Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature

CHAPTER FIVE: Healing the Severed Trust: Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World as Native Ceremony

127 Chapter Five Healing the Severed Trust Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World as Native Ceremony In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen identifies two basic forms of Native American literature, the ceremony and the myth. According to Allen, “the ceremony is the ritual enactment of a specialized perception of a cosmic relationship, while the myth is a prose record of that relationship.”1 Both forms have the purpose of locating the individual within an interlocking and interconnected framework that includes the psychological, the social, the geographical, and the spiritual, all the way out to the cosmic. This holistic perception of the world—very different from the scientific, calculative way of thinking that separates and isolates things as resource-objects for our use—connects humans to the landscape and all the beings who grace the world around us. Ceremony plays a particular role in this way of thinking, for its purpose “is to integrate: to fuse the individual with his or her fellows, the community of people with that of the other kingdoms, and this larger communal group with the worlds beyond this one. A raising or expansion of individual consciousness naturally accompanies this process. The person sheds the isolated, individual personality and is restored to conscious harmony with the universe.”2 Allen states that because individuals from the West fail to think in this holistic way, in which all beings are interconnected, 128 Chapter Five they very often struggle with an authentic understanding of the great power that exists in Native American literature. The structures and symbols of this literature “are designed to integrate the various orders of consciousness ,” not only within and among humans but also between humans and other entities who also participate in the ceremonial literature.3 Most importantly , the literature itself is an “enactment of [this] specialized perception ” of the cosmic interrelationship grounding our existence, not merely a record or description but an unfolding, a presencing of that way of thinking and thus, concomitantly, of the reciprocal appropriation, in Momaday’s words, that pervades reality. In her essay “First People,” Linda Hogan mirrors Allen’s depiction of Native American literature as embodying a cosmic interrelationship, describing the way in which ceremonies can heal the rift that has grown between the self and the world. She says: “The stories that are songs of agreement and safekeeping, and the ceremonies that are their intimate companions, tell us not only how to keep the world alive, they tell us how to put ourselves back together again. In the language of ceremony, a person is placed—bodily, socially , geographically, spiritually, and cosmologically—in the natural world extending all the way out into the universe. This placing includes the calling in of the animal presence from all directions.” In this passage, Hogan connects storytelling with ceremony and notes that they both allow us to find our place in the intricate web of the natural world that sustains us and the cosmological order that grounds our existence. Moreover, stories and ceremonies are a happening, a lived event that places us within both the cultural and the natural worlds in such a way that we are restored to balance and the world is kept alive. She continues: “The ceremonial language and the images it evokes allow a human to see herself in relation to what’s around, in, and outside of the seemingly singular human body. A ceremony enacts the recalled participation with nature. It reorients us, locates us in our human place, according to the natural laws of the world.” Hogan emphasizes the way in which ceremony brings forth a once-forgotten way of being and thinking based on relationship and participatory experience. Rather than merely describing this remembered knowledge, ceremony draws forth an ancient mode of existence that recognizes an ecology of physical and spiritual being. After describing how Earth has been ravaged and poisoned, Hogan concludes: “We are hoping for, in need of, a ceremony that will heal this. In a changed world, we are in need of an ancient way being.”4 Healing the Severed Trust 129 The role of participatory interaction between humans and the landscape , including the plants and the animals, the hills and the valleys, the sky, the thunder, and the sun that grace our journey through life, is central to the renewal of this ancient way of being. In Teaching Spirits, Joseph Epes Brown explains that relationships...