holding a world in balance
An interview with Linda Hogan
by Camille Colatosti

Linda Hogan is an award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist. Her works include Red Clay, Eclipse, Seeing Through the Sun, Mean Spirit, The Book of Medicines, Solar Storms, Power, Sightings: The Mysterious Migration of the Gray Whale, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir, and Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. She is also co-editor, along with Brenda Peterson and Deena Metzger, of Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. Fulcrum Press will publish her forthcoming book, Horses Running, under the label of the Museum of American Indians.

Her writings explore the connection between humans and animals, as well as the relationships among all of the earth’s creatures. As she explains in her preface to Dwellings, "As an Indian woman I question our responsibilities to the caretaking of the future and to the other species who share our journeys. These writings have grown out of those questions, out of wondering what makes us human, out of a lifelong love for the living world and all its inhabitants. They have grown, too, out of my native understanding that there is a terrestrial intelligence that lies beyond our human knowing and grasping."

Today Hogan, retired from teaching creative writing at the University of Colorado, lives in a small rural town, southwest of Denver. Her grandchildren are frequent visitors to her home, where she lives with two horses, a dog and a cat. There are also wild visitors: tree foxes, night owls, coyotes and at least one mountain lion.

Camille Colatosti: How did you become interested in the traditional relationship between indigenous peoples and animals? What is significant about this relationship?

Linda Hogan: When I think about the relationship between people and animals, the thing that I have always understood is that we are not only in relationship in an ecosystem but are as humble as the animals in our own rightful place. This is the difference between other religions and indigenous tradition. For Indians, if you are a seal hunter, you pray while you make your tools; you sing to the seal and you pray to the seal. You tell it why you are taking its life. If you are going to kill it, you respect it.

Common people, like squirrel and sparrow
by Linda Hogan

It is a warm autumn day and we are driving east to release a golden eagle. We drive out past the farmlands with gold stalks of last year’s corn bristling up from the flat fields, past hills showing the signs of a recent snow; moisture, a scattering of white. The front range of mountains is soft in the west behind us, the fields furrowed and lined where the mowers have been.

The eagle is quiet in a carrier in the back of the car. We drive with it past old, worn-looking houses, over railroad tracks, past trees twisted by years of shaping wind. We travel past a marsh of old, rattling cattails, and blue sky laying itself down on a snaking irrigation canal. There are rows of hay and grain silos. Antlers of deer and elk are nailed on the barns as if to say they are worshiped. And beneath all this is the black, rich earth.

As we reach the place where the eagle came from something inside the car changes; something strong and different is in the air. We stop talking, as if to listen. As soon as I feel it, Sigrid, the caretaker of injured raptors, feels it, too. She says of the eagle, "He knows he’s home."

This feeling is a language larger than human, conveyed to us by the eagle we are transporting, the eagle we have held in our hands. Wordless, it seems to be a language spoken from and to the body. It enters skin, stomach, and heart. Feeling it, I can’t help but think of the limits of our human language, what we can’t speak, what we have no words for. It is clear there is a vocabulary of senses, a grammar beyond that of human making.

The eagle is still. He is waiting, listening. Looking back at him, I see what I can only call a look of wonder on his face, his beak slightly open, his eyes alert. The excitement and tension is strong and palpable, as if it had long been beyond the eagle’s belief that he would ever return to this place. The changed climate in the car is so powerful that I am anxious; I want to pull over right away and let him go, but we drive farther, checking every small detail of the terrain, the currents of air, to make certain the tawny dark-eyed eagle will have the best chance for flight and survival. He needs a hill to rise from, a wide-trunked tree in the distance where he can sit in a branch and groom while he looks over the land and sky and decides what he will do. From past experience with birds, we know this; we have watched them do this many times before, an eagle, hawk, or owl sitting, taking in the world’s terrain, even the parts of it we, with our limited human vision, can’t see. He will look at the land and remember it, remembering the alive currents of air as they sweep the grasses as surely as we remember the contours of our own homelands.

Finally, finding the right place, we pull over and take him out of the carrier. With grief and joy mixed together in our hearts, we say good-bye and set him free, placing him on the ground. He looks around for only a moment and then, in a muscular rise, his long wings open, strong and wide, he pulls upward. This bird doesn’t stop in a tree to wait and watch. He flies, the light on him gold and brown. His dark eyes watch us. He circles back one last time the way so many birds do, as if to say good-bye. And then he travels away until he is only a spot in the sky and soon he disappears altogether from our sight, although with his keener vision, we know that he still sees us where we stand on the autumn earth wondering, as I will always wonder, what was communicated by the bird to us, how it was spoken, how taken in.

This is how many stories begin: Long ago, when animals and human beings were the same kind of people, they understood each other. When the world was young, the animals, people, and birds lived together peacefully and in friendship. In these early days of the world, in some locations, animals and humans were equals and, it was said, they spoke a common language, across species bounds. Perhaps they spoke in the way the eagle’s language was communicated to two women on that day of its return home.

MAGIC WORDS (ESKIMO)
In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen –
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.

Last year a group of tribal elders and thinkers came together to talk about our relationship with the animals. Alex White Plume, a Lakota man who was one of the originators of the buffalo restoration programs on tribal lands, said that as the buffalo were returning so were the native grasses, insects and birds. The people, too, returned to the traditions, stories, and the language, which itself reflects ecological relationships not contained by English. When taking back tradition, Alex said that the people looked again for their human place in the world. As we brought the animals back, he said, "We found that we, too, are just common people, like the squirrel and sparrow."

At the same gathering, Sarah James, a Gwich’in woman from interior Alaska, and the spokesperson for the caribou, said, "It was given to us by the creator to take care of the Earth. Every time we speak, we speak for tree, water, fish. We are trying to save the Caribou. I learn oil and gas rule the world, but we’re not going to compromise to save the Caribou; they are the reason we are here today. We put ourselves in a humble position, no greater than bird or duck or plant. We’re as humble as they are. I look at the mountain as if my life depends on it – for food, medicine – not just to see how beautiful it is. The animals can’t speak for themselves, so we speak for them."

To be common people, humble people, how freeing that is. How much it offers us, placing us back in the participatory relationship with the world. It offers us the animal underpinnings of our own minds and bodies, and it is those we must rely on to bring us back to our humanity and compassion, to restore ourselves to our place.

– From Intimate Nature by Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger and Brenda Peterson, copyright © 1998 by Brenda Peterson, Deena Metzger and Linda Hogan (Introduction and Compilation). Used by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Camille Colatosti: Did your background as a member of the Chickasaw Nation influence your relationship with animals?

Linda Hogan: My mother is of Germanic background and my father was Chickasaw. He was always good to animals but he was not traditional. My grandmother was kind and had a special relationship with animals. I remember that a large land tortoise was heading out and my grandmother stopped it and told the turtle not to go the way it was traveling because there were dogs there. The turtle turned around.

I have always had an empathic relationship with animals that can’t be explained. I see this with horses. I live with two horses and am doing horse therapy with another named Thirsty. I have a brain injury and working with a horse is therapeutic for balance. Thirsty and I are an empathic pair. I think something and he will do it. I look at the barrel and say, "Okay, now let’s go around the barrel," and Thirsty does this.

The Western mind has the idea that there is dominion over animals. If you see animals in a zoo, you do not see an animal, you see a creature of loss that has been created by humans, a marginal creature. All its significance has been taken away. The animal is without his environment. It has no den, no place where it catches food; it has nothing. Animals lose their very selves. Animals live very complex lives and have their own significant intelligence in their true environment. The Western mind does not see that.

Camille Colatosti: What are some of the themes that stand out in indigenous stories about the human-animal relationship?

Linda Hogan: There are a lot of different themes. There is the story that so many tell of the time when humans and animals could change into each other. There were times when animals and people spoke the same language, or when the animals helped the humans. For instance, our mythology says it was the spider who brought us fire.

I’ve thought about these human-animal relationships for years – is this true? Well, humans and animals existed together for many thousands of years without creating the loss of species. There was enormous respect given to animals. I have to trust the knowledge of indigenous people because it held a world in balance.

I have a special interest in ceremonies. I look at a ceremony called The Deer Dance. In the ceremony, I watch the entire world unfold through the life of the deer and a man dressed as a deer. The man dances all night. It is as if he were transformed into a deer. This is a renewal ceremony for the people. The deer that lives in the mountains far from the people provides them with life.

The purpose of most ceremonies – such as healing ceremonies – is to return one person or group of people to themselves, to place the human in proper relationship with the rest of the world. I thought that we were out of touch with ourselves 20 years ago. Now, with computers and email and cell phones, we are even more out of touch. How many of us even stay in touch with our own bodies? If we aren’t inhabiting our own bodies, how can we understand animal bodies of the world?

Camille Colatosti: How did you come to convene a meeting of tribal elders on endangered species concerns?

Linda Hogan: Because animals play such a central part in ceremonies and the history of tribes, I decided to invite a group of elders to get together to talk about animals.

One elder told us that in her tradition, the same word means power, energy, animal and God.

One of the most traditional, a man in his 80s named Howard Luke, who is an Alaskan Athabaskan, said that we do not live in a human-centered world. Animals are watching us and know what we are doing.

Camille Colatosti: How do you address these ideas in your writing?

Linda Hogan: In my novel Power, there is a whole section where the main character is sitting in a boat and hearing what other people, including the panther people, are thinking. The panther talks about how the humans used to be beautiful people and what humans have now lost.

I just finished writing a book on American Indian horses, Horses Running. I have a wild horse and I think she is an American Indian horse. The Chickasaw had our own breed of horses. Chickasaw horses were short and stocky, and had necks that were so short that they had to get down on one knee to eat grass.

For years, our Chickasaw ponies were the most admired, and they were in high demand. But along the Trail of Tears were thieves, and the horses were stolen and eventually mixed with other breeds until they were gone. The Chickasaw didn’t even make it to where we were supposed to go on the Trail of Tears. We stopped in Choctaw land, because we were all sick and exhausted.

My grandfather once found a horse that he thought was a Chickasaw horse, and he would not allow anyone else to ride it. The horse knew this. When my father was a boy, he tried to ride the horse and he got in trouble. The horse tried to throw him, run him into branches, and so on, until my grandpa went out and stopped them.

Camille Colatosti: In your essay in Intimate Nature, you suggest that the stories of indigenous people and the wisdom the stories hold were suppressed by conquering peoples, but you also suggest that contemporary science is leading us back to the kind of knowledge that was suppressed. What do you mean?

Linda Hogan: I participate in Native Science Dialogues. There was one at the Navajo Community College in May. Native thinkers and traditionalists come together to talk with Western scientists about the significance of indigenous knowledge. Science is now catching up with what we know. Our elders have held and passed on enormous and elaborate understandings of the world, ecosystems and scientific philosophies.

A small example: a Comanche Indian woman says to an anthropologist, "I can look out there at that field and see seven different kinds of medicine and all you see are weeds."

Camille Colatosti: You also write about your involvement with rehabilitating raptors. Why did you take on this work?

Linda Hogan: I started working in a wildlife rehabilitation center in Minnesota. I had moved to Minnesota and it was a very unhappy time in my life. I had an impossible job. I didn’t realize the depth of racism there and my contact with nature was minimized.

I started working in the wildlife center because it was the only sane thing in a crazy world. Going there was like being back in touch with the world again. Then I came back to Colorado and I found Sigrid, a caretaker of injured raptors. We became friends. I began working with her. At first, she had a backyard operation. Then, it grew into a model facility with two intensive care buildings. Later, I even helped work at bingo games to get money for the medication that the birds needed. That became my life–to make sure that the birds were well taken care of.

I did physical labor, at times even giving the birds showers – those who liked it, that is. Even the owls loved getting the showers. I would clean and sometimes we would cut deer meat and there wouldn’t be a thought about it because we were doing it for the birds. We would cut up mice and wouldn’t think about it and after a while mice meat even started to look kind of tasty.

One day, a bird came to Sigrid and made a lot of noise and wouldn’t stop. So she followed this hawk to another who was caught in a fence. It took a lot of intelligence for the hawk to know to come to us. The hawk knew what Sigrid did there. It returned often to sit on the flight cage with its companion.

Working with the birds was central to my life and was my identity for a time. In an interview I was once asked what I was most proud of. They expected me to say the title of a book, but I said, "Working with birds." I love my writing but it is not the same as saving lives, not the same as being in the world every day. But in my writing, I try to make a feel for that natural world, to use words to make wholeness out of what’s been broken.

Camille Colatosti is Witness staff writer.