beginning of life.”

“I began to form a kind of knowing... I began to feel that if we had no separate words for inside and out and there were no boundaries between them, no walls, no skin, you would see me. What would meet your eyes would not be the mask of what had happened to me, not the evidence of violence, not even how I closed the doors to the rooms of anger and fear. Some days you would see fire; other days, water. Or earth. You would see how I am like the night sky with its stars that fall through time and space and arrive here as wolves and fish and people, all of us fed by them. You would see the dust of sun, the turning of creation taking place. But the night I broke my face there were still boundaries and I didn't yet know I was beautiful as the wolf, or that I was a new order of atoms. Even with my own eyes I could not see deeper than my skin or pain in the way you cannot see yourself with closed eyes no matter how powerful the mirror.”

“But I had truly entered a different world, a tree-shaded place where unaccountable things occurred, where frogs knew to wait beneath dark ground until conditions were right for them to emerge, where water's voice said things only the oldest of people understood.”

“I didn't know then that what I really wanted none of us would ever have. I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past. I wanted not to be fragments and pieces left behind by fur traders, soldiers, priests, and schools.”

“I don't know how it is that people change, or what is required, or how it moves. I know only what it feels like to change; it's in the body, in the stomach, in the heart. They ache and then they open. I felt it then; Dora-Rouge said it happens all our lives. She said that we are cocoons who consume our own bodies and at death we fly away transformed and beautiful.”

“Things depended on this, on respect. The order of the world did.”

“And one day a part of me stepped inside the girl and looked around. I saw the hand she spoke of, heard the voices in languages neither of us knew. I could see how dangerous it was. An inescapable place with no map for it. Inside were the ruins of humans. Burned children were in there, as well as fire. It pulled me toward it, like gravity, like dust to earth and whatever it was, I had to call on all my strength to get away.”

“I would one day understand my mother. I would one day take in the fact that we were those who walked out of bullets and hunger, and even that walking was something miraculous. Even now I think of it. How the wind still sweeps us up in it. Even now there are places where currents meet and where people are turned to ice. I understood it first like this: the mouth of a river goes one way; my mother was the opposite. Things and people fell into her like into the eye of a storm, and they were destroyed. Like the black hole Husk had described to me. I understood things then in the manner of Husk's telling. Except for how I emerged from Hannah and how there are rages and wounds so large, love is swallowed by them and is itself changed, the lover taken in and destroyed.”

“From school, I remembered Psyche and how she had to separate a hill of grain one grain at a time. Perhaps I was separating grain. Perhaps I was remaking myself.”

“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.”

“And I belonged to that winter. I was born one February inside a snow so deep it collapsed the roofs of houses. I crossed infinity to come to life through an angry, screaming woman, as if I arrived from the place where storms were created, a world where bad medicine was made from the bodies of women and men, the milk of deer, the loss of land. I arrived in the place where traders had passed with sleds of dead, frozen animals. According to Bush, I was born in a house of snow.”

“A few of the wolves, not quite a whole pack, circled the shed that contained the furs and traps. They looked at the wood as if they could see or smell the trapping gear through the walls. It made them restless, their breathing visible as they paced. If we understood their language, their cries might tell us all that had happened on the island.”

“She wanted me to know that what possessed my mother was a force as real as wind, as strong as ice, as common as winter.”

“I believed what the old people said, that fish were a kind of people, like the wolves, and that they wanted to live as much as we did, those of us who had been born to a destiny of death and survived, passing through like small fish through a hole in a net.”

“Together we went outside and as the wind inhaled there was a moment of silence in which we heard the sound of the northern lights. ‘Listen,’ Bush said, and I heard the shimmering of ice crystals, charged by solar storms.”

“Those dreams of mine, if that's what they were, lived inside the land. Maybe dreams are earth's visions, I thought, earth's expressions that pass through us.”

“…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… ‘These maps are not our inventions. Maps are only masks over the face of God. There are other ways around the world.’”

“Out of the blue, she said, ‘Beavers. None of them ever considered how beavers change the land.’ She was right. Beavers were the true makers of land. It was through their dams that the geographies had been laid, meadows created, through their creation that young trees grew, that deer came, and moose. All things had once depended on them. And on these maps, we could read back to how land told the story of the beaver people.”

"Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing."

“LaRue believing animals felt no pain and Bush, like the traditional people, knowing the world was alive and that all creatures were God. I had wanted, before now, to tell LaRue about pain and animals, but I knew he would never believe a girl. I would have to wait for science to back me up, watching the magazines for hard evidence. I'd learned this from Husk. And I knew LaRue believed in things like science and printed words. But Husk said some things were so obvious the scientists couldn't even see them.”

“Spring was a season of madness. The warming air and thawing water brought people to a kind of hysteria that could not be helped.”

“…the people of the Hundred-Year-Old Road… They had lived so long and seen so many of the younger generations gone, but even at that they had been unable to convince later generations to follow the paths of the older ways. The secrets of their longevity were to shun the ways of the white world and remember to live each day with reverence for all that was around them.”

“Tommy went with me back to Agnes' house. He carried the black cast-iron kettle that contained stew. Above us, I could feel the life returning to the trees. Tommy said, ‘Think of how many people have carried this kettle.’
“I did. I thought of it. It was iron that had probably been mined from our own earth. Suddenly I saw how old it was, this kettle. It had witnessed the killing of my people. It had been fired by trees no longer there, and forged in the presence of women talking at night. Now Frenchie's tears were a part of it, too, and God only knew what other sorrows. Agnes once said it had contained a soup of rocks, twigs, and moss. Food for lean times.
“It had other uses, too. It had bathed my grandfather, Harold, when he was an infant. It held a river. It was alive. I thought I'd heard sounds from it one night. Now I told Tommy and he nodded like he knew just what I meant. I think he was proud of me for hearing such things.”

“We hated death and feared it, at least I did, but its presence, as it always does, made us desperate for love, the shining part of life, and to make love, to enter creation. I believe it happens this way to ensure that life will go on, that our people would continue. Love is a beginning, a secret warmth that grows, something that comes alive; inside skin a soul turns over and opens its eyes.
“Love, I realize now, is a third person come to stand between the loving two. 
“From the next room Dora-Rouge said, ‘I can hear the grass growing.’ I looked at the kettle on the counter. The sunlight came inside it and filled it. It was a new angle of light, springtime, one I'd never before seen in this place.”

“Overnight, all at once, it seemed, the world became green. In one day the snow was gone, the dark earth visible. Because of the sudden thaw, I could believe a god, any god, created water in one day, animals in another. In still another, trees were set to bud, then opened. There was a change in light. Ice moved and floated. It hit itself. Then parts of it broke away. There was a loosening, winter breaking in half, then in smaller and smaller pieces, all the way down to atoms and particles. The world was filled with sound. It was a wonderful din, the many voices of spring, the running of water, the ice breaking up, the wind and stars telling birds the way home so that they could fly even while asleep, return, and take count of us wingless people... In this way winter struck its camp.”

“I wondered if we'd reach our destination, the four of us. Destination. I liked that word, with its hint of fate. I believed in destiny as much as I believed everything was a sign. It had been a sign to get Agnes' letter with the folded dollar bills. It was a sign when a woodpecker tapped at a dead tree. Sometimes a person smiled at me a certain way and I knew we'd be friends or that our fates would, in some way, overlap. Once, I'd dreamed German words. Achtung. Halt. The next day two boys from Munich in dirty jeans showed up at the A&W and I went off with them to Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was sure it was meant to be, that my dream was a sign. I was always looking for signs. I even called the two boys Stop and Look. But as I packed for our journey, I wondered about this particular destiny, if it was really ours. Maybe there were others to be pursued. Maybe destiny was a limitless, open road. Something dark and doubting weighed me down. I tried to talk those doubts away. Angel, I said to myself, you are being silly, Angel, you are this, you are that. As I went through my clothing, fresh from the line, I had feelings of dread and joy, hope and futility all linked together at once, as when people's destinies twine around each other like roots or vines. I had it in my stomach, that feeling of doubting, wondering if it really mattered if we stayed or went. Maybe we would head toward our destinies all the same without this trip, the four of us. And though my grandmothers accepted me without misgivings, slow as I was in their ways, and as fast as I was in others, I had cold feet. Bush trusted I could do the work, could paddle and lift, could hunt if I had to. But I was not so sure. What did matter to me was how much I wanted to find my mother, Hannah Wing, whose red hair was braided and twined together with my own, at least in color. I wanted to know the truth about her, whatever it was.”

“Or perhaps it was the word "God" that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon. To use words and sing, to speak. …and that was how I came later to understand that God was everything beneath my feet, everything surrounded by water; it was in the air, and there was no such thing as empty space.”

“…and truly, we no longer needed time. We were lost from it, and lost in this way, I came alive.”

“But there was a place inside the human that spoke with land, that entered dreaming, in the way that people in the north found direction in their dreams. They dreamed charts of land and currents of water. They dreamed where food animals lived. These dreams they called hunger maps and when they followed those maps, they found their prey. It was the language animals and humans had in common. People found their cures in the same way. ‘No one understands this anymore. Once they dreamed lynx and beaver,’ Agnes said. ‘It used to be that you could even strike a bargain with the weather.’”

“I was devoted to woods the wind walked through, to mosses and lichens.”

“Sometimes I felt there were eyes around us, peering through trees and fog. Maybe it was the eyes of land and creatures regarding us, taking our measure. And listening to the night, I knew there was another horizon, beyond the one we could see. And all of it was storied land, land where deities walked, where people traveled, desiring to be one with infinite space.”

“At river's end, where water emptied into a lake, we came to gray walls of stone that held other paintings, red and black. These were of moose and wolverine. ‘Look,’ I said. I stopped paddling. A rain cloud passed over, and it was our good fortune that a light mist fell because when the rock wall became wet, we could see that the wolverine had wings. Invisible in the dry air, those wings waited for water to expose them. A white bird, too, was now visible. ‘What people,’ I wondered aloud, ‘had such vision?’
“‘Your people,’ said Dora-Rouge. ‘Mine.’”

“‘The Europeans called this world dangerous,’ she said. And I thought I understood: they had trapped themselves inside their own destruction of it, the oldest kind of snare, older than twine and twigs. Their legacy, I began to understand, had been the removal of spirit from everything, from animals, trees, fishhooks, and hammers, all things the Indians had as allies. They'd forgotten how to live. Before, everything lived together well—lynx and women, trappers and beaver. Now most of us had inarticulate souls, silent spirits, and despairing hearts…
“But now, she told me, the men were haunted by something else, by something inside themselves they'd tried, but failed, to forget. ‘That's why animals and people stopped talking to each other.’
“‘…I believe this knowledge was given on the tenth day of creation,’ she said. And those that didn't know it were unfinished creations, cursed to be eternal children on this earth, lacking in the wisdom that understands life, even the diatoms precious and strange. Creation, according to Dora-Rouge, was an ongoing thing. On the eighth day of creation, Dora-Rouge had told me, human beings were given their place with the earth.
“‘…Then, on the ninth day was the creation of stories, and these had many uses.’ They taught a thing or two about doing work, about kindness and love. She told me there were even stories to show a way out of unhappiness. Another day was devoted to snails and slugs, night crawlers and silverfish, roaches.
“Then there was the creation of singing and songs. ‘If those drifting ones would have stayed behind, they might even have learned the antidote for war,’ she said. ‘But they heard only as far as the creation of war on the sixth day. Thieves were created on that same day, too.’”

“I'd never have thought there might be people who found their ways by dreaming. What was real in those land-broken waters, real even to me, were things others might call the superstitions of primitive people. How could it be, I wondered, that all people who came from their own earth, who lived there for tens of thousands of years, could talk with spirits, could hear land speak, and animals? Northern hunters were brilliant hunters. Even now they dream the location of their prey and find it. Could they all have been wrong? I didn't think so.”

“The old world dawning new in me was something like the way a human eye righted what was upside down, turned over an image and saw true.”

“Should we turn back? we both wondered… Our faces were hopeless, our eyes contained a question. But neither of us knew the answer to this. There was no longer a thing such as "should." Everything had changed. We'd gone too far to turn back. Not too far in distance alone, but too far inside ourselves. No longer were we the women who left Adam's Rib. And as for me, the girl I had once been could never have paddled through rain as if it were not falling and camped in wet mosses. Those women would never have sung ancient songs at night so assuredly, or spoken to spirits that walked through forests and gave us their permission to enter. That girl would never have known how spirits hung above the water like fog, would never have heard stories in the land we passed over, or given herself up to a trail that went any map's wrong way. …something godly was bringing us through.”

“…they talked about the time when everything was still alive. That's what they remembered and missed. It was what all the old people longed for again, the time when people could merge with a cloud and help it rain, could become trees, one with bark, root, and leaf. People were more silent in those days. They listened. They heard.”

“‘Precious metal,’ Bush said as we paddled north once again, as if the diggers were a mystery to her. ‘What do you think they really want? What does silver mean to them?’ Agnes said she thought it meant the world was ending. In a history book I once read, Cortés was quoted as saying, ‘We white men have a disease of the heart, and the only thing that can cure it is gold.’ With those words, with that disease, came the end of many worlds. So Agnes could very well have been right: precious metals signaled an ending.”

“None of it mattered now… not even the future. What mattered, simply and powerfully, was knowing the current of water and living in the body where land spoke what a woman must do to survive. We slipped back into a deep wildness, into beauty and eeriness where spirits still walked on land, and animals still spoke with humans, toward a place where wolves and their ancestors remembered the smell of Dora-Rouge and her ancestors from years before.”

“In the old days, according to Tulik, the world was created by Beaver. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There were no other creatures but them. They were the ones.’ This was when trees were still in sky reaching down with their roots, looking for a place to take hold. It was when the world was still covered by water. At that time, ice lay down on half of every year. They were the ones. Beaver took down trees from the sky; they brought up pebbles and clay from somewhere beneath the vast waters. They broke the ice that had shaped itself over the water. They swam through it and they made some land. With pebbles and clay. When trees were still in the sky. They laid sticks down across the water. It was like a trail the new creatures and nations and people to come would walk across. In those days the faces of spirits lived on the water and windblown snow. There were no other creatures, none, except beaver who rose out from the darkness beneath waters, out of the lodges and dens and burrows of the world, places the rest of us have never seen, places at the center of earth. The only light was what came from inside the stars, from inside the yellow of trees. There was just freezing and thawing until Beaver took down some of the trees from sky, leaving nothing behind but teeth marks and wood chips. Beaver brought up clay and mud from the deep. Beaver created a pool, then a bog, then living earth. When Beaver shaped the humans, who were strangers to the rest of creation, they made a pact with them. They gave their word. They would help each other, they said. Beaver offered fish and waterfowl and animals. The people, in turn, would take care of the world and speak with the gods and all creation. Back then, the people could hear the beaver singing. Back then they still sang out loud. A song haunting and sweet. Back when there were no lights except in the eyes of animals. This is true. It's what Tulik said. Like the voices of children coming out of water, so beautiful.”

“Perhaps there was balance in the world, after all, I thought. Maybe it just needed time.”

“We heard the low howl of a wolf, so low it could have been mistaken for the wind. It lay down across the wet earth. Tulik's dog answered, remembering the wolf blood that still lived inside it, no matter how it had been bred out, no matter how people wanted to make of the animals something they weren't, as they'd tried to do with the people, as they were doing with the land. And so the events that followed were tribal cries, the old wailing come to new terms.”

“Some of the plants we would cut. Others had to be pulled by the roots, but only if there were enough left to survive. Each had its own requirements. We were careful, timid even, touching a plant lightly, speaking with it, Tulik singing, because each plant had its own song.
“‘I feel stupid, talking to plants,’ I said to Tulik one day. 
“‘What's wrong with feeling stupid? Entire countries are run by stupid men. But,’ he said, ‘soon you won't feel that way.’”

“Some plants were from marshes, others from meadows. All were our sisters. I sampled all the remedies and teas, sometimes drinking the bitterness of wormwood or maybe a cup of bluestem, to see what its effects were, all the time telling the plant, ‘Thank you,’ because you have to speak with the plants even if it feels foolish. There was the mikka plant that took down the heat of inflammation, and scilla, a tea that would open the body for childbirth. I tried the salves, ate the soapy-tasting mixtures. I began to learn them and l soon, as Tulik had said, I no longer felt embarrassed.”

“In those days, we were still a tribe. Each of us had one part of the work of living. Each of us had one set of the many eyes, the many breaths, the many comings and goings of the people. Everyone had a gift, each person a specialty of one kind or another, whether it was hunting, or decocting the plants, or reading the ground for signs of hares. All of us together formed something like a single organism. We needed and helped one another.”

“‘It looks lonely, doesn't it?’ Tulik said.
“I wouldn't have thought those words myself, but he was right. There was a loneliness to it. ‘You'd think the opposite would be true,’ I said.
“…but now that Tulik had electricity, I listened to the radio and was forced to consider also the speed of certain kinds of darkness, because it was 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. Part of the fast-moving darkness was the desire of those who wanted to conquer the land, the water, the rivers that kept running away from them. It was their desire to guide the waters, narrow them down into the thin black electrical wires that traversed the world. They wanted to control water, the rise and fall of it, the direction of its ancient life. They wanted its power…
“It was the river traveling out of its raging, swift power and life into such humdrum places as kitchens with stoves and refrigerators. The river became lamps. False gods said, "Let there be light," and there was alchemy in reverse. What was precious became base metal, defiled and dangerous elements. And yet we would use it. We would believe we needed it. We would turn buttons on and off, flip switches…
“I knew darkness had its beauty and was, in every respect, less costly.”

“Reversing the truth, they would call us terrorists. If there was evil in the world, this was it, I thought. Reversal. Some of us, less strong than Auntie, thought we should sign the papers, sell the land, accept compensation. I understood this, too, because everything was in short supply there. And some thought so because they believed the government would do what it wanted, anyway. It was inevitable, they said. Maybe they were right.”

“It takes so little, so remarkably little to put an end to a life, even to a people.
“Aurora cried in terror. The air sparked with a volatile tension—the loud machines, the unreal light, the fear and anger that welled up in us in waves so strong it made me sick; I felt the beginning of hate. This was the worst thing, I knew later, learning to hate. I thought I had hated before, families, social workers, people who had hurt me, even my own possessed and damaging mother, but this was another kind of hatred, one that would lay itself down inside me a bit at a time throughout my life, like a poison with no antidote. Some of us would hit and cut ourselves, rage, or swallow their bottled spirits, be fed only bitterness from the dark bowl of history. And I hated what those men could do to us, what they would do, what they did. In their light full with the moving specks of dust, we would all be changed forever…
“I could just make out the men, hazy as ghosts. They had pulled a wild card and were going to play it all the way through. They knew that if they waited long enough, we would resist. We knew if we fought back, we'd be destroyed. Nothing had changed since the Frenchman, Radisson, passed through and wrote in his journal that there was no one to stop them from taking what they wanted from this land. ‘We were caesars,’ he wrote, ‘with no one to answer to.’
“We were the no one.”

“Aurora and I were the future, and above all we were to be protected, sheltered. Grandson, too, but he was from there and he would remain there; he needed to learn and see. This was his past; it was his future.”

“Auntie opened the door and yelled out to them, ‘She has a baby. Let her go.’ And then I was outside, standing in the combined light of morning and the machines. The house was surrounded. A few of the workers revved their engines to intimidate me, and me just a skinny girl with two bad teeth carrying her baby sister. That's how large their fear was…
“It was an ancient fear, that we would retaliate for past wrongs…
“Later 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. Their eyes were not strong enough, their hearts not brave enough, their spirits not inside them. They had no courage. That's all I could figure. Maybe, like us, they had only fear. But unlike us they were afraid of what no money, no home, no job might mean.
“…They were men who would reverse the world, change the direction of rivers, stop the cycle of life until everything was as backward as lies.
“…such men could not see all the way to the end of their actions. They were shortsighted. They had no vision. They had no future within them, no past…
“They will do as they are told. They don't have the courage not to. They are afraid and dangerous.”

“On quiet nights at one of the construction sites with a temporary stay of noise and earth moving, we sat before the fire, our eyes shining in firelight, thinking about our own worlds, how we had come to this through history, how there'd been a prophecy that we would unite and become like an ocean made up of many rivers. Even though we were afraid, it was a full feeling. We thought maybe this was our time. We believed in what we were doing, and like the others, I felt hope that we would succeed, that we would be able to protect the earth and her people.”

“During the lengthening evenings, while we were singing, the white people from nearby towns, workers and their wives, arrived and stationed themselves on the other side of the blockade. They yelled at us, at our singing, our needs. They chanted "Bullshit. Bullshit." This was their song. It was a song against life, against their own futures, but they did not yet know this. They wanted their jobs. They believed they were limited and could live in only one way and they wanted us to give up our way of life for theirs. They thought the land would starve them. Maybe it would. It couldn't have loved them.”

“The nomadic people, the hunters, showed up from time to time in between their trips into the diminishing wilderness. It was a sad thing for them to see a forest turned into rubble and stump, the land stripped of game. Now they traveled longer distances and down to the south and west to find animals; because of this, they too wanted to help us. There were stories for everything, they said. But not for this. We needed a story for what was happening to us now, as if a story would guide us. Oh, there were stories all right, like those in The Greater River News, about how we "Occupied" Two-Town Post, as if we'd stolen it and taken it over by force, as if we were soldiers who knew what we were doing. How quickly we became the enemy; and we, the enemy, sat there on quiet nights, warm with hope, and no bitterness among us. But now I know it was a story of people eating, as toothy and sharp and hungry as the cannibal clan was said to be—eating land, eating people, eating tomorrow.”

“I remember these events like an illness, and I wish I could forget what men do for small and pitiful power. And there are nights I lay awake and think of what we were in danger of becoming. Our lives in that place were being taken from us, the people removed from the land, water, animals, trees, all violated, and no one lives with full humanity without these elements.”

“One day, I supposed, the police would return to solving crimes rather than creating them.”

“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, came back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. ‘There are still people who go to the past,’ Tulik told me one day. ‘They know the road there and when they return it is with something valuable, a flint, a story, or a map.’ It is what we are always looking for, we who were at the place of old rocks, worn and gray, at islands emerging and falling.”

“It was against the will of land, I knew, to turn rivers into lakes, lakes into dry land, to send rivers along new paths. I hoped the earth would one day forgive this breach of faith, the broken agreement humans had with it.”

“We are small, I thought… We are awake in the gone forest, stepping out of clay. We are precious as earth, as diatoms shaped like mystery itself in the blooming seas.”

“Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of ocean, and perhaps we must become sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.”

“Those with the money, the investments, the city power, had no understanding of the destruction their decisions and wants and desires brought to the world. If they'd known what their decisions meant to our people, and if they continued with this building in spite of that knowing, then they were evil. They were the cannibals who consumed human flesh, set fire to worlds the gods had loved and asked the humans to care for.”

“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.”

“…it is not that the ways are lost from us but that we are lost from them. But the ways are patient and await our return.”

“The north is not always cold and white. Some mornings it is warm and the wind stirs, a gentle hand touching the world and people. On these mornings, the shadows of leaves are beautiful on the ground. Light comes slow and languid, as if the sun is hesitant to rise above earth, as if earth has slowed in its spin to a lazy, gentle curve. And some nights when moonlight casts a spell, it is clear enough to see the shape of Fish in the sky. Next to it are Wolf, Badger, and Wolverine. Though I have never seen that constellation, I know it is there. Sometimes the aurora borealis moves across night, strands of light that remind me of a spider's web or a fishnet cast out across the starry skies to pull life in toward it. At other times it reminds me of the lines across a pregnant woman's belly. It leaves me thinking that maybe our earth, our sky, will give birth to something, perhaps there's still another day of creation, and the earth is only a little boat with men and women, slugs and manta rays, all floating in a shell across the dark blue face of a god.”

“Even now the voice of Agnes floats toward me. I hear her say, ‘Once the whole world was covered in water.’ I hear her sing, stepping out of the fog the way she did that day when I first saw her. And sometimes Dora-Rouge touches me. It's her, I know. I can tell by the bony finger, the familiar feel of her hand on my shoulder. At times she brushes back a strand of my hair like she had always done, in order to see my beautiful face. There are times I would think her hand was the wind, but in another brush of her hand, I hear her say that a human is alive water, that creation is not yet over.”

“If you listen at the walls of one human being, even if that one is yourself, you will hear the drumming. Older creatures are remembered in the blood. Inside ourselves we are not yet upright walkers. We are tree. We are frog in amber. Maybe earth itself is just now starting to form.”

“One day, when the light was yellow, I turned to Bush and I said, ‘Something wonderful lives inside me.’
“She looked at me. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The early people knew this, that's why they painted animals on the inside of caves.’
“Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it.
“You will see.”
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