Feasting on Famine in Linda Hogan’s <i>Solar Storms</i>

Abstract

In 1899 H. B. Cushman observed that when a Chickasaw died, tribal lamentations would last for several days and would con clude with a feast (410). Nearly one hundred years later in 1997, in the prologue to her novel Solar Storms, Chickasaw Linda Hogan recounts a feast.1 But in her presentation, Hogan changes several mourning-feast customs, the most salient of which requires that the mourned be deceased. The alteration of the tradi tional mourning feast serves not merely as a signpost for changing Native American rituals. Rather, the transformed mourning feast in Solar Storms indicts white culture for causing Native American famine, both physical and emotional. But in blurring some demar cations of culpability and in providing a role model in the form of the character offering the feast, Hogan points to ways in which the Native American community might respond to the emotional, bodily, and cultural starvation inflicted through postcolonialism.2 In this manner Hogan eschews what David L. Moore deems con struction of reductionist binaries concerning colonization.3 Hogan's Solar Storms recounts the story of Angela (Angel) Wing, a beleaguered seventeen-year-old whose disfigured face bears the scars of an unremembered trauma. Angela's deranged mother Hannah Wing necessitated Angela's placement in foster homes, from which Angela has fled for years. In a court record Angela dis covers the name of Agnes Iron, whom she contacts, believing her to be a relative. Agnes, Angela's great-grandmother, immediately sends money for Angela to join her in Adam's Rib, an economically