“We Need New Stories”: Trauma, Storytelling, and the Mapping of Environmental Injustice in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms and Standing Rock

Abstract

Given the recent struggle at Standing Rock and the ever-growing threat of climate change, examining the cultural and political narratives that enable these crises has become increasingly pressing. Therefore, as a contribution to discussions around Indigenous sovereignty and environ-mental justice, this article draws on Hogan’s novel to show how colonizing representations work to perpetuate trauma—revealing diverse traumas as linked, intergenerational, and tied to stories. To counter these threats, the novel employs formal strategies to construct alternative representations that promote healing by uncovering links between trauma to situated (racialized/gendered) bodies and the environment and by proffering “new stories” that recognize the living agency of the more-than-human world. Drawing parallels between the extractive and representational histories of James Bay and Standing Rock/DAPL, the article analyzes maps and cultural narratives alongside the novel to demonstrate how these representations justify violence against Indigenous peoples and lands based on ethnic and speciesist hierarchies. Ultimately, it is argued, Hogan creates a multivocal ceremonial form of storytelling modeled on healing and mourning rituals designed to reintegrate the individual into a more-than-human living community and to redistribute responsibility for ethical trauma responses among a wider alliance public, functions increasingly relevant to current struggles for environmental and climate justice.