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" "Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this year that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern. For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, come back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. (p325)
Linda K. Hogan (born July 16, 1947) is a poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma.
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For American Indian people the journey home is what tells us our human history, the mystery of our lives here, and leads us toward fullness and strength. These first poems were part of that return for me, an identification with my tribe and the Oklahoma earth, a deep knowing and telling how I was formed of these two powers called ancestors and clay.
(Your writing is rich with love and compassion – how do you stay rooted in those qualities when dealing with such tragic themes as the destruction of our environment and the treatment of Native Americans?) What other choice do I have? It doesn’t mean I have no anger about injustice. I do. I throw myself down when it is violent and painful. But it is also a matter of how to work against that injustice. I haven’t seen it succeed by fighting, yelling, rage, or outward anger. Think of those yelling faces you see on the news, mouths wide open. They lose. Their anger, their hatred has the opposite effect of what they are reaching toward.