Born to Love the Earth – An Interview with Linda Hogan

SML: Can you tell me a bit about your background? 

LH: I grew up with three lives, one as the daughter of a military child, one as the almost daughter of my uncle in the Indian community in Denver, and one as the grandchild of traditional Chickasaw grandparents in Oklahoma. It was the Indian people I was most comfortable with and I didn’t know more than a few people in my mother’s family. So I followed the compass of love to where I felt most cared about and it was always with the Indian people, whether Chickasaw, like myself, or Navajo, or Lakota, like my children. But, of course, we moved. And the army is full of Native peoples. Even now, there is a longing of the young men to become soldiers. 

SML: What about your relationship with the Earth? It’s one of the first things I was drawn to when I discovered your work many years ago. 

LH: I was born to love the Earth. It wasn’t taught to me. It was natural. Maybe it was passed down from my grandmother to my father to me. I have just returned from a trip in a canoe/ kayak down the enormous Mississippi in a journey of our Indian people where we once traveled it like a highway. Now I have made a journey back home to work for the tribe, and have a heart that is constantly broken by what the people of Oklahoma, which means red land/ people in our language, what they do to this living body of our world. It truly is my mother and the river was my grand- mother. I didn’t want to leave. There were places I entered where the silence spoke so loudly it was without measure and it went straight to the soul. And in another location at night I walked in a forest near where our tribe camped before they were forced to come to Oklahoma by Andrew Jackson and I went out in the woods and sang, which I almost never do, and there in our lands I could always feel the great waters of Earth moving beneath my small human feet, almost like a quake. 

SML: I’m more familiar with your fiction and nonfiction than your poetry, but it seems to me that it’s quite rare to find someone who writes so beautifully in all genres. How do you decide what to write in which form? 

LH: I write the truth in fiction when doing novels. They are stories that really happen. Usually I go research them and then the story comes around the event in one way or another. Solar Storms had a subplot, a hope, which was to find my first granddaughter who had been given up by her mother after I had already bonded with her, and because of my own lack of income and being single I could not adopt her. In any case, it worked. I dedicated the book to her and her adoptive mother read it and called me. My granddaughter was only about eight then. Now she is a working mother. That is a side story. But my novels are about environmental, political, or indigenous events in the world, the land, the building of a dam, the killing of an endangered species, the desire for wealth over the lives of people, the hard human truths that so hurt us. 

SML: You’ve written about the differences between tribal and non-tribal cultures’ systems of knowledge. Can you explain a bit about these differences? 

LH: As far as indigenous knowledge goes, we have lived in a place for so many years, thousands of years, sixty thousand counted in Australia. Our artifacts date back to 8000 BCe. Theirs further. But of course what we know does not date that far, that is just the evidence of our presence here. What we know comes from thousands of years of observation, of the sky, the Earth, the animals, and not from the new western knowledge system carried still from the old Europe, a system now being challenged by scientists themselves. Our system isn’t just science and knowledge, but how a person knows and thinks and where that comes from. And it does not come from the same place. The world is not seen the same. We do not take something out of its ecosystem to a lab and study it, but learn as things are. And now, myself a child of this world, not with a teacher, I listen to what the world tells me and it is practical and present. Also, our elders pass on knowledge, for example that the new insects are moving northward because of the change in weather, which is also science in the western way. 

SML: Thomas Berry, who was a mentor of mine, talked about “recreating the human at the species level”. Of course the recreating takes place in the mind and heart and spirit, acknowledging that we are of the Earth, that we are just another species, not greater than or above anyone else. He seemed to have faith, right up until he died last summer, that humanity would rise to the challenge facing us. Personally I want to believe this, but it’s often difficult. What are your thoughts on this? 

SML: Recreating the human at the species level is an intriguing thought. It is as if we can be taken apart and put back together and I have a hard time with it. Perhaps he meant taking people back to the origins of their being, meaning, and what the world
would look like if you could see it all new. But he is right that we need to recreate what we think and know and feel and knowing we are not greater than the other lives. Imagine what that might do to save not only our world, but to care for one another. 

SML: Yes, that’s what he meant. Remembering what it means to be a human being. 

L.H.: I see a different aspect of humanity where I live, let me add. Thomas Berry probably didn’t live in this hard country of cattle buying, selling, animals seen only as objects, all things a joy to run over by young men (and good old boys), red voters, hard core Christianity that actually began as churches as socialist places in the 30’s and then somehow changed into right wing Evangelical worlds. I live here, where pit bull fights and other atrocities are a constant. And I am mocked at work for having feelings about these things. 

SML.: I was commiserating recently with a friend about how people just don’t understand what it means to be connected, part of, the Earth. What can be done to open more people this reality? 

L.H.: Some of us understand that we have an effect on the world with what we do. Some don’t. So here in Oklahoma, the trees are cleared, the waters are taken by the mines, the grasses the cattle eat are perfect because of pesticides. Every single action is a circle. All things move in a circle, as the elders used to say back in the past. Now we are almost elders and searching for those role models that were there when we were younger and find that we have to be them. And we have to offer what is there for the future. All I can think to do, on my end, is to give readings, lectures, attend places where people listen, to write and teach. It is all I know how to do.

G.V.: You’ve done wildlife rehabilitation work, which I greatly admire. It had to have been both painful and fulfilling.

L.H.: Yes, rehabilitation. It was my love for many years. Now the labor would be hard and my mentor has passed on. She had many successes and was a true healer. It was not so painful early on because it seemed what we did was always the best and often it worked. In the last few years it was so much West Nile Virus. More than anything. Before that, it was contact with humans, cars, electric wires, fences. Logging with nests brought down. With the West Nile Virus, it became very hard to watch the suffering which caused much pain, more than the others, and harder to get rid of. But yes, it was good work and I loved the birds, or any animal I have been given the gift to assist in this life. Someone once asked me what work I was most proud of, thinking of my writing. I said, working with birds, and I could tell they didn’t understand.

SML: Recently I had a conversation with a colleague about a project of The Gaia Foundation (based out of the UK), where they’re reaching out to tribal elders around the world to encourage them to share their knowledge before it’s too late. They’re also working to protect sacred sites that have been forgotten, ignored, or even desecrated. What are your thoughts on this? 

L.H.: The entire Earth is a sacred place, in truth, but some have a special meaning, story, or energy, and have to be especially protected. We have to work quickly and not sit back and watch as these places are destroyed. It happens too quickly. You can go to committee meetings in your courthouse and see how a decision is made, then find out who is elected, who supported those who vote, and so on. We have grown so complacent. To think the elders tried to save the “Snow Bowl” from being a recreational area and no one listened. 

Elders are here because of wisdom and knowledge, because of having seen this all before. I would like to wake up this world, which itself is waking everyone up to pay attention, to get to work. Where did the silence of people originate? The helplessness? I just returned from visiting our sacred sites which are now highways and covered with new towns and plowed fields. I walked through a cotton field and saw our pots in pieces and knew that these came from ancient times, from my own blood people having touched them, made them. I found men who were grave-robbers and who showed me items that are still alive. There is nothing worse than knowing your sacred sites are not sacred to others, to a farmer who told someone studying us, “They’re f…ing dead. What difference does it make?” But those objects are alive and the men didn’t understand, any more than they do that the world is alive, too. 

What they have lost is knowledge of the stars, a language written across the landscape of this Earth in the southeast. That is a sacred site. A narrative of lives long there. But private land gives you rights and the tribe now can make the call on certain events and places but it is so pervasive that all cannot be even known to the tribal Nation. If I see a person with an intact bowl, I have to know they found a site and probably looted it. Nothing is a sacred site to some people in our world, and since I don’t think I can change it I have to think about what I can preserve or offer to the present time and to the future. So I am working on the future, traveling the past of our people in order to write a part of the story for the future. I will travel to our places and tell the stories I hear in the Earth. I’d love to hear more about the foundation in the UK. It sounds amazing. 

SML: How do you deal with the sadness over what’s happening to the Earth, the loss of species, and so on? And as a grandmother, my heart aches. 

L.H.: I just get to work on it, and also just writing and public speaking. I travel often. We all have our gifts and have to do our own work with all the love we have at our fingertips and all the power, also at our fingertips. But, I am adding this, my heart also aches. I recently heard an Australian original owner, a traditionalist, say, “My heart is gone. I have no more heart.” It upset people but I understood what she knows and has seen. 

And yes, as a grandmother you don’t want to imagine a world after humans and neither do I. I want to imagine a world with a different kind of human. We want a whole Earth for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. And whole people. 

SML: I just finished reading People of the Whale and when I read the chapter called “Hunt”, I was reading through tears. For the fate of the whale, certainly, and also for the people who mistakenly felt they were doing what they needed to do, who refused to listen to the women and who refused to see the greed and even the evil under the surface. Elsewhere in the book, I cried for the boys sent to war forced to do unspeakable things, things no human being should have to do. Today it seems we are caught in a web of never ending wars, fought supposedly to counter terrorism, to protect  the “homeland” from assaults like 9/11. And yet the more wars we fight, the more terrorism spreads. There has to be a better way.

L.H.: Ah, yes. War. When did this tendency originate and why? And when will it end? I have seen wars since the beginning of my life, and my father going away to first one, then another. Now we are in Afghanistan, and the Israelis are acting like neocolonialists and taking what isn’t theirs and behaving like the Nazis did and we all keep this in motion, all our nations. As for the Twin Towers, had insane Americans bombed some place and killed people (and we are doing it daily) and our country been devastated in every way by the country of their origin, we would think it an outrage. But instead, we took it all a step farther and destroyed another country and now we are in another. All because of a few insane men flying into the Twin Towers and Pentagon. And some people do ask, what took so long for us to be bombed when we have created so many enemies, especially under the Bush administrations? We are fortunate to have not been harmed before. 

I do not know the meaning of war, the roots of it. But they go deep in the human psyche, deeper than peace, it seems. And so those of us who wish for peace often end up having to fight for peace. That again, becomes a circle, almost a root of war. We used to talk about the sacred hoop and that there were many sacred hoops, all overlapping. There are also the circles of cruelty and fighting and even the love of it here in our world, and if we could learn to overcome it, we would then be able to believe in any religion or person who could put an end to it. We would bow down to that peacemaker. So let us hope we find healers and peacemakers and keepers of the land.