Listening To The Chanting Of Life:a Study Of The Ecological Concerns In Linda Hogan’s Novels

As one of the most significant contemporary Native American writers, Linda Hogan (1947--), from the Chickasaw, is universally acclaimed as an environmental artist and a social activist. Her writings are a behavior of probing and improving the human relations and the relation between human beings and non-humans, and her novels express her lifetime concern for the living world and the inhabitants in it.Nevertheless, the anthropcentrism and dualism have broken the relations between people and people, people and the natural world, and the characters in Hogan’s novels abandon Native American’s philosophical concepts that value the interrelatedness and interconnectedness, forget the self in these relations and have to face the identity loss, spiritual dilemma and ecological crisis.Hogan’s works start with the issue of Native American people’s survival,but finally transcend the tribal limit to take care of the interrelations and mutual growing among all kinds of life forms in the universe. By way of writing and story-telling, Hogan makes great efforts to restore the broken relations and rebuild the connections between human beings and other life forms around them. This dissertation will mainly focus on Hogan’s four novels:Mean Spirit, Solar Storm, Power and People of the Whale, and analyze from four dimensions how her works rebuild a much deeper and more sustainable relation when facing the severe ecological crisis.The first dimension of the interconnection between human beings mainly focuses on the conflict between the western individualism and the Indian community value. By restoring Native American communal tradition, the characters resist in different ways the environmental deterioration and spiritual crisis. The concept of community in Hogan’s works does not limit to the connection among people with the same tribes and blood origin, it is an open and fluid pan-indian-community, based on the same accepted Native American sense of value and tradition.In the second dimension, the dissertation discusses the relation between people and the land. For the Native American people, the land plays an important role of constructing self-identity. However, in the western main-stream culture, the land is regarded as meaningless space and resource, which finally resulted in the land deterioration and the loss of the sense of place. This chapter will analyze how the characters reconstruct the sense of place by the way of going home and restoring the relation with land and nature.The third dimension mainly takes concern with the intimate relation between people and animal. By focusing on the different attitudes toward animals between western society and Native Americans, Hogan’s works reflect the animal and nature crisis caused by the history of colonization and industrial over-development, and provide the reader a new way of observing the relation between people and animal.The fourth dimension examines the relation between human beings and the tradition. This chapter will discuss how the wave of mordernity and globalization impacts the American Indians’ traditional way of life, reflects the human destiny and the meaning of tradition-keeping and the role of traditional values in the process of solving the ecological crisis in the contemporary world.In the process of reconstructing the above four relations, Hogan tries to criticize the ideologies of anthropcentrism and cultural imperialism, to explore the ecological problems caused by those ideologies and to bridge the boundaries of species. In the traditional ceremony, the Native American people cure the illness by way of continuous chanting, in this sense, the modern people who are suffering from the ecological diseases can obtain "a sense of environmentality", which means the people as species is only part of the whole biosphere, and get the opportunity of healing in the ceremony of reading Hogan’s novels and listening to the chanting of different life forms. The Native American traditional values are ones of dynamics and life force and still exert its influence on the way of surviving in the modern world. Therefore, standing at the invisible boundary, the human beings and other life forms should get across the boundary and walk on hand in hand instead of gazing at each other.