Power: A Novel

The looming storm in the opening foreshadows the cultural conflict about to take place in which Indigenous traditional practices will clash with Western systems of justice with tumultuous results. Setting is essential to Linda Hogan’s characterization, and the space that the characters inhabit creates zones of belief and behavior that delineate their roles, illuminating divisions and alliances between different characters and cultures.

Omishto is initially portrayed as part of both Taiga culture and Western settler culture, but not fully belonging to either. Her physical mobility reinforces her status as unformed, not belonging to one place but a traveler of both worlds. She walks between her mother’s place in town and Ama’s place via a road she knows by two names: State Road 59 and Fossil Road. She doesn’t sleep on either territory but prefers to drift alone in her boat, signifying her sense of isolation from both. Her unique position in the narrative sets up the novel’s exploration of Cultural Identity as a Balance of Assimilation and Preservation. Hogan particularly explores this through Omishto’s relationship with nature. From her tribal teachings, she’s learned to understand nature’s signals, but she’s adopted a Westernized fear of its wildness. Omishto’s split identity is manifested in her ambivalence: She describes herself as “half-minded,” wishing to penetrate nature’s mysteries, but also turn from them. However, Omishto is sensitive to the pain of animal suffering, and possesses an ecological mindset critical of Western progress, believing that such an extractive mindset will “kill a world” (27). This attitude foreshadows the fact that Omishto ultimately chooses to move to her Taiga ancestral home.

Omishto is also split in her relationships, encapsulated through her inner conflict regarding her connections with her mother and with Ama, who act as foils to each other. While Omishto’s mother has assimilated with Western settler culture, trying “to pass for white” (20), and lives in a new house in town, Ama dwells in a ramshackle house in the swamplands. Ama’s house, situated on the Taiga border, indicates Ama’s interloper status, “halfway between the modern world and the ancient one” (23). Her house’s foundation has been washed away from floods, and it’s infested with termites. The dilapidation of the house is symbolic of the dwindling number of Taiga people who have barely “survived what history had laid down” and their lands (6), which have been poisoned by the Western pursuit of development.

Ama’s house is a place of refuge for Omishto from her predatory stepfather, a threat that her mother denies out of fear. Omishto feels like it exists with a different sense of time than her mother’s modern house in town, before the land was urbanized. However, her mother thinks of Ama as a “ruin” and that Ama’s house is too worn down and should be abandoned. While Omishto’s mother feels hopeless in the face of her culture’s disenfranchisement under colonialism, Ama chooses to preserve and pass on tradition despite the threat of collapse. Hogan’s construction of Ama and Omishto’s mother as foils emphasizes the different approaches that the two take to assimilation and preservation.

Throughout the story, Omishto continually develops her cultural identity, informed by her experiences of the two worlds’ different sets of beliefs and knowledge. Hogan establishes the theme of Indigenous Knowledge Versus Western Scientific Knowledge in this section. Omishto’s first-person narration contains a mix of references to tribal ways of knowing, Christian beliefs, and textbook historical facts. While her mother wants Omishto to attend school, Ama gives her a tribal education about nature. Omishto respects Ama’s teachings because she Ama explores multiple ways of knowing. Ama reads modern library books, examines plants and animals, and carries Taiga oral history. However, like her mother, who has a “split mind” between her bitterness toward Ama for her closeness with her daughter and her admiration for Ama’s traditional lifestyle, Omishto loves Ama but judges her based on Western standards of beauty and behavior. Hogan epitomizes the clash of Western and Taiga knowledge systems through the story of the death of Abraham Swallow. To the tribal people, Swallow’s death is a curse—a magical punishment for his treatment of his wife—while the police see the investigation as a joke. This foreshadows the complications in different justice systems later in the novel.

Like the setting and characters in the novel, the storm also has two sides: creative and destructive. In Taiga mythos, the storm is the breath, Oni, present at the birth of the world. However, the storm is also the inciting incident for Ama’s hunt and eventual death of the panther. Omishto’s nakedness and “first breath” after the storm signifies her rebirth through experience after facing death in the hurricane. The novel reinforces a cyclical view of life and the inevitability of change through adolescence and human development. Humans are powerless against the natural force of weather and time in the novel, an idea that establishes the theme of The Power of Nature Over Human Industry.