Solar Storms

Linda Hogan, born July 16, 1947, in Denver, Colorado, is a celebrated Chickasaw writer whose body of work spans poetry, novels, and nonfiction. Much of her family lives near Ardmore, Oklahoma, and she has a close relationship to the area; Hogan has long emphasized the personal and cultural significance of this region in shaping her identity and writing. She earned her M.A. in English and creative writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1978 and later taught there, as well as with the Indigenous Education Institute. A prolific author, Hogan had already published six collections of poetry before the release of Solar Storms in 1995. Across all genres, her work centers the survival of Indigenous identity and environmental preservation. An activist as well as a writer, she worked in wildlife rehabilitation for nearly a decade and collaborated with fellow nature writer Brenda Peterson on 2015’s Sightings: The Gray Whales’ Mysterious Journey. Other notable publications include the poetry collection Daughters, I Love You (1981); Mean Spirit (1990), a Pulitzer finalist and Hogan’s first novel; and Power (1999), a story about the killing of an endangered Florida panther. Hogan served for six years as Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation and was inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame in 2006. Among her many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple Colorado Book Awards, and the PEN Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing.

Solar Storms explores the struggle between Indigenous communities and colonial forces and systems. For instance, Hogan references both the North American fur trade and the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 throughout the novel to emphasize the violence, dispossession, and exploitation that Indigenous peoples have long endured. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, the fur trade was driven by European demand for beaver pelts and other animal furs used for garments and hats, and Indigenous land was exploited for these resources. While some Indigenous communities benefitted economically in the short term, the fur trade ultimately heightened European colonial control over Indigenous lands and communities just like Angel’s. Wounded Knee, likewise, is emblematic of state-sanctioned violence against Indigenous people. On December 29, 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, an estimated 300 Lakota men, women, and children were murdered by U.S. soldiers, a tragedy still seen as a symbol of the violent oppression of Indigenous people and culture. Solar Storms’s central conflict—the construction of a hydroelectric dam on Native lands—is a fictionalized account of real developments like the James Bay Project, a massive hydroelectric scheme carried out in Quebec beginning in the 1970s. Like the project in the novel, James Bay involved the forced relocation of Indigenous people (primarily Cree and Inuit), destruction of longstanding ecosystems, and violation of treaty agreements. Drawing on these historical contexts, Hogan demonstrates how the exploitation of Native lands is not a closed chapter in history but an ongoing environmental—and humanitarian—crisis.

Various other Indigenous women writers, like Hogan, also foreground Native survival, memory, and resistance in their work. Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020), for example, parallels Hogan’s novel in its portrayal of an Indigenous community’s fight against government encroachment; like Hogan, Erdrich is also a poet, and her lyrical prose brings all the more depth to her characters’ complex struggles. Joy Harjo—former U.S. Poet Laureate and a member of Oklahoma’s Muscogee (Creek) Nation—also blends the personal with the collective in collections like An American Sunrise (2019) and the frequently-taught poem “Remember,” both of which emphasize the inseparability of land, ancestry, and identity. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981), through poems, prose, and photographs, documents the endurance of Indigenous systems of knowledge, making it a natural companion to the story told in Solar Storms. Cherie Dimaline’s young adult speculative fiction novels like The Marrow Thieves and Hunting By Stars share many of the same concerns as Solar Storms, while also exploring a fictional—and horrifying—next step in colonial exploitation of Indigenous people and land. Broadly speaking, as a novel about a young protagonist making sense of abuse suffered in childhood, Solar Storms shares similarities with books as varied as Educated by Tara Westover and The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe.