Multidirectional Eco-Memory and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan's "Solar Storms"

Linda Hogan’s novel Solar Storms (1995) details and examines the complexities of a Chickasaw worldview as it relates to conceptions of the environment and nonhuman nature. In many instances, the novel gestures towards a privileged material bond between Chickasaw communities and their landscape through a deeply embodied sense of environmental history. However, Hogan’s novel simultaneously works against tired and racist clichés of native proximity to “the land”. Rather, Solar Storms presents an indigenous conception of environment as one which is organised through a legal, pre-colonial understanding of ecological arrangements and environmental responsibility.

The worldview of the novel’s subjects and its accompanying legal structures are presented as necessarily opposed to colonial conceptions and manipulations of indigenous lifeforms and landscapes. The effort to decolonise and reclaim land is intimately related to the fostering of environmental and political consciousness. Humans and nonhumans co-emerge through struggle, connected by what Rosanne Kennedy has conceived of as Multidirectional eco-memory, that is an understanding of humans and nonhumans as historically co-emergent and co-dependent. Kennedy’s focus on colonised populations, both human and nonhuman, and their shared histories of harm allows us to extend and enhance what constitutes both environmental and colonial violence.

This paper will argue that Hogan’s novel anticipates Kennedy’s theory in its fostering of political consciousness via multidirectional memory. The novel’s abiding understanding of human and nonhuman as co-emergent through pre and postcolonial histories provides the praxis of its indigenous and environmental activism.