| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 99 === This thesis aims to examine how Native Americans survive through storytelling, using Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms as my anchor text. The entire work proceeds in five chapters. The first chapter is my introduction. Chapter Two, “Famine Stories,” delineates the mental starvation that Native Americans suffer. In this novel, there are abundant stories dealing with the trauma caused by colonial deprivation. Such stories are termed as “famine stories,” which according to its influential level, is further divided into three kinds—personal famine stories, familial famine stories, and communal famine stories. These stories intertwine with one another, and their causes can all be traced to the colonial history. Chapter Two, “Feed Me Stories,” intends to seek a recovery from Native people’s mental famine. Taking Angel’s self-constructing journey as an example, I argue that storytelling reconnects the lost Native American with the lost past. In addition, stories reconstruct the Native worldview, which looks forward to harmony and balance between the human and non-human. Emerged in her grandmothers’ storytelling, Angel comes to realize her mother culture and rebuild her Native identity. Moreover, she retrieves her correlation with the land, develops an intimacy with animals and plants and inherits her family tradition to be an herbal woman. She at last recovers from her psychical wounds. Chapter Three, “The Future Storyteller,” sheds light on Hogan’s intention to carry Native survivance into the future. Protesting against dam construction, Angel takes the tribal future as her responsibility. She devotes her love to nurturing the tribal youth and justifying her Native living right by revealing the deprivation which traumatizes the Native community. Her telling is powerful. It challenges the dominators’ covering the truth up, and puts Native perspective into attention. She de-annihilates Native culture and assures its prosperity in the future. What she does corresponds to Gerald Vizenor’s “Native Survivance,” ensuring “an active sense of presence,” and “the continuance of native stories” (vii). The entire tribe is reunified due to storyteller’s effort and the community is again “the Beautiful People” (313).
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