The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir [Paperback]

Linda Hogan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2002

"A deeply courageous account of Hogan's personal and tribal history...staggering."—Pam Houston, O Magazine

"I sat down to write a book about pain and ended up writing about love," says award-winning Chickasaw poet and novelist Linda Hogan. In this book, she recounts her difficult childhood as the daughter of an army sergeant, her love affair at age fifteen with an older man, the legacy of alcoholism, the troubled history of her adopted daughters, and her own physical struggles since a recent horse accident. She shows how historic and emotional pain are passed down through generations, blending personal history with stories of important Indian figures of the past such as Lozen, the woman who was the military strategist for Geronimo, and Ohiesha, the Santee Sioux medical doctor who witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee. Ultimately, Hogan sees herself and her people whole again and gives an illuminating story of personal triumph. "This wise and compassionate offering deserves to be widely read."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a Cree Indian story, Wolverine convinced the animals of the world to keep their eyes closed, so humans wouldn't see their "inner fire" and try to steal it. People, too, can close their eyes and protect their inner fires even if it means those fires may burn them, observes Hogan (Mean Spirit), an award-winning Chickasaw novelist and poet. She herself was seared by such bottled-up fire throughout her girlhood. Raised by an alcoholic, army sergeant father and a pathologically silent mother, she turned first, at age 12, to a steady older lover, then to alcohol. Her adult life, too, has been a series of struggles adopting two seriously disturbed children, enduring amnesia following a head injury and coping with her fibromyalgia but she has learned from each experience to find beauty and grace even in darkness. Hogan's memories spill out in waves of layered associations: from fire to pain, from "phantom pain" to "phantom worlds," from glaciers to dreams. Into her personal history, she integrates stories from the American Indian past. In Hogan's writing, the smallest detail can evoke a whole history: that Chief Joseph's skull was sold to be used as an ashtray sums up the tragic mistreatment of American Indians at the hands of whites. Wiping out so much Native wisdom has left our world diminished, defoliated in "landscape and spirit," in Hogan's eyes. Still, Native culture is beginning to thrive again, reminding us that just as every "before" has an "after," "beginnings" have "returns." Life, Hogan concludes, "may never be easy but may be beautiful," even in this "broken world." This wise and compassionate offering deserves to be widely reviewed and read. Agent, Beth Vesel, Sanford J. Greenberger Associates. (June)Forecast: Deep and full of grace, Hogan's writing is every bit as good as ever. Anyone who knows anything about Native American writing will rush to buy it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Following critical praise for her other works, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Mean Spirit, Hogan offers a memoir rich with the texture of her life as a Chickasaw Indian. Each chapter weaves together her personal and often tragic experiences as the daughter of an army sergeant with Native history, myths, legends, earth, and contemporary life. Although she is often depicting painful events, her voice resonates calm. For example, an unsettling discussion of her pubescent love affair with an adult man while her family is stationed in Germany introduces exploitation and abuse. This is followed by the strong and tranquil chapter "Water: A Love Story," in which she crosses the ocean on her return to America. She is a "child held up by water" as she travels "away from a broken human past." Even the chapter titles emit an otherworldly quality: "Fire, Dreams and Visions: The Given-Off Light," "Silence Is My Mother," and "Bones, and Other Precious Gems." Words, after all, "are the defining shape of a human spirit." A very good book that goes a long way toward explaining Native Americans today; for all academic and public libraries.
- Sue Samson, Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393323056
• ISBN-13: 978-0393323054
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #100,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #38 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Native American

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I want to tell you my story.", August 8, 2001

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (Hardcover)

"As an Indian woman," Linda Hogan writes in her haunting new memoir, "I have always wondered why others want to enter our lives, to know the private landscape inside a human spirit, the map existing inside tribal thoughts and traditional knowledge. It is a search, I think, for a sense of meaning and relationship" . I discovered Linda Hogan through her "sister writer" , Brenda Peterson. Hogan is a Chicksaw poet, novelist, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "This is a book about love," she writes. "It didn't begin that way. I sat down to write about pain and wrote, instead, about healing, history, and survival. The work revealed to me that there is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples" (p. 16). Hogan's writing here is confessional and painfully honest.

In her memoir, Hogan travels her personal geography of having an "illegal," sexual relationship as a twelve-year-old-girl with a man twice her age --"it was love and it was also wrong," she admits , surviving alcohol, adopting two children with "attachment disorders" , attempting to understand her mother ("Silence is my Mother"), and sufering a closed-head injury and amnesia. Along the way, she offers us huge lessons about hope, forgiveness, and healing.

Linda Hogan is an authentic voice who deserves our attention. I read her 207-page book slowly, in a single sitting, and in awe. When you've finished this heart-moving memoir, then go to its back cover, and make a note to also read the writers included there who praise this book--Brenda Peterson, Barry Lopez, and poet Joy Harjo.

G. Merritt

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking essays by a fine Native American writer, March 29, 2003

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (Paperback)

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."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The woman who writes a gift to the world..., June 13, 2003

By 

Alicia Trees "blissgirl3" (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (Paperback)

A few years ago, I had a phase where I read memoirs seeking insights into how to live a full meaningful life. To my innocent surprise, I instead found that many people write their memoirs as versions of the lives they WISH they had lived rather than the real thing.

"The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir" by Linda Hogan is much more than the real thing. This memoir is a kind, loving, forgiving and nakedly honest look at a life; the hopes and dreams encapsulated in one Native American woman's reflective survey of history and its intersection on her unique life. Whether she's talking about her tabooed love affair as a twelve year old girl, the unavoidable coldness of her mother, her own struggle with her adoptive daughters, her horse accident and subsequent convalescence -- Hogan locates herself within a greater context: the world of family, friends, direct and indirect ancestors and the legacy of a difficult and brutal American history.

This book is not meant to be rushed through but savored. It's small enough to read in a single sitting, but the lessons, explorations and stories deserve the luxury of time. Read a chapter and come back to it later. It's a real treasure.