Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 93 === Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between the land and the memory in Native American culture in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, by analyzing the significance of the journey home, presenting the struggle against land loss and identifying the restored memory as tribal resistance. Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms tells the story of a young woman’s journey home to the ancestral land of her tribal people with whom she undertakes a resistance to the Hydro-Quebec electric company and American government for tribal survival and ecological justice. The thesis confirms “a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience” (Said 7), asking firstly the importance of the land in Native American culture and unfolding the significance of the place-based memory to the tribal continuum. Arif Dirlik’s idea of “the place-based imagination” is employed to elaborate on the irreplaceability of the tribal land while Michel de Certeau’s theory is borrowed to explain that Native American’s land-specificity results from their “cultural specificity” (228). Making a specific tribe different from other tribes, the “cultural specificity” further explicates an intimately interactive and entangling relationship between the land and memory in tribal culture. In Solar Storms, the ancestral place where Angel, the protagonist, visits is significant for her search of her past, because each landscape abounds with tribal memories. Through the stories told by her grandmothers, Angel retrieves her ancestral memories associated with the land. Stories become the embodiment of the memories shared by a specific group of people inhabiting a locale; tribal stories enable her to establish her tribal identity and integrate herself into the tribal lineage. Though the ancestral lands are flooded in the end, tribal memory, stored and restored in the act of story-telling, stands as a resistance in the face of tribal genocide and cultural erasure. With Angel as the narrator of the novel, Hogan informs readers that Native Americans, by employing the enemy’s language, are remaking an American history from the American Indian perspective.
This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One, entitled “Introduction,” provides a general introduction to the motives of my analysis of Solar Storms in terms of the relationship between the land and the memory.
Chapter Two, entitled “Reclaim the Land, the Memory, and the Stories,” deals with a Chickasaw history of relocation/displacement, Hogan’s personal life in relation to the experiences of displacement, and formulates the theoretical framework to elaborate on the relationship between the land and the memory in tribal culture.
Chapter Three, entitled “Journey Home: the Struggle for Tribal Land,” gives a brief introduction to the history of Hydro-Quebec electric project (James Bay I project in the 1970's), analyzes the significance of the land to the tribal people, reveals the destruction of the land because of the dam construction and finally emphasizes the power of memory in the face of the crisis of land loss.
Chapter Four, entitled “Remember Home: the Recovery of Tribal Memory,” illustrates how a tribal memory is rooted in soil, why memory is important to the tribal people, how the traumatic memory as a result of the loss of tribal land causes damages to the tribal people through the study of Hogan’s Solar Storms, and comes to the conclusion that the restored memory, transmitted in ways of storytelling and writing, is regarded as a way of tribal healing and resistance to strive for the survival of the tribal culture.
Finally, Chapter Five, the conclusion, recapitulates the theme of the thesis and its import.
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