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Power
When sixteen-year-old Omishto, a member of the Taiga Tribe, witnesses her Aunt Ama kill a panther-an animal considered to be a sacred ancestor of the Taiga people-she is suddenly torn between her loyalties to her Westernized mother, who wants her to reject the ways of the tribe, and to Ama and her traditional people, for whom the killing of the panther takes on grave importance. " Power is a beautifully written story, that rare book that comes along once in a while, touching the deep parts of our humanness and calling us . . . to be better than we are."- Rocky Mountain News "[Hogan] has written a book about a crisis of belief that is dizzying in its depths, a book that is a testament to the ability of people to imagine what they cannot articulate."- Boston Book Review "Hogan's Power is a bildungsroman. It is a lament for the animals and plants we have so heedlessly extinguished and it is also a story hopeful for the restoration of a world in balance."- Bloomsbury Review
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First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Linda Hogan
80 books553 followersLinda K. Hogan (born 1947 Denver) is a Native American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She is currently the Chickasaw Nation's Writer in Residence.
Linda Hogan is Chickasaw. Her father is a Chickasaw from a recognized historical family and Linda's uncle, Wesley Henderson, helped form the White Buffalo Council in Denver during the 1950s. It was to help other Indian people coming to the city because of The Relocation Act, which encouraged migration for work and other opportunities. He had a strong influence on her and she grew up relating strongly to both her Chickasaw family in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and to a mixed Indian community in the Denver area. At other times, her family traveled because of the military.
Her first university teaching position was in American Indian Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. After writing her first book, Calling Myself Home, she continued to write poetry. Her work has both a historical and political focus, but is lyrical. Her most recent books are The Book of Medicines (1993) and Rounding the Human Corners. (2008) She is also a novelist and essayist. Her work centers on the world of Native peoples, from both her own indigenous perspective and that of others. She was a full professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado and then taught the last two years in the University's Ethnic Studies Department. She currently is the Writer in Residence for her own Chickasaw Nation.
Essayist, novelist, and poet, Hogan has published works in many different backgrounds and forms. Her concentration is on environmental themes. She has acted as a consultant in bringing together Native tribal representatives and feminist themes, particularly allying them to her Native ancestry. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, expresses an indigenous understanding of the world.
She has written essays and poems on a variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, biographical and from research. Hogan has also written historical novels. Her work studies the historical wrongs done to Native Americans and the American environment since the European colonization of North America.
Hogan was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Oklahoma. She is the (inaugural) Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. In October 2011, she instructed a writing workshop through the Abiquiu Workshops in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
(from Wikipedia)
Linda Hogan is Chickasaw. Her father is a Chickasaw from a recognized historical family and Linda's uncle, Wesley Henderson, helped form the White Buffalo Council in Denver during the 1950s. It was to help other Indian people coming to the city because of The Relocation Act, which encouraged migration for work and other opportunities. He had a strong influence on her and she grew up relating strongly to both her Chickasaw family in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and to a mixed Indian community in the Denver area. At other times, her family traveled because of the military.
Her first university teaching position was in American Indian Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. After writing her first book, Calling Myself Home, she continued to write poetry. Her work has both a historical and political focus, but is lyrical. Her most recent books are The Book of Medicines (1993) and Rounding the Human Corners. (2008) She is also a novelist and essayist. Her work centers on the world of Native peoples, from both her own indigenous perspective and that of others. She was a full professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado and then taught the last two years in the University's Ethnic Studies Department. She currently is the Writer in Residence for her own Chickasaw Nation.
Essayist, novelist, and poet, Hogan has published works in many different backgrounds and forms. Her concentration is on environmental themes. She has acted as a consultant in bringing together Native tribal representatives and feminist themes, particularly allying them to her Native ancestry. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, expresses an indigenous understanding of the world.
She has written essays and poems on a variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, biographical and from research. Hogan has also written historical novels. Her work studies the historical wrongs done to Native Americans and the American environment since the European colonization of North America.
Hogan was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Oklahoma. She is the (inaugural) Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. In October 2011, she instructed a writing workshop through the Abiquiu Workshops in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews
August 22, 2021
Power by Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, and environmentalist educated at the University of Colorado Boulder and a professor at the University of Colorado. This was a beautiful and engaging book as one quickly becomes immersed in the struggles of a young girl trying to determine her path in the world as she struggles between her Native American heritage or her mother's denial of her ancestors. Omishto was aptly named as is so beautifully described in this lovely book:
At the crux of this beautiful coming-of-age story is the legend of the Florida panther, an endangered species that is protected by many Federal laws. Omishto, spending much of her time with Ama, a woman that she has known as her aunt from her early childhood, living in a house that is barely surviving in its weathered and run-down condition, described as a dying house. After a devastating storm, sixteen-year old Omishto witnesses her Aunt Ama kill a Florida panther, an animal considered to be a sacred ancestor of the Taiga people. Omishto's confusion about this act by Ama propels her search for answers as to why.
This was such a lovely book, another one that has sat on my library shelf for way too long. I am enjoying finally reading a lot of forgotten books and not being disappointed.
". . . That's why my father named me Omishto. It means the One Who Watches, but nowadays everyone just calls me Sis or girl. But it's true, I watch everything and see deep into what's around me. I have a strong wind inside me, is what Grandma said. A wind with eyes. They used to call it the spirit, the breath, and the name we have for it it is Oni. I feel lives and spirits in the woods, and I see the growing things. But I can't see what is watching me from the trees. Still, I am careful in the way I move, not to be caught unawares, not to turn my back on it."
At the crux of this beautiful coming-of-age story is the legend of the Florida panther, an endangered species that is protected by many Federal laws. Omishto, spending much of her time with Ama, a woman that she has known as her aunt from her early childhood, living in a house that is barely surviving in its weathered and run-down condition, described as a dying house. After a devastating storm, sixteen-year old Omishto witnesses her Aunt Ama kill a Florida panther, an animal considered to be a sacred ancestor of the Taiga people. Omishto's confusion about this act by Ama propels her search for answers as to why.
"The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature."
"And as the great bird rested, the panther entered through the broken shell, the hole of creation, all golden eyes and secret pride and lithe stillness, walking as if every cell of its muscular body was breathed awake and healthy. She, Sisa, God of Gods, entered this world with grace and sunlight and beauty."
This was such a lovely book, another one that has sat on my library shelf for way too long. I am enjoying finally reading a lot of forgotten books and not being disappointed.
May 13, 2019
In order to read this novel you must enter your original animal-self, to seep into the human veins of our history in the earth, to fossilize our place among the nowneveralways and then to shatter that into the quaking possibilities of beyond.
February 1, 2009
It was somewhat difficult adapting to her circular style of writing, though I liked all the symbolism: the sick panther represented the death of the old ways of the clan, Omishto represented their future. The Spanish horse represented the Spaniards who were there first and were now gone, as did Methusaleh the ancient tree that didn't survive the storm. It had been planted by the Spaniards. Ama was in complete control of her destiny, her actions directed toward bringing Omishto into the clan. Power in the book is represented by the storm, the clan, the law, feminist power; Herm's power over Omishto and her mother, the Elders, the Church, Omishto's power and potential in both worlds, and perhaps the strongest—the power of the book itself to make the reader keep rereading passages in order to understand them.
May 30, 2016
"Power" is the word for this novel. Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan has created a magnificent, powerful novel. Power is the story of Onishto, a girl belonging to an almost extinct Florida tribe that sees the panther as its creator and protector.
Onishto lives in a dysfunctional family. When she can, she spends time with Ama, a single, middle-aged Native woman who lives alone in the swamp and hears and sees more of the natural world than most people do.
Ohishto also longs for wilderness. But she knows that wilderness is not idyllic. A hurricane that batters the land and makes deer fly in the air leads to events that change Onishto's and Ana's lives.
I don't want to give away more of the story, but the writing is lyrical and the insights are profound.
Onishto lives in a dysfunctional family. When she can, she spends time with Ama, a single, middle-aged Native woman who lives alone in the swamp and hears and sees more of the natural world than most people do.
Ohishto also longs for wilderness. But she knows that wilderness is not idyllic. A hurricane that batters the land and makes deer fly in the air leads to events that change Onishto's and Ana's lives.
I don't want to give away more of the story, but the writing is lyrical and the insights are profound.
March 15, 2025
3.5
Feeling a bit torn on this one. The writing itself is beautifully done but very slow, so I enjoyed my time with it but never felt the urge to come back and my interest did waver at times. Maybe if I was in a more patient mood the past week and didn't feel a rush while reading this for class I would've enjoyed it a bit more.
That being said, while I had my doubts while reading, this book really stuck the landing for me. I found the conclusion very moving and the slow nature of the book made the protagonist's arc feel more natural while also being appropriate thematically. A thoughtful meditation on power, identity, and nature.
Feeling a bit torn on this one. The writing itself is beautifully done but very slow, so I enjoyed my time with it but never felt the urge to come back and my interest did waver at times. Maybe if I was in a more patient mood the past week and didn't feel a rush while reading this for class I would've enjoyed it a bit more.
That being said, while I had my doubts while reading, this book really stuck the landing for me. I found the conclusion very moving and the slow nature of the book made the protagonist's arc feel more natural while also being appropriate thematically. A thoughtful meditation on power, identity, and nature.
May 19, 2018
Hogan is a beautiful writer, as one might expect from a poet. This book is for those who do not need a lot of plot and can appreciate the tension between our modern way of life - rather destroying the earth we live on - and the call of her roots in the Taiga clan. Hogan takes you into 16-year-old Omishto's mind as she observes her world and her choices. It was very interesting to view both a modern trial and the trial in her clan over the same incident. I do think there is a lot of symbolism I might be missing in the book. I'll read more!
31 Rain fall harder now . . Earth tuns into water . . . and water becomes mud. Everything . . . turning into another one, as if it is only sand turning over in an hourglass . . .
Story of the pepople, panther coming down from the hole in the sky
161 Clan Trial I know our survival depends on who I am and who I will become.
166 condition of cat who "break their hearts and lives"
177 Lost in the fog
178 The beginning of wind was the first breathing of one of the turbulent Gods,
190
31 Rain fall harder now . . Earth tuns into water . . . and water becomes mud. Everything . . . turning into another one, as if it is only sand turning over in an hourglass . . .
Story of the pepople, panther coming down from the hole in the sky
161 Clan Trial I know our survival depends on who I am and who I will become.
166 condition of cat who "break their hearts and lives"
177 Lost in the fog
178 The beginning of wind was the first breathing of one of the turbulent Gods,
190
August 13, 2017
Our story follows young Omishto and the events that take place during an unexpected Hurricane. Omishto belongs to the Taiga Tribe, set in the swamps of South Florida, this small and dying tribe has few members in the reservation. Her mother, a born again Christian, expects certain things of her but Omishto is drawn to the ways of her ancestors and to her Aunt Ama who follows the spirit world. One day while visiting Ama a hurricane unexpectedly hits the area and Ama and Omishto are caught in the storm. Both are supremely shaken and Ama goes into a sort of trance and begins a hunt which Omishto follows for miles into the swamp. They kill an endangered panther and thus the world around Omishto begins unraveling.
This could have been a brilliant book, this book could’ve shook my world but it was so incredibly dense, slow-paced, packed with repetitive sentiment and unnecessarily prolonged scenes that it bogged down the entire story. The ‘hunt’ that takes place in a couple of hours takes 25 pages to tell and I know that Logan (she herself is Chickasaw) wanted to instill in the reader a sense of appreciation of the land, the history and the people but it made me skim the text because it was an endless journey.
This book is highly, highly literary – it is in love with itself and with its language and it is evident. I longed for the story, I wanted the story but there was so much extra that the story was muddled within the extraness. The last 30% of the book was far better – it was evocative and moving and it came together wonderfully so I more than liked it but I have a hard time seeing myself rereading this piece and knowing I have to waddle through that first half.
If you enjoy dense literary pieces I highly recommend this but go in knowing what you will get and that it is for you.
November 24, 2024
one of, if not, the most beautifully written books i have ever read.
December 25, 2025
fell asleep reading ts multiple times
May 18, 2022
> Even if I can’t see what’s in the shadows this time, I know what I feel and there are things I know and feel and see that other people don’t. Ny mother was gutting a chicken she pointed at me with the knife and said, “This girl’s going to give us trouble. Look at her eyes.” She put down the chicken and was quiet a long time, watching me. “They’re barely open, she’s only a baby and she’s watching everything.” And then Mama turned her back to me so I wouldn’t witness her work, so I wouldn’t see her cut the chicken apart.
Omishto. One Who Watches.
>
> I stand up behind her before she even has a chance to answer, take the brush, and run long strokes through her dark hair the way my sister and I do with each other’s hair, the way I used to do with my grandpa who’d never once had her hair cut. It’s the way of girls and women.
>
> It’s as if everything breathes, hard and desperate, the land, the house, the water.
The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature.
>
> Her hair looks like it is part of the dying house, a black vine creeping along the wall, and she is only carved wood. I think I can see her rib cage through the cloth, her belly and breasts.
Ama is being covered by blown-in vines and wet, dark leaves, as if the world is trying to bury her, and her eyes are closes.
>
> “I see how the snakes were flung against her house by the rough, angry hands of wind. There are three, one still alive, a brown piece of slow-moving flesh. t, too, is covered with mud. It moves as if it just returned to life, delivered out of death. Ama has a bruise forming on her arm where she was hit, perhaps by the snake. The preacher would say this is a bad sign, snakes at a woman’s feet, but Ama doesn’t believe in the preacher. She believes in old Janie Soto and Annie Hide and the old women would say the snakes are a sign of God, they always were, it was always this way and still is. They *are* god, Janie Soto contends. And Janie ought to know because she’s been face to face with this other God all her life. For whatever reason I start to think of this old woman, I wonder how the old people who live in their little settlement at Kili Swamp have weathered this storm. And my mother, I wonder if her house has survived it, if she is okay or worrying about me, or if her faith relieves her of even these concerns. “
>
> Stunned animals walk about, unafraid of us. Two herons, unable to fly, walk slowly. We are usually only something visited in their dreams and they must believe this silence is not the waking world, the wakened time, as they look at us without seeing.
>
> Believing and knowing are two lands distant from each other.
>
> ” I think again of breath, and how we Taiga people have that word -Oni- for breath and air and wind. It is a force. Oni is like God, it is everywhere, unseen. I think I heard this word spoken in the rush of weather. I’m sure of it. The wind said it’s own name, “Oni”.
>
> Mama used to say I looked like something the wind blew in.
>
> She has given in to nature, or to something inside herself. She’s unwilling to fend it off. But then, it has always been Ama’s skill ti live with the world and not against it.
>
> [Grief]
I look over at Ama. She’s quiet, as if she’s preparing herself for something, calling her soul to her as sure as if she’s saying out loud, “Will all the parts of Ama Eaton come here, come home.”
>
> I look back at the tracks we’ve left in the wet ground, as if we’ve grown from them, as if they created us and we grew upward, rose up as if from the footprints of our ancestors, to become the flesh of a woman and a girl. Ama walks as if it’s easy, her steps are nearly silent. Behind her I keep as eye on her back. It is straight.
I have already forgotten such things as music exist. Ama doesn’t hear it, though, she only hears the deer walk. “Listen to its hooves,” she says, and I wonder how, always, she puts this world away as if it never happened and how she hears the little feet of the deer.
>
> It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world.
>
> I feel watched. By nature. I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do.
>
> Everything about her says she doesn’t want to do this thing, but that there is no choice, as if it’s destiny, as if it’s fate, as if all the stories are true.
>
> tears run down Ama’s face even though she doesn’t look like she is crying when you look at her. It is just wetness falling down her skin.
>
> “This way is God,” she says, and I wonder if she means the way we travel or the kind of murder she is about to commit.
God was what we call what we don’t know, Ama Eaton is following this kind of unknown thing, moving toward it.
>
> When she rises up and walks out from the skin of the water, her hair is wet and long down her back and the moon is reflected on her wet outline and I notice for the first time how womanly she is, that she has a strong and curved body.
>
> Everything she does is all under the surface and secret, unlike the land which yields itself and is open in the bright moonlight.
>
> It has the softness too, of something that wanted to live and couldn’t. It is beautiful, its skin loose on it, the muscular hunger of it’s body that does not seem to breath.
>
> “What do you know and what do you just believe?” I thought about that for the longest time. I know nothing, I only believe in things. And what I believe in now is the force of the storm, the mighty force of it, and the cat lying dead or half dead in the bushes and trees and that what we are doing is wrong but I know that we are compelled to it.
>
> [Ama’s Reasoning] Ama cries just to look at it. I know why she cries. Because once they were beautiful and large and powerful. Now it is just like her, like the woman who wears boy’s old shoes because she’s poor and they are cheaper, and it is also like me trying so hard to stay out of Herman’s way, trying to think what kind of like I’ll ever have, and it is like the cut-up land, too, and I see that this is what has become of us, of all three of us here. We are diminished and endangered.
>
> We humans are nothing more than a vision the gods had. We are only one song, one of the births of this singular world, one of the deaths, too, all of it blown together by the winds of a storm. I don’t know why I remember this now, but I do and I also think there is nothing whole about this, not any of this.
>
> Sisa, that’s what we call the cat in Taiga. It is our name for them. It means godlike, all-powerful. The cat is the animal that came here before us and it taught us the word, Oni, which is the word for life itself, for the wind and breath, and I think all this as Ama carries it like it weighs nothing, no breath in it. But now the breath is in us.I am quit. I don’t help her. I don’t touch the cat, not once. I am afraid to. It’s not that I think it will spring back to life. It’s that, even dead, it has power over us, some kind of sway. There will be punishment and retribution, I know, words they use at my mother’s church. I don’t like these words, but I can’t think of any other. And I know, too, that Ama believes, without a doubt in her heart, that this is redemption. I can see it in her face, so calm, so quiet.
>
> She doesn’t fuss. I watch her closely. I can’t read a thing on her face, not a look of surprise, not a look of remorse or guilt either. She is at peace
>
> Once Ama painted the metal roof of her house red, the color of oxblood, but most of it is peeled off by now. It reminds me of her in that way, no paint of fixing up, worn down to within an inch or a minute of falling.
The house is sinking back into the earth and Ama would let it. It is the natural thing
>
> My mother used to say, You trying to dig a hole to China>” And I guess I was. Every place that I could find a crack of pure earth I’d dig. It was in my mind to escape this world. I’d pretended I was tunneling out of prison or that I’d break into one of the rivers underground and float it away from here. I thought a way would break open, and I’d find an entrance to another world and I would enter it free and alone.
>
> Sometimes I see things as they were before this world, in the time of first people. Not just before the building of houses, the filling in of land, the drying up of water, but long ago, before we had canoes and torches and moved through the wet night like earthbound stars, slow and enchanted in out human orbit, knowing our route because, as Ama said, it has always been our route. I see this place from in the beginning when it was an ocean of a world. Even sky was a kind of water. Land not yet created. And then a breeze of air, an alive wind, swept through, searching for something to breath its life into and all it could do was move the water in waves and tides, and water didn’t stand up, although it spoke
It was before there were ants that survived the floods by gluing sticks together to make rafts that will float. At first, there was not even a stone. It must have been that a dreaming god, a begetter of some kind, dreamed up something solid and rooted. Then, that first island floated up like a limestone from the ocean floor, the way it is now, in this time, and it began to breathe. Soon, green ferns pushed up their first coils from the ground and opened. The frogs emerged from the mud and the island in the sea was breathing. The wind breathed through all of this. **And all this was before anyone thought of heaven**. The time might has been the age of the first trees, tall cypress or the mangrove trees that from land now.
>
> It has all fallen, this poisoned, cut world. It has fallen in a way that means this place is taken down a notch. Unloved and disgraced and torn apart. Fallen, that’s what this world is. And betrayed.
>
> I can’t tell her— she would never understand— that it was an old story we must have followed, that we were under something that felt like a spell, that what I followed wasn’t Ama, and that Ama followed something that wasn’t her either. It wasn’t that Ama was claiming something, but that something was claiming her.
>
> I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me.
>
> I can still smell the cat, the sharp odor, the damp fur, the smell of cut flesh and blood, all still with me like it’s become my skin, and I am steeped in it. All around me are the houses, with people watching television and eating their snacks, and I am in the trees.
>
> bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time.
>
> Two worlds exist. Maybe it’s always been this way, but I enter them both like I am two people. Above and below. Land and water. Now and then.
>
> Forgiveness means that whatever the sin was, you will never do it again, and that others will stop judging you. It means you are pardons by them and you know the error of your ways. It’s a gift they offer you. But it’s a selfish gift because it makes them feel better than it makes you feel.
>
> I’m both a Taiga, a person from this downtrodden place, and I am the smart daughter, the one they think will show all the other’s how we can make it. I was the one who would prove that we are not the bottom of the world. They thought their kids would follow me. Now they hope they won’t.
>
> resurrection ferns that wait for a rain like dead things and then open up new and green and beautiful like they are doing right now out on the hurricane felled trees, like they didn’t know it was catastrophe that gave them life. Maybe, I think, I am like those ferns. Ama’s like the rain.
>
> I receive them, but inside my skin I feel myself draw back, even though these are generous women, kind women. But theirs is a spare God, short on love, thin on compassion, strong on judgement. Theirs is a fallen God, at least in my eyes, and it’s not for me I sit here, and it doesn’t feel good, this sacrifice. I feel it in my stomach— it doesn’t feel right
>
> It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm.
>
> I hate the smell of school, but I’ve been good at it, this world where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life.
>
> I sit down and make myself still inside, as if dreaming. I sit until the teacher comes over and places a book before me, already opened, but I am thinking how at school I have learned there’s no room in sky for my mother’s heaven; there’s no room at the center of the earth for hell, either. It is new worlds I will have to look for. I sit without looking at the book.
Nothing to state that I have entered this room. I’m silent. It’s as if I’m not here. All the time, inside my own mind, I talk to myself. I am not a cloud that has to fall, I tell myself. I am not a tree, broken by the wind. I am not a building fallen with the storm. I am not brick, collapsed. **I glance around, knowing I am not one of those people, either, not these people who are like vines grown over this land, smothering it.**
>
> I look at a leaf with acetone on it, the perfect natural structure of it, the fluids moving around the thin-veined webbing of green. Leaf, I think, what an easy thing to be. Humans are not like leaves. We are shambles of an animal.
>
> I’ve been good at this world, the one that hits you when you are born and makes you cry right from the start, so that crying is your first language. I’ve learned what I was supposed to learn, but now it comes to me that in doing so I’ve unlearned other things. I’ve lost my sense; I cannot sense things. Yes, we are a shambles. And maybe Ama found the way; she found it when all the paths were washed away by rivers from the sky, when all the buildings were blown down by the breath of a God. For just one day, that one day, she found a way out of that shambles, a way around it. And it’s this I want to find. But now she has no path back, no way to return even if she wanted to be here in this America. She lives in a point, a small point, between two weighted things and it is always rocking, this scale, back and forth.
>
> And I say to myself, I am not a child. I am not a white person. I am not the one who was wrong.
>
> And I am the child who followed, the quiet thing who has no mind. They can’t tell what I am inside. Neither can I.
>
> As she puts it, she is occupied from morning to night. That she occupies. House. Woods. Water. Land. And does it in a beautiful manner.
>
> The people, are watching Ama, studying her. She’s a curiosity. She is a human being of a different kind. She makes them doubt, I see that.
>
> A woman so unlike them as to exist in another world, another time. She is their animal.
>
> They are the children of those who were alive from the deaths of others and so I do not look at them even though they are right; they are taking up our beliefs and judging us, and to them I am a monster because for them everything has been so easy, but they do not see themselves or know their own history.
>
> There is something in between them. Their eyes speak and I can’t enter the current of their gaze. It’s an exchange the color of rich, middy water. I know a world grows there, in that water, the river flowing between them. Maybe it is a river of life or the deep water of our tribe and in it are our riches.
>
> Yet, always, we the survivors still had the sweet perfumed air, the winds from the gulf, the leaping of fish when they were fish. There was still a world of cats with eyes of light, deer with lovely antlers, bears that sounded like storms, wading birds with their twins on the skin of water. We saw the stars with their faces of brilliant fire. We knew the round, high world of eagles and all of it the food of creation before God and guns, orderliness and clocks.
>
> I see how she loves and fears her, but Ama takes directions not from people, but from the earth itself. She believes in earth.
>
> “Look at them”
”They are all waiting for Jesus to come and save them.”
>
> I take it all in because I do know this— I will not be the same person when I return. A door has closed, a door that will never open again, to a house and a life I will never fully enter or dwell in again. It’s more than childhood I am leaving.
I am at the beginning or the end of a great distance. What the distance is, I can’t say. But it is a distance that ends and begins with me.
>
> They still hold themselves in a beautiful manner; that’s what we used to call it, “a beautiful manner.” It’s the way of living that holds tight to memory, creation, and earth. You can see this goodness of life on their peaceful faces, on their skin.
>
> Through the ground, through the heavy pull of gravity, I feel the deep underground waters, all of it beneath the hot, bright sun and the fresh odor of this sun-warmed world, and I am sinking.
>
> His eyes look cracked and white around the edges as if he’s seen too much sun, or other things he should never have looked at.
>
> The place itself seems alive. Here, the land itself seems to have a sound, the soft brush of a breeze. And the sun— if sun could pile up like snow, it would pile against my body, against the trees, the old people.
>
> And I will speak in this full light of sun where nothing is hidden and they will listen, sitting still as rocks. My words will be important to them.
>
> It was history, not us, that failed, as if history is a person, one that takes hold of us and decides who will survive, who will die, who will be whole and who will not. But in reality I know that history is nothing more than the after shock of men’s fears and rages and the wars those two feelings create. It’s a tidal wave that swallows worlds whole and leaves nothing behind.
>
> Banishment is equal to death. It is death to be split from your own people, your self, to go away from the place you so love.
>
> Ama stands, her back to us. She stands still in a moment that stretches itself out and seems like forever. I am afraid to
Omishto. One Who Watches.
>
> I stand up behind her before she even has a chance to answer, take the brush, and run long strokes through her dark hair the way my sister and I do with each other’s hair, the way I used to do with my grandpa who’d never once had her hair cut. It’s the way of girls and women.
>
> It’s as if everything breathes, hard and desperate, the land, the house, the water.
The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature.
>
> Her hair looks like it is part of the dying house, a black vine creeping along the wall, and she is only carved wood. I think I can see her rib cage through the cloth, her belly and breasts.
Ama is being covered by blown-in vines and wet, dark leaves, as if the world is trying to bury her, and her eyes are closes.
>
> “I see how the snakes were flung against her house by the rough, angry hands of wind. There are three, one still alive, a brown piece of slow-moving flesh. t, too, is covered with mud. It moves as if it just returned to life, delivered out of death. Ama has a bruise forming on her arm where she was hit, perhaps by the snake. The preacher would say this is a bad sign, snakes at a woman’s feet, but Ama doesn’t believe in the preacher. She believes in old Janie Soto and Annie Hide and the old women would say the snakes are a sign of God, they always were, it was always this way and still is. They *are* god, Janie Soto contends. And Janie ought to know because she’s been face to face with this other God all her life. For whatever reason I start to think of this old woman, I wonder how the old people who live in their little settlement at Kili Swamp have weathered this storm. And my mother, I wonder if her house has survived it, if she is okay or worrying about me, or if her faith relieves her of even these concerns. “
>
> Stunned animals walk about, unafraid of us. Two herons, unable to fly, walk slowly. We are usually only something visited in their dreams and they must believe this silence is not the waking world, the wakened time, as they look at us without seeing.
>
> Believing and knowing are two lands distant from each other.
>
> ” I think again of breath, and how we Taiga people have that word -Oni- for breath and air and wind. It is a force. Oni is like God, it is everywhere, unseen. I think I heard this word spoken in the rush of weather. I’m sure of it. The wind said it’s own name, “Oni”.
>
> Mama used to say I looked like something the wind blew in.
>
> She has given in to nature, or to something inside herself. She’s unwilling to fend it off. But then, it has always been Ama’s skill ti live with the world and not against it.
>
> [Grief]
I look over at Ama. She’s quiet, as if she’s preparing herself for something, calling her soul to her as sure as if she’s saying out loud, “Will all the parts of Ama Eaton come here, come home.”
>
> I look back at the tracks we’ve left in the wet ground, as if we’ve grown from them, as if they created us and we grew upward, rose up as if from the footprints of our ancestors, to become the flesh of a woman and a girl. Ama walks as if it’s easy, her steps are nearly silent. Behind her I keep as eye on her back. It is straight.
I have already forgotten such things as music exist. Ama doesn’t hear it, though, she only hears the deer walk. “Listen to its hooves,” she says, and I wonder how, always, she puts this world away as if it never happened and how she hears the little feet of the deer.
>
> It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world.
>
> I feel watched. By nature. I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do.
>
> Everything about her says she doesn’t want to do this thing, but that there is no choice, as if it’s destiny, as if it’s fate, as if all the stories are true.
>
> tears run down Ama’s face even though she doesn’t look like she is crying when you look at her. It is just wetness falling down her skin.
>
> “This way is God,” she says, and I wonder if she means the way we travel or the kind of murder she is about to commit.
God was what we call what we don’t know, Ama Eaton is following this kind of unknown thing, moving toward it.
>
> When she rises up and walks out from the skin of the water, her hair is wet and long down her back and the moon is reflected on her wet outline and I notice for the first time how womanly she is, that she has a strong and curved body.
>
> Everything she does is all under the surface and secret, unlike the land which yields itself and is open in the bright moonlight.
>
> It has the softness too, of something that wanted to live and couldn’t. It is beautiful, its skin loose on it, the muscular hunger of it’s body that does not seem to breath.
>
> “What do you know and what do you just believe?” I thought about that for the longest time. I know nothing, I only believe in things. And what I believe in now is the force of the storm, the mighty force of it, and the cat lying dead or half dead in the bushes and trees and that what we are doing is wrong but I know that we are compelled to it.
>
> [Ama’s Reasoning] Ama cries just to look at it. I know why she cries. Because once they were beautiful and large and powerful. Now it is just like her, like the woman who wears boy’s old shoes because she’s poor and they are cheaper, and it is also like me trying so hard to stay out of Herman’s way, trying to think what kind of like I’ll ever have, and it is like the cut-up land, too, and I see that this is what has become of us, of all three of us here. We are diminished and endangered.
>
> We humans are nothing more than a vision the gods had. We are only one song, one of the births of this singular world, one of the deaths, too, all of it blown together by the winds of a storm. I don’t know why I remember this now, but I do and I also think there is nothing whole about this, not any of this.
>
> Sisa, that’s what we call the cat in Taiga. It is our name for them. It means godlike, all-powerful. The cat is the animal that came here before us and it taught us the word, Oni, which is the word for life itself, for the wind and breath, and I think all this as Ama carries it like it weighs nothing, no breath in it. But now the breath is in us.I am quit. I don’t help her. I don’t touch the cat, not once. I am afraid to. It’s not that I think it will spring back to life. It’s that, even dead, it has power over us, some kind of sway. There will be punishment and retribution, I know, words they use at my mother’s church. I don’t like these words, but I can’t think of any other. And I know, too, that Ama believes, without a doubt in her heart, that this is redemption. I can see it in her face, so calm, so quiet.
>
> She doesn’t fuss. I watch her closely. I can’t read a thing on her face, not a look of surprise, not a look of remorse or guilt either. She is at peace
>
> Once Ama painted the metal roof of her house red, the color of oxblood, but most of it is peeled off by now. It reminds me of her in that way, no paint of fixing up, worn down to within an inch or a minute of falling.
The house is sinking back into the earth and Ama would let it. It is the natural thing
>
> My mother used to say, You trying to dig a hole to China>” And I guess I was. Every place that I could find a crack of pure earth I’d dig. It was in my mind to escape this world. I’d pretended I was tunneling out of prison or that I’d break into one of the rivers underground and float it away from here. I thought a way would break open, and I’d find an entrance to another world and I would enter it free and alone.
>
> Sometimes I see things as they were before this world, in the time of first people. Not just before the building of houses, the filling in of land, the drying up of water, but long ago, before we had canoes and torches and moved through the wet night like earthbound stars, slow and enchanted in out human orbit, knowing our route because, as Ama said, it has always been our route. I see this place from in the beginning when it was an ocean of a world. Even sky was a kind of water. Land not yet created. And then a breeze of air, an alive wind, swept through, searching for something to breath its life into and all it could do was move the water in waves and tides, and water didn’t stand up, although it spoke
It was before there were ants that survived the floods by gluing sticks together to make rafts that will float. At first, there was not even a stone. It must have been that a dreaming god, a begetter of some kind, dreamed up something solid and rooted. Then, that first island floated up like a limestone from the ocean floor, the way it is now, in this time, and it began to breathe. Soon, green ferns pushed up their first coils from the ground and opened. The frogs emerged from the mud and the island in the sea was breathing. The wind breathed through all of this. **And all this was before anyone thought of heaven**. The time might has been the age of the first trees, tall cypress or the mangrove trees that from land now.
>
> It has all fallen, this poisoned, cut world. It has fallen in a way that means this place is taken down a notch. Unloved and disgraced and torn apart. Fallen, that’s what this world is. And betrayed.
>
> I can’t tell her— she would never understand— that it was an old story we must have followed, that we were under something that felt like a spell, that what I followed wasn’t Ama, and that Ama followed something that wasn’t her either. It wasn’t that Ama was claiming something, but that something was claiming her.
>
> I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me.
>
> I can still smell the cat, the sharp odor, the damp fur, the smell of cut flesh and blood, all still with me like it’s become my skin, and I am steeped in it. All around me are the houses, with people watching television and eating their snacks, and I am in the trees.
>
> bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time.
>
> Two worlds exist. Maybe it’s always been this way, but I enter them both like I am two people. Above and below. Land and water. Now and then.
>
> Forgiveness means that whatever the sin was, you will never do it again, and that others will stop judging you. It means you are pardons by them and you know the error of your ways. It’s a gift they offer you. But it’s a selfish gift because it makes them feel better than it makes you feel.
>
> I’m both a Taiga, a person from this downtrodden place, and I am the smart daughter, the one they think will show all the other’s how we can make it. I was the one who would prove that we are not the bottom of the world. They thought their kids would follow me. Now they hope they won’t.
>
> resurrection ferns that wait for a rain like dead things and then open up new and green and beautiful like they are doing right now out on the hurricane felled trees, like they didn’t know it was catastrophe that gave them life. Maybe, I think, I am like those ferns. Ama’s like the rain.
>
> I receive them, but inside my skin I feel myself draw back, even though these are generous women, kind women. But theirs is a spare God, short on love, thin on compassion, strong on judgement. Theirs is a fallen God, at least in my eyes, and it’s not for me I sit here, and it doesn’t feel good, this sacrifice. I feel it in my stomach— it doesn’t feel right
>
> It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm.
>
> I hate the smell of school, but I’ve been good at it, this world where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life.
>
> I sit down and make myself still inside, as if dreaming. I sit until the teacher comes over and places a book before me, already opened, but I am thinking how at school I have learned there’s no room in sky for my mother’s heaven; there’s no room at the center of the earth for hell, either. It is new worlds I will have to look for. I sit without looking at the book.
Nothing to state that I have entered this room. I’m silent. It’s as if I’m not here. All the time, inside my own mind, I talk to myself. I am not a cloud that has to fall, I tell myself. I am not a tree, broken by the wind. I am not a building fallen with the storm. I am not brick, collapsed. **I glance around, knowing I am not one of those people, either, not these people who are like vines grown over this land, smothering it.**
>
> I look at a leaf with acetone on it, the perfect natural structure of it, the fluids moving around the thin-veined webbing of green. Leaf, I think, what an easy thing to be. Humans are not like leaves. We are shambles of an animal.
>
> I’ve been good at this world, the one that hits you when you are born and makes you cry right from the start, so that crying is your first language. I’ve learned what I was supposed to learn, but now it comes to me that in doing so I’ve unlearned other things. I’ve lost my sense; I cannot sense things. Yes, we are a shambles. And maybe Ama found the way; she found it when all the paths were washed away by rivers from the sky, when all the buildings were blown down by the breath of a God. For just one day, that one day, she found a way out of that shambles, a way around it. And it’s this I want to find. But now she has no path back, no way to return even if she wanted to be here in this America. She lives in a point, a small point, between two weighted things and it is always rocking, this scale, back and forth.
>
> And I say to myself, I am not a child. I am not a white person. I am not the one who was wrong.
>
> And I am the child who followed, the quiet thing who has no mind. They can’t tell what I am inside. Neither can I.
>
> As she puts it, she is occupied from morning to night. That she occupies. House. Woods. Water. Land. And does it in a beautiful manner.
>
> The people, are watching Ama, studying her. She’s a curiosity. She is a human being of a different kind. She makes them doubt, I see that.
>
> A woman so unlike them as to exist in another world, another time. She is their animal.
>
> They are the children of those who were alive from the deaths of others and so I do not look at them even though they are right; they are taking up our beliefs and judging us, and to them I am a monster because for them everything has been so easy, but they do not see themselves or know their own history.
>
> There is something in between them. Their eyes speak and I can’t enter the current of their gaze. It’s an exchange the color of rich, middy water. I know a world grows there, in that water, the river flowing between them. Maybe it is a river of life or the deep water of our tribe and in it are our riches.
>
> Yet, always, we the survivors still had the sweet perfumed air, the winds from the gulf, the leaping of fish when they were fish. There was still a world of cats with eyes of light, deer with lovely antlers, bears that sounded like storms, wading birds with their twins on the skin of water. We saw the stars with their faces of brilliant fire. We knew the round, high world of eagles and all of it the food of creation before God and guns, orderliness and clocks.
>
> I see how she loves and fears her, but Ama takes directions not from people, but from the earth itself. She believes in earth.
>
> “Look at them”
”They are all waiting for Jesus to come and save them.”
>
> I take it all in because I do know this— I will not be the same person when I return. A door has closed, a door that will never open again, to a house and a life I will never fully enter or dwell in again. It’s more than childhood I am leaving.
I am at the beginning or the end of a great distance. What the distance is, I can’t say. But it is a distance that ends and begins with me.
>
> They still hold themselves in a beautiful manner; that’s what we used to call it, “a beautiful manner.” It’s the way of living that holds tight to memory, creation, and earth. You can see this goodness of life on their peaceful faces, on their skin.
>
> Through the ground, through the heavy pull of gravity, I feel the deep underground waters, all of it beneath the hot, bright sun and the fresh odor of this sun-warmed world, and I am sinking.
>
> His eyes look cracked and white around the edges as if he’s seen too much sun, or other things he should never have looked at.
>
> The place itself seems alive. Here, the land itself seems to have a sound, the soft brush of a breeze. And the sun— if sun could pile up like snow, it would pile against my body, against the trees, the old people.
>
> And I will speak in this full light of sun where nothing is hidden and they will listen, sitting still as rocks. My words will be important to them.
>
> It was history, not us, that failed, as if history is a person, one that takes hold of us and decides who will survive, who will die, who will be whole and who will not. But in reality I know that history is nothing more than the after shock of men’s fears and rages and the wars those two feelings create. It’s a tidal wave that swallows worlds whole and leaves nothing behind.
>
> Banishment is equal to death. It is death to be split from your own people, your self, to go away from the place you so love.
>
> Ama stands, her back to us. She stands still in a moment that stretches itself out and seems like forever. I am afraid to
December 8, 2022
I was looking for a book written by a Native American author that wasn’t Sherman Alexie and I picked a great one. A very profound meditation on our role as humans on the planet and how two different values systems come into conflict in ironic ways. Lots to think about in this one, and a very reachable novel for students who are looking for a challenge.
November 16, 2011
Power is a beautiful novel that contains descriptive and soft prose. The novel shows a side of Native American culture that is not always heard of. Omishto, the main character, is a 16 year old native who seems immensely attached to her culture. Omishto is in constant battle with her mother and stepfather in defense of her Aunt Ama. Ama is a complex character being exiled from the tribe for breaking tribal and federal law. Unfortunately, the novel barely touches on the action, and is mostly descriptive of nature and relationships. The novel is an easy read, and does provide small insights into religion, native culture, and white thought, so I would recommend it to anyone with an interest.
May 24, 2010
This is an amazing novel about the conflict between Native and white worlds. Omishto, the last of the Taigo people, confronts the harsh truth that there are no absolutes when it comes to some questions of what is right and wrong and what has to be done. My favorite line from the book: "Would it have been a different world if someone had believed our lives were as important as theory and gold?"
March 12, 2018
Breathtakingly good. It takes a tremendous amount of clarity and insight to write a story of a mental reckoning and discovery of self. It's not a book for those desiring an action-heavy plotline, but it's a stunning exploration of seeing the world and the self clearly and with conscience.
January 26, 2009
Not as complex as Solar Storms, but still a great story. Twists you about.
January 28, 2016
I really loved this book. Maybe 4.5, only not a 5 because I think I can say I enjoyed Solar Storms better. She writes beautifully and with both books I have felt my brain stretching.
April 1, 2021
Great look at assimilation and identity
April 14, 2022
Not as good as Solar storms but beautifully written
April 19, 2022
Unlike in a book like Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, where the crux of the story ends with the climax of a hurricane, in Linda Hogan’s Power the work opens fairly early on with a hurricane instead. This is an interesting narrative choice, as often the most action-packed or climactic moment of a book is put near the end for the purposes of memorably ending things with a bang, so to speak
But in this work the most action-packed moments come with the hurricane and the killing of the panther, which is the inciting incident. Everything that follows is the fallout. I would argue the hurricane almost feels unnecessary in this sense. I feel like Ama and the narrator could have just as well found the panther without any hurricane involved. While the writing of the hurricane was interesting, it has little effect on the story and goes largely unmentioned for the rest of the book. Also, the way the hurricane actually sneaks up on these experienced rural people who are caught totally unprepared is so super unrealistic and shows how little research Hogan did about how hurricanes work. This alone is a really big negative for me.
The book luxuriates in the first few chapters about the relationship between the narrator and Ama, and in these chapters a conflict is set up between the traditional ways of the Taiga people and the more modernized ways of people like the narrator’s mother, who believes that the killing of animals and the destruction of nature is a small price to pay for progress.
The narrator contrasts herself from her mother saying “I think that it’s a way to kill the world” (p.27), but the narrator is still somewhat caught between these two people, occasionally respecting Ama for who she is, but at other times not, and often finding herself confused as to why Ama decides to kill the panther, perhaps rightly so, until later on in the book when she realizes that Ama’s killing and hiding of the panther was done not just as a mercy to the panther but as a mercy to the Taiga people who would despair to see how sickly it had become.
In these first few chapters, we hear snippets about the mom and her overbearing ways, the father and his lustful feeling towards the narrator, and a tiny bit about the narrator’s sister, but it is not until chapter 4, about a third of the way through the book, that we finally see these characters in scene.
Up until then everything we get to hear of Mama paints her to be horrible, but Mama in person does not feel like the mother that we are expecting. Yes, she is shrill and overbearing, but she clearly cares for her daughter.
Donna, the narrators sister, and Herm the narrators stepfather both feel very undeveloped as characters--particularly Donna, who only has a few lines of dialogue, and whose only discernible trait is that she’s pretty. It’s not that she’s even established as shallow, but that she never has any establishment as a character at all.
Hogan also makes the very interesting choice of only first mentioning the death of her brother Jerry, who died in a fire, in chapter 5, almost halfway through the book. As opposed to someone like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, who is obsessed with the death of his older brother and finds himself incapable of not constantly thinking about him, in this work the narrator seems, if not untroubled, then at least not willing to think about Jerry much at all, which the narrators admits as much of. Overall, the death of Jerry plays very little role in the work as a whole so it’s another thing that is a bit confusing as to the purpose of its presence in the story.
There is also a very interesting parallel between the presence of so few panthers left in Florida, as well as the presence of so few of the Taiga people. The narrator mentions that there are only probably around thirty panthers left, and later on mentions that there are only a total of 30 Taiga people left as well. As she says, comparing her people with the panthers: “There might be less of them then there are of us” (p.111).
Even then, most of the Taiga people who remain are old and therefore sickly, and much the same goes for the panthers. Indeed, the Taiga population is so small that inbreeding would be almost inevitable, just as it has been for the panthers.
It's also frustrating, as the narrator points out, that the direct act of killing a panther is so frowned upon, but there is no punishment for the endless indirect acts of endless real estate development and road building and so on and the effect that that has on the panther. The rich and powerful go blameless for these massive acts of destruction of nature, but this single act that will not have as big of an effect in the long term as so many other acts is the one that goes punished, not just by the courts of the Western world, but by tribal court as well. Most ironic of all is the fact that in the Western court Ama is found innocent whilst in the tribal court she is found guilty.
Overall though, while the points made in this book are good and valid and all that, the book itself isn't all that great.
2.5/5
But in this work the most action-packed moments come with the hurricane and the killing of the panther, which is the inciting incident. Everything that follows is the fallout. I would argue the hurricane almost feels unnecessary in this sense. I feel like Ama and the narrator could have just as well found the panther without any hurricane involved. While the writing of the hurricane was interesting, it has little effect on the story and goes largely unmentioned for the rest of the book. Also, the way the hurricane actually sneaks up on these experienced rural people who are caught totally unprepared is so super unrealistic and shows how little research Hogan did about how hurricanes work. This alone is a really big negative for me.
The book luxuriates in the first few chapters about the relationship between the narrator and Ama, and in these chapters a conflict is set up between the traditional ways of the Taiga people and the more modernized ways of people like the narrator’s mother, who believes that the killing of animals and the destruction of nature is a small price to pay for progress.
The narrator contrasts herself from her mother saying “I think that it’s a way to kill the world” (p.27), but the narrator is still somewhat caught between these two people, occasionally respecting Ama for who she is, but at other times not, and often finding herself confused as to why Ama decides to kill the panther, perhaps rightly so, until later on in the book when she realizes that Ama’s killing and hiding of the panther was done not just as a mercy to the panther but as a mercy to the Taiga people who would despair to see how sickly it had become.
In these first few chapters, we hear snippets about the mom and her overbearing ways, the father and his lustful feeling towards the narrator, and a tiny bit about the narrator’s sister, but it is not until chapter 4, about a third of the way through the book, that we finally see these characters in scene.
Up until then everything we get to hear of Mama paints her to be horrible, but Mama in person does not feel like the mother that we are expecting. Yes, she is shrill and overbearing, but she clearly cares for her daughter.
Donna, the narrators sister, and Herm the narrators stepfather both feel very undeveloped as characters--particularly Donna, who only has a few lines of dialogue, and whose only discernible trait is that she’s pretty. It’s not that she’s even established as shallow, but that she never has any establishment as a character at all.
Hogan also makes the very interesting choice of only first mentioning the death of her brother Jerry, who died in a fire, in chapter 5, almost halfway through the book. As opposed to someone like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, who is obsessed with the death of his older brother and finds himself incapable of not constantly thinking about him, in this work the narrator seems, if not untroubled, then at least not willing to think about Jerry much at all, which the narrators admits as much of. Overall, the death of Jerry plays very little role in the work as a whole so it’s another thing that is a bit confusing as to the purpose of its presence in the story.
There is also a very interesting parallel between the presence of so few panthers left in Florida, as well as the presence of so few of the Taiga people. The narrator mentions that there are only probably around thirty panthers left, and later on mentions that there are only a total of 30 Taiga people left as well. As she says, comparing her people with the panthers: “There might be less of them then there are of us” (p.111).
Even then, most of the Taiga people who remain are old and therefore sickly, and much the same goes for the panthers. Indeed, the Taiga population is so small that inbreeding would be almost inevitable, just as it has been for the panthers.
It's also frustrating, as the narrator points out, that the direct act of killing a panther is so frowned upon, but there is no punishment for the endless indirect acts of endless real estate development and road building and so on and the effect that that has on the panther. The rich and powerful go blameless for these massive acts of destruction of nature, but this single act that will not have as big of an effect in the long term as so many other acts is the one that goes punished, not just by the courts of the Western world, but by tribal court as well. Most ironic of all is the fact that in the Western court Ama is found innocent whilst in the tribal court she is found guilty.
Overall though, while the points made in this book are good and valid and all that, the book itself isn't all that great.
2.5/5
February 18, 2020
Sadly I just came across Power on my bookshelf. I read this book several years ago and forgot to write a review at that time. I’m writing now from memory, so I truly can’t do the Hogan’s work justice. I remember loving this book.
Linda Hogan, a Native American Chickasaw author, writes prose that reads like poetry. This book is a lyrical read.
Here’s what I remember and can pick up after a quick review:
The name of her main character, Omshito means One Who Watches. This young teenage girl has been blessed, or cursed, with the ability to feel the spirits of the animals and natural world around her. Omshito is a member of the fictional Tiaga tribe in Florida. A belief taught by this tribe is that speaking an animal's name out loud, actually calls out to the powers inside the animal.
Omshito’s tribe and their way of life are losing the battle to the spread of “civilization” and the ways of the white man. To complicate things even more, Omshito’s mother, Ama, is determined to renounce her Indian heritage and live as a "civilized'"white woman. Omshito is torn between the two worlds.
When a devastatingly destructive storm hits, the hurricane “tells” Ama she must kill a panther to save everyone from the storm. Omshito and her mother belong to the Panther clan. The only known panther is old, ailing, and of course endangered. The story, told with vivid descrtipion of the wetlands of Florida and the rage of the hurricane, revolves around the pull between two cultures and hunt for this panther and the ramifications thereof.
My review doesn't do this book justice. Please take a chance on this one and let it fill your senses
Linda Hogan, a Native American Chickasaw author, writes prose that reads like poetry. This book is a lyrical read.
Here’s what I remember and can pick up after a quick review:
The name of her main character, Omshito means One Who Watches. This young teenage girl has been blessed, or cursed, with the ability to feel the spirits of the animals and natural world around her. Omshito is a member of the fictional Tiaga tribe in Florida. A belief taught by this tribe is that speaking an animal's name out loud, actually calls out to the powers inside the animal.
Omshito’s tribe and their way of life are losing the battle to the spread of “civilization” and the ways of the white man. To complicate things even more, Omshito’s mother, Ama, is determined to renounce her Indian heritage and live as a "civilized'"white woman. Omshito is torn between the two worlds.
When a devastatingly destructive storm hits, the hurricane “tells” Ama she must kill a panther to save everyone from the storm. Omshito and her mother belong to the Panther clan. The only known panther is old, ailing, and of course endangered. The story, told with vivid descrtipion of the wetlands of Florida and the rage of the hurricane, revolves around the pull between two cultures and hunt for this panther and the ramifications thereof.
My review doesn't do this book justice. Please take a chance on this one and let it fill your senses
October 25, 2020
The prose alone in this novel is just stunning and so rich to read through. Ama is such an intricate and mysterious character and I really enjoy the way she is characterized without much aid from dialogue, as she is a fairly quiet character. This makes room for our narrator to come by her knowledge through other sensory perceptions when she is with Ama, creating space for alternate ways of knowing and learning. Despite Ama's silence I keep finding moments where Omishto is insisting on listening--sometimes it is listening to the land, or to animals, to Ama's body language, sometimes it is to the silence itself. There is another silence, the ones that she is sworn to by her mother's husband when he is inappropriate with her, and her sister Donna swears her to when they witness a neighbor's death. This creates a really interesting tension to track throughout the narration of the ways silence and truth are woven together in different ways. The relation to water is also something threaded throughout the novel, and the ways water can symbolize both huge, destructive power and maternal nourishment. The boundaries between indoor/outdoor, land/water are blurred at Ama's house, and it's interesting to see that kind of interconnectedness show itself in that way--how the house sits on swampy land (neither sturdy land nor water, kind of a liminal space) how the windows stay open, and the outside world kind of flows freely and the boundaries aren't so firm. A complex look at truth, at right and wrong, at power--and all the ways those things through identity, belief, and western structures of domination.
June 2, 2020
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)
All-time fav book quotes:
- "Everything about her says she doesn't want to do this thing, but that there's no choice, as if it's destiny, as if it's fate, as if all the stories are true." (Hogan 61)
- "Sometimes I see things as they were before this world, in the time of first people... moved through the wet night like earthbound stars, slow and enchanted in our human orbit." (Hogan 83)
- "Forgiveness means that whatever the sin was, you will never do it again, and that others will stop judging you. It means you are pardoned by them and you know the error of your ways. It's a gift they offer you. But it's a selfish gift because it makes them feel better than it makes you feel." (Hogan 99).
This book easily made its way onto my list of 5-star books and I honestly feel as though it deserves those 5 stars! The way that the characters are intertwined with each other is just amazing. It begins at a somewhat slow pace but once you're like 3 chapters in... it's hook line and sinker. Can I just say that there is so much description in this book and you totally feel as though you're in the everglades with Omishto. Linda Hogan is a masterful writer and beautiful storyteller. I loved every moment of this book and am glad to chalk it up as the first book I finished in June! such a beautiful book! (definitely recommend and DEFINITELY going to re-read at some point) :)
All-time fav book quotes:
- "Everything about her says she doesn't want to do this thing, but that there's no choice, as if it's destiny, as if it's fate, as if all the stories are true." (Hogan 61)
- "Sometimes I see things as they were before this world, in the time of first people... moved through the wet night like earthbound stars, slow and enchanted in our human orbit." (Hogan 83)
- "Forgiveness means that whatever the sin was, you will never do it again, and that others will stop judging you. It means you are pardoned by them and you know the error of your ways. It's a gift they offer you. But it's a selfish gift because it makes them feel better than it makes you feel." (Hogan 99).
This book easily made its way onto my list of 5-star books and I honestly feel as though it deserves those 5 stars! The way that the characters are intertwined with each other is just amazing. It begins at a somewhat slow pace but once you're like 3 chapters in... it's hook line and sinker. Can I just say that there is so much description in this book and you totally feel as though you're in the everglades with Omishto. Linda Hogan is a masterful writer and beautiful storyteller. I loved every moment of this book and am glad to chalk it up as the first book I finished in June! such a beautiful book! (definitely recommend and DEFINITELY going to re-read at some point) :)
October 2, 2017
It's hard to review books I've read for school because I read them differently than novels I pick up just for fun. Power isn't a book I would pick up on my own, but I really enjoyed the discussions and insight I gleaned from my classes.
Also, this isn't an easy book to read. It's told in first person, and the narrator contradicts herself constantly. The plot moves slowly--things happen, but they take their time, and the narrator has many thoughts about them. The prose is poetic at times, but that too contributes to the hazy, sometimes confusing atmosphere of the book. It's magical realism in a subtle, unexpected way.
I like that you could read this book from different angles: as an environmental novel, as an indigenous novel, as a coming-of-age story for a teenage girl. The way that I, as a reader, was able to get into the head and thoughts of the main character was fascinating, a product of the non-linear, stream-of-consciousness style of writing that Hogan does so well here. I couldn't always relate to Omishto or her decisions but that was the point.
Also, this isn't an easy book to read. It's told in first person, and the narrator contradicts herself constantly. The plot moves slowly--things happen, but they take their time, and the narrator has many thoughts about them. The prose is poetic at times, but that too contributes to the hazy, sometimes confusing atmosphere of the book. It's magical realism in a subtle, unexpected way.
I like that you could read this book from different angles: as an environmental novel, as an indigenous novel, as a coming-of-age story for a teenage girl. The way that I, as a reader, was able to get into the head and thoughts of the main character was fascinating, a product of the non-linear, stream-of-consciousness style of writing that Hogan does so well here. I couldn't always relate to Omishto or her decisions but that was the point.
June 29, 2021
Whenever I had trouble following this author's train of thought, (more often than I wish to admit), I found it helpful simply to surrender to this novel's ethereal and hypnotic prose. I also resolved to suspend disbelief toward the baffling precociousness of Omishto, the 16-year-old protagonist straddling two worlds - between a rabidly dysfunctional westernized family and her Native roots upheld by tribal elders and her adult friend, Ama. Omishto finds herself juggling two sides of a profoundly controversial court case pitting environmental justice against tribal self-determination and religious beliefs. Ultimately, she comes to no resolution and instead accepts that she will live with the tension of clashing values, ("What she did was wrong. I know that. But I understand it"). I appreciate that juxtaposed to this seeming moral ambivalence are her fierce convictions, especially as she chooses to walk the way of her elders, fired by her old-soul intelligence. This novel left more questions than answers, but maybe therein lies its magic.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 2, 2024
3.5 maybe 4 stars. I’ll have to think about it some more and then decide. It’s very literary, and the writing style is circular and lyrical, so it might not be a style for everyone.
But the most random thing……as I was reading, especially during the trials, I kept thinking about the Tower of Babel and the Lord confusing the languages of the people. But reading this I got to wondering exactly what does it mean to confuse languages? And maybe it doesn’t just mean words. Because in this book there are times where people are technically speaking the same language, but it doesn’t have the same meaning for both people, so in effect they still don’t understand each other, or rather they don’t comprehend one another. And it just got me thinking down a rabbit hole. This book has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel, that’s just where my mind went. And how do we really reach through a completely different paradigm to understand one another? Can we?
Anyways, lots to think about.
But the most random thing……as I was reading, especially during the trials, I kept thinking about the Tower of Babel and the Lord confusing the languages of the people. But reading this I got to wondering exactly what does it mean to confuse languages? And maybe it doesn’t just mean words. Because in this book there are times where people are technically speaking the same language, but it doesn’t have the same meaning for both people, so in effect they still don’t understand each other, or rather they don’t comprehend one another. And it just got me thinking down a rabbit hole. This book has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel, that’s just where my mind went. And how do we really reach through a completely different paradigm to understand one another? Can we?
Anyways, lots to think about.
November 12, 2018
The modern and traditional Indian worlds collide in this novel about a 16-year-old girl growing up in a fictional Florida tribe on the verge of extinction, the Taiga. Omishto is torn between loyalty to her westernized mother and her tribe as she tries to find her own spiritual connection to her people, nature and the world. The tribe’s relationship with the panther is central to the story. Omishto witnesses the killing of a panther, leading to a trial and further distancing Omishto from her family. The story appears to have been influenced by the real-life killing of a panther, for which Seminole leader James Billie was tried and found not guilty in 1987. ( https://tinyurl.com/Panther-verdict ) Lots of symbolism and poetic descriptions of nature.
Linda Hogan is of mixed Chikasaw and white ancestry.
Linda Hogan is of mixed Chikasaw and white ancestry.
August 11, 2020
I admit, it took me a long time to finish this book and there was much of it I didn’t understand but I found it to be a powerful read. Why? Because Hogan’s main character, sixteen-year-old Omishto (a member of the Taiga Tribe), is the perfect character to represent the contrast between the old ways vs. the new ways. The old ways are portrayed by the Indigeneous Taiga tribe that lives within, close to, surrounded by, and spiritually connected to nature. The ‘new ways’ are what many of us from white European cultures have grown up to consider the ‘norm’: capitalistic, patriarchal, Christian people who dishonor and destroy nature, other cultures, and, ultimately, themselves. I enjoyed Hogan’s descriptions of the natural world and ways of living within that world.
July 1, 2024
The book straddles the line between realistic fiction and myth, as she tells the story of Omishto, a 16-year old Native Floridian girl. She is part of a small band called the Taiga (I am not sure if they are an actual band). She is visiting an aunt, Ama, in her home in the swamp. A hurricane arises and later, after the hurricane is done, Ama feels the need to kill a panther, which she does. Ama is tried in civil court and later by the Native elders and both times, Omishto is asked to testify. Ama goes off into exile. In the end, Omishto makes a decision on whether to stay in the realistic Florida setting or join the elders in the mythical Native one.
July 13, 2018
This book wasn't the easiest to get through, as the writing was very poetic and dreamlike. I loved it for the same reasons. The young woman, Omishto, is in the middle of two worlds; one, the American life of school, life with a mother who is compelled to fit in by practicing evangelical Christianity and an abusive step father. The world that is more true to her is the traditional life of her native Taiga tribe, which has dwindled along with their totem panther. I liked learning the perspective of this native culture through the eyes of such a strong and intuitive girl.
October 18, 2018
This book was written beautifully. Every sentence was like poetry which is what I loved about this book. A drawback to that though is there was a lot of dragging situations out.Iit felt like I was running backwards in a dream the whole time, thats how slowly paced this book was. Other than the pacing, I realy enjoyed this book. It was maybe my first Native American read? I'm not sure. I might have read Native American books as a kid, but not so much recently. This was for my Multicultural Literature of the U.S. class! This class is introducing me to so many new perspectives, I love it.
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