The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir by Linda Hogan

The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir Reviews

• 
  Debbie Zapata

  March 29, 1020am ~~ Review asap. Stunning, sad, profound book. Many things to think about.
  
  March 31, 1030am ~~ As usual when a book touches me deeply, I take a few days to think before trying to write a review. Sometimes that space of time helps me organize my thoughts from WOW to something more definite and explainable.
  
  But sometimes this procedure does not work and I am left with my brain filled with that WOW floating around among all the other thoughts that a book stirs up.
  
  This is one of those times.
  
  I can only say that while this is a painful book to read in many ways, it is also one of great wisdom and beauty. The author's courage in telling her story is heart-stopping. I doubt if I would have even survived a life such as hers. But she found the courage to follow her path, to not surrender.
  
  And this woman knows. About life, about people, about Earth, about the connections that 'civilized' people have allowed to be broken. She knows, she cares, and she is able to express her beliefs in a way that touches a reader's heart and soul.
  
  And that is all I can say except for WOW.
  
  
• 
  Ron

  The West has been vanishing almost since it was first inhabited by Europeans, and as a Native American writer, Hogan is devoted to the recovery of what has been nearly lost -- in particular, the culture and history of Native American tribes. This collection of personal essays, part memoir, argues that history lives, often unacknowledged, in our bodies. The catastrophe of shattered Indian cultures lives on, generations later, in the shattered lives of so many descendants of those tribes.
  
  Hogan is of Chickasaw descent, her ancestors inhabitants of what is now Tennessee and Mississippi, forcibly relocated over 100 years ago to the "Indian Territory" of Oklahoma, a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears. Her father an Army sergeant, she spent her first years in Germany, and in later years lived in Colorado. It was a difficult childhood, including a teenage "marriage" to an older man, a silent mother terrified of other people, her father often absent. She writes of her own alcoholism and adoption of two Lakota sisters, both deeply scarred emotionally by a history of severe child abuse.
  
  Hogan's book is an account of her emergence from the "dark underworld" of her early life and the discovery of her own humanity and capacity for love. There is the love for her troubled daughters and the love she learns to feel for her parents, in particular her father, who grew up as a cowboy and whose world forever made cowboys and horses appealing to her.
  
  There is much about pain in Hogan's story -- physical, emotional, spiritual. There is the pain of cultural genocide, and its aftermath in the scourge of alcoholism, poverty, domestic violence, and child abuse. There is the pain of her own troubled life and that of her daughters. There is also the pain of a debilitating physical condition, fibromyalgia. Finally, there is a near fatal accident when she falls from a runaway horse, causing a head injury and fractured pelvis and requiring many months of recovery.
  
  Besides her own story, there are illuminating ruminations in this book on memory, dreams, lost souls, horses, the body, landscapes, identity, and myth. You put the book down after the last page with a sense that you have been on a long, deeply experienced personal journey. Hogan makes reference to Andre Dubus, another writer whose life was abruptly changed by an accident. As a companion to this book, I'd recommend his collection of essays, "Broken Vessels."
• 
  Peggy

  This book is written so beautifully that it spoiled me for another memoir I've been reading behind the scenes. I agree with the blurb by Teresa Jordan that the book "reaches back through human experience until it arrives at the very core of being." Hogan excavates the material of her biography in layers, passes through history, DNA, nature, science, and spirit until the reader finally understands that any event Hogan relays has been molded by an enormous chronology of native survival. The depth of the author's perspective repays the reader in compassion learned. I love this book for the narrative it presents and for the wisdom of its melodic voice.
• 
  Carol Douglas

  This is a beautifully written books, as are all of Linda Hogan's works. Hogan is the Chickasaw Nation's writer in residence. Her many books tell of the beauty and extreme difficulty of Native Americans' lives.
  The Woman Who Watches over the World is her autobiography. The title is based on a statue she bought that broke but is still beautiful, and it ushers in the story of people who are broken but still full of love.
  Hogan was literally broken by a fall from a horse. But despite a life of pain, she struggles on. She tells of growing up with a mother who was silent because of her own pain, and of Linda's own struggles in her youth with alcohol. That surprised me. She has done so much to lift the human spirit that I never would have guessed that she had once been its captive.
  She tells of adopting Native daughters who had suffered, and believing that she could mend their injuries. She found that one's pain was too great to be healed, but the other flourished after much help.
  It is good of Hogan to show that a fine novelist and poet has been through great suffering but continues to watch over the world and love all of its creatures. Her nature writing is always superb.
  
  
• 
  Liz

  This is the first Linda Hogan work which I've read in whole--I've read excerpts from Dwellings and The Book of Medicine. The times I've read her it's been assigned reading, and I have to say I'm not really sure how well known she is outside academia. I read this for my women's and gender studies class, where we learned a lot about systems of oppression, including race, and how these perpetuate other systems of oppression. I almost wonder if it would have been better to start with this out of all her works, as it's Hogan's memoir and explains who she is. However, this isn't just Hogan's memoir, but a memoir of her people.
  
  If I had to summarize this book in one sentence, I would say it's about Hogan's experiences growing up and living as an American Indian in America. Hogan places a lot of emphasis on family and tradition and how traditions are passed down. She covers a lot of serious and explicit subject matter in this work. It is true that in some ways, non-American Indian readers might relate to certain areas of this book, such as the difficulty of passing down tradition through generations.
  
  However, as a white reader, one really isn't supposed to be able to connect with this book. To me, this whole book is about the problems that resulted because white people wanted to kick American Indians off American soil. It's about the oppression of a race. It's not only a great lesson in American history, but a reminder that American Indians still don't have great lives.
  
  Hogan writes a considerable amount about spirituality and uses intimate diction in her work. She writes about spiritual connections with land and place which no white man can have--I know I've felt connected with nature before, but not quite to the extreme that Hogan does, if that's even the word I'm looking for. This may sounds like an alienating thing, but to me it wasn't. American Indians and Americans have had very different relationships with the land, such as using every part of the buffalo versus building railroads for ourselves on the land. I found the spiritual aspects of this work to be eye-opening, and I think it's important for Americans to become more educated about American Indian culture, because understanding their relationship to the land versus ours helps us understand how we repress them and what we can do to make it right.
  
  On the back of this book, there is a quote from Hogan saying, "I sat down to write a book about pain and ended up writing about love." At many points in the work Hogan talks about how much more she and those around her thrived in a loving atmosphere. At the end of her book, she doesn't give her reader an exact call to action, but I thought her call to action was to love. Learn more about other cultures that exist in the same country as your own. Learn to love them, and gain a better understanding of they want and need to live happier lives. I think we should not only take action on our own to get this education, but works like Hogan's help with this process, and maybe eventually there will be more love between races, instead of oppression.
• 
  P C

  This book unsettled me to the core and was super difficult to read, tbh. The author - a chickasaw woman in diaspora - weaves together all parts of her story of living through and beyond chronic pain, abuse, and traumatic injury (and history). She locates all of these experiences in her body and its relation to the world, acknowledging that there's limits on its knowability and translatability. Her points about phantom pain and the colonial urge to know what can't or doesn't want to be known are going to stay with me.
  
  CW: pedophilia, sexual abuse
  
  Editing to add:
  There were definitely uncomfortable parts where she describes (nonconsensual) interventions that her adopted lakota children - CSA survivors - were put through to make them interact "normally". From the story, it's clear that state systems (of foster care, mental healthcare etc) were inadequate for facilitating any kind of healing for her kids. The author speaks positively of the treatment (which "worked"), but I think about what few, if any, alternatives she might've had, and the impossible choices that native peoples continue to be faced with.
• 
  Alexia

  I will say that this book was gut-wrenching, soul-cutting, and soothe-saying all in one bundle. Hogan’s words held me through the crumbling of my own world, and I will forever be grateful for that. Beautifully written and well crafted piece of work if I ever read one.
• 
  Laura Norton-Cruz

  I loved loved loved this book in parts. I was absorbed in it. I felt like a friend was telling me stories because there is something intimate, loving, and wise about Linda Hogan. At other parts of the book, I was lost or bored or put off by her poetic, philosophical musings.
  
  Some of the historical, scientific, or cultural literature from which she draws in her musings is very interesting and powerful for narrating certain truths about Native American history or the importance of the bones of our ancestors. And some of her poetic interpretations of these ideas are incredibly poignant--I had to underline them and write them down in my journal. But other parts seem like an attempt to connect too many disparate things and a lack of an editor.
  
  Her narratives about her own life, however, are incredibly compelling, as well as her reflections on her life: why her mom may have been so full of fear and incapable of love, or why, as a 12-year-old, she was drawn into a romantic relationship with a soldier. Everything about these sections was powerful, except or those places where an editor should have intervened to prevent redundancy.
  
  Some of Hogan's words that I love:
  
  "And always, when confronted with smallness, all I wanted to have count was my own capacity to love."
  
  "There are events or times remaining from childhood that stay within a person for no known reason, as if they wait within a person for a kind of clarity or meaning."
  
  <3 <3
  
  "As a young person coming from silences of both family and history, I had little of the language I needed to put a human life together. I was inarticulate to voice it, therefore to know it, even from within...Language is an intimacy not only with others, but even with the self. It creates a person."
  
  So, if you can slog through certain parts, the book is a beautiful narrative of hurt and healing, and very worth reading.
• 
  Natalie

  Linda Hogan's writing is insightful and lovely as always, but I wanted her to dig in a little deeper in each essay than she did--or else to weave back and forth between them and give us a little more of a sense of her life as a whole. I was really intrigued by her statement in the introduction that she wrote the book as an answer to all the young people who asked her how she survived her life, but having finished the book, I don't feel like I quite know the answer. I really enjoyed her essay collection _Dwellings_, so I'm trying to put my finger on what didn't quite work for me about this collection. I think maybe that these essays were not as thematically linked as the ones in _Dwellings_ were, and I missed having a thematic throughline?
• 
  Sonja

  This book was so hard for me to read. I had to put it down several times because of the abuse she suffered, along with what other relatives suffered. It was just too sad. I have to give the author credit, tho, for having such a forgiving spirit and coming out of her experiences, both mental and physical, with a kind and loving heart. She was so in touch with her Native American background, its history, spirituality, connection with earth and sky, that she came out whole. She is a very strong woman in her own right. If we all could be so grounded to come out of adversity this well, the world would be a much better place.
• 
  Hiram Diaz III

  I can't say very many positive things about this book. The tone is self-pitying and self-righteous. The narrative is, it would seem, inadvertently discontinuous, aimless, and inadvertently aporetic - on the one hand, the book is supposed to be a memoir, but on the other hand, the author eventually tells her reader that she "no longer know[s] what truth there is in memory" (p.170).
  
  Hogan's heavy-handed sentimentalism, in my opinion, trivializes the very real problems she wants us to remember, ponder, and address in the public sphere.
• 
  Kelly

  Reading this was like having a religious experience. I spent two days reading this in order to answer one exam question for a Women's Studies course and I am deeply moved by the stories Hogan told. For the longest time I have been in a bad place but Hogan helped me shed some light on the bad, showed me how I can change for the better "knowing that the horrible and beautiful are together in the world," and passing "the threshold into something finer." There's something tragically beautiful about her story and the truths that are revealed. Something life-changing.
• 
  Wendy

  Hogan has some beautiful turns of phrase in this book, and some excellent descriptions. Beyond that, it's hard to find anything good to say. There was no story. There were probably a dozen stories interwoven, except they didn't go anywhere and coalesce into a larger point. I'm not even sure what this book was supposed to be about, except as a vehicle for Hogan to whine about how painful her life is and has been.
• 
  Randine

  This book had an enormous impact on me. So much so that I looked Linda Hogan up and watched a 3 hour interview with her on In-Depth Books and then I requested her friendship on FB. Her story is exceptional. The first half of the book is almost too sad to read but her writing is poetic and it's impossible to not feel her love and acceptance of life generated from a Native American point of view. She has a stunning soul.
• 
  Catherine

  This is a poet I want to keep close tabs on. Her beautiful and rending thoughts of pain illuminated many things for me and as a result, healing came. She's lived a rough life but she's hung on and has eyes for great beauty amidst suffering.
• 
  Razif

  Soo, yeah, I borrowed this book from my campus' library, thinking maybe this book was good--and light read, because of its small size, and I could bring this book everywhere.
  
  Turns out, it was one of the heaviest book I've ever read. It brought so many emotions--mostly kinda sad. It was so painful to continue reading without having these mental images built up in my mind. I had to stop for several reasons. It felt so vivid.
  
  As a guy who barely knows anything about Native American history, I had to look up the meaning of some words as well, sometimes it ruined the mood and vibe, but at least I learned something.
  
  But on the other hand, I almost could feel the buried hatred within the author towards white people... I don't know much about this matter, so I won't comment anything further.
• 
  Kristine

  I didn't appreciate that she called my Jesus "that desert man." It honestly threw me off. However, I continued to read it to understand what she wanted to tell. Her story was very painful to read but gave me insight on Native American history. A lot of readers actually liked the book but I beg to differ. I would consider this novel poorly written and biased.
• 
  Emily Ho

  Solipsistic and unfocused. I appreciate that it’s a memoir, which invites solipsism, but it was a hard book to finish because it got so incredibly navel-gazey. Some interesting ideas, facts I didn’t know before, and a desperately sad story of pain and abuse, but overall would not recommend. Not my fav read of hers.
• 
  Thais Mather

  Deeply raw and honest this book delivers the best of the personal/political duality of being a woman of indigenous decent. If the work of writing is to make one understand; this text is a beacon. New favorite writer
• 
  Cassie Fleurs

  I loved this
  Picked it by curiosity and stumbled upon a beautiful jewel that will make you rethink life
  The books left me stranded in thoughts and showcased a marvelous hability of metaphors, an enchanting way to look at life
  Her love for all creation shows in each page
• 
  Lissa

  I was both stunned by honest narration and emboldened by brilliant insight. A humble yet courageous empowerment of the soul.
• 
  Jacqueline Bussie

  A powerful memoir written by an indigenous woman. Haunting and healing.
• 
  Katie

  This book is a lot. A confluence of emotions and cultures and wonderous healing in the face of a lifetime’s worth of wounds.