46 pages • 1 hour read
Linda HoganPower: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4, Chapter 7 Summary: “Oni: What They Believe”
Once again in her boat in the middle of the lake, Omishto feels the thoughts of her family and people blow toward her across the water. Like magic, she is able to enter their heads and witness what they believe. The healer, Annie Hide, believes in the oral tradition of the tribe passed down to her people by the panther at creation. She believes in Ama and in the rightness of her actions because she followed tradition, and she wants to bring her home. On the other hand, Janie Soto believes that tradition has been broken and that Ama must be punished for breaking the laws of nature. She sees Ama’s banishment as a sacrifice that must be made to restore balance and is disappointed in Ama. Joseph Post, an elder of the Turtle Clan, believes in the power of the tribe’s magic and the mystery of human life. While he knows that Ama has violated tribal law, he believes that she is mysterious like nature itself, so what she has done is a part of cyclical history for which she might atone in some future life.
Omishto also sees from her mother’s perspective, who believes only in the Christian God who will save all of them. Omishto also sees the pain of her mother’s self-hatred, as she believes that humans are sinners, the Earth is poisoned, and her culture deserved to be obliterated by the dominant colonizer’s culture. Omishto also has a moment of compassion for her mother, seeing that her mother’s God can also be viewed as Oni, but in a different form. From Ama’s perspective, Ama has saved the Taiga people through her sacrifice of the panther, and she has opened a way to reach a parallel world in which nature and humans live in harmony again. Then, Omishto imagines the panther’s perspective, which laments that humans have fallen from Grace and broken their relationship with nature and their own sacred laws. Finally, Omishto returns to her own perspective, which is one of questioning and doubt. After considering everyone else’s complex perspectives, she feels a crisis of faith in choosing her own beliefs.
Part 4, Chapter 8 Summary: “They Come to Me”
Omishto stays at Ama’s house and works to fix the damage from the storm while a series of people come to visit her there. A man comes to buy the house, but she refuses him. She invites the spirit of her biological father to guide her, but his spirit doesn’t appear to her. She realizes that she has always been stronger than him.
The sheriff arrives and questions Omishto about Ama’s whereabouts, but Omishto answers truthfully that she doesn’t know. She finally reports to him her stepfather’s abuse but realizes that the law cannot help her. Later, her stepfather arrives and threatens her, so she locks herself in the chicken coop until he leaves. Her mother comes to ask her to return to school but Omishto refuses. Next, her sister comes on her mother’s behalf and warns her that she cannot stay at Ama’s house because Herman is planning to send Omishto away to be forcefully hospitalized like her mother had been.
One night when Omishto can’t sleep, she wakes up to the knowledge that Janie Soto had been sitting under the hide of the panther during the trial, and Ama must have given it to her. Three boys come to the house, threatening Ama, and Omishto escapes through the window, hiding in the swamp until they leave. She tries to look for the rifle that Ama used to kill the panther to protect herself but cannot find it.
Her mother visits one final time, warning Omishto again of Herman’s plans. She says that she will leave Herman, but Omishto doesn’t believe her. Her mother also reveals that the old people of Kili Swamp saved their lives once when they took them in when her husband was threatening to hurt them. During their conversation, Omishto feels reborn as a separate person from her mother because their responses to life are so different. Finally, Annie Hide visits Omishto, showing her kindness and solidarity, and stays the night with her there.
Part 4, Chapter 9 Summary: “What I Have Left”
Omishto dreams of the past, when the earth and the people lived in harmony with nature and shared mutual respect with the animals. While society teaches of linear time and the impossibility of returning to old ways, Omishto doesn’t believe this. She believes that it is possible to live in harmony again.
She sits for a long time, connected with the natural world around her. She has decided to leave the modern world behind and live in Kili Swamp with the old people, even though she knows that it means she will be feared and rejected by the Western world and become their “enemy.” She reasons that she does not want to live in fear anymore in a culture in which she feels pressure to assimilate, becoming “dissolved salt.”
When she arrives at Kili Swamp to tell the old people her decision, she comes across a panther in the dark. The panther stares at her and she tells it, in her tribal tongue, that she will not harm it. It walks away. After calling Donna one final time to ask her to care for Ama’s domestic animals, she finally goes off to live with the Taiga elders, accompanied by a vision of the four ancestors, who lead her there. The elders are waiting for her, giving her a fan made of white feathers that she dances with while someone sings a song of hope for this world.
Part 4 Analysis
Once again, Omishto has returned to the natural world, floating in the water on her boat, but this time she is changed and more in tune with her spiritual self. She embodies the “One Who Watches” as she journeys through the minds of all those to whom she is connected (4). This is a mystical experience, and the embodiment of her destiny: to be the watcher and learn the magic of her tribe. Whereas earlier she hovered, afraid of snakes in the water, the panther’s gaze, and the storm to come, now she is open and willing to receive what Oni and the spirits bring to her on the wind. She has befriended the land. The fog protects her and keeps her “hidden.” Where before she feared the unknown, now she is comfortable with not knowing. By returning to the setting of the opening scene, the narrative becomes cyclical, echoing the Indigenous conception of time as cyclical.
The significance of Ama and her killing of the panther is refracted, split into pieces through Omishto’s omniscient narration. The various viewpoints evoke ambivalence. This magical aspect of Omishto’s character allows multiple perspectives to be given equal weight. While Hogan breaks down Omishto’s inclination to binary thinking, she encourages the reader to question binary thinking. Each person and animal that Omishto imagines displays ambivalence. None of them fully condemn Ama, but rather judge her actions based on their belief system. In this way, the novel advocates for a multiplicity of perspectives, resisting a single dominant narrative.
Part 4 concludes Omishto’s coming of age: her journey out of fear and into wisdom and compassion. In contrast to the opening sections of the novel, in which she moved between worlds, now she stays in place while people visit her. She has taken Ama’s place as the gatekeeper between worlds. Her relationship with her mother has also transformed; instead of being afraid that she will become her mother, Omishto has created a “boundary” and is becoming her own separate self. She is making the decisions, and her mother looks to her for guidance and wants to be close to her. From this new place of strength, Omishto can also finally stand up to her stepfather. Her strength is equal to Ama’s, but her role is creative rather than destructive. When she meets a panther, they both walk away alive. She has become a symbol of hope and unity.
When Omishto chooses to return to the panther tribe and live in Kili Swamp, she is becoming whole again by entering a new covenant with nature, from where she draws her strength. She reflects on The Power of Nature Over Human Industry and concedes nature’s superiority. Because of Ama’s sacrifice, she does what Ama could not, and finds hope for herself and her people by living a traditional life rather than trying to assimilate into Western society.
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By Linda Hogan
