Unmapping Adventure: Sewing Resistance in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms

T. Christine Jespersen's essay "Unmapping Adventure: Sewing Resistance in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms" explores Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan's reclamation and recasting of the American adventure story as one belonging to indigenous peoples. Merging Amerindian mythology with rearticulated frontier stories, Hogan reweaves adventure as a mode of activism based upon Algonquin beliefs about gender, ecology, and resistance. Solar Storms recounts four women's dangerous canoe trip through the boundary waters on the U.S.-Canadian border. Each woman's decision to travel is imbricated in the larger social issues of cultures and environments struggling with histories of conquest. Linking the wounding of culture with the flooding of indigenous lands by a hydroelectric dam, Hogan literally and figuratively unmaps frontier adventure. The novel is significant in suggesting new openings among Euroamerican and Native American philosophies of identity, community, and ecology. Rewriting Euroamerican narratives that sponsor cultural and ecological conquest as a means of forming individual and national identity, Hogan rearticulates adventure stories as initiating sustainable resistance to cultural and environmental devastation. Intervening in ecological narratives that separate humans from nature, Hogan offers a viable alternative story and possibility: individual human identity interlaced with diverse human communities and the environment.