I’m very concerned with human, animal, and plant survival, traditions that are ecologically sound, and indigenous knowledge systems, and how to conve… - Linda Hogan

I think protest and legal actions lack the emotions, the feelings of the people, and story is a way to touch the heart. It often carries a weight that the grey language of law lacks.

We're all affected by place whether we realize it or not. For one thing, all our stories-creation stories, myths, oral traditions-are, in part, about storied land. Stories live in the land. They "take place" in context with all the rest. Our daily lives are linked to place. One of the problems with the dominant culture is that it wants to escape this connection. As Rachel Rosenthal said in a recent performance, people use intellect and science as a tool so they won't have to dirty their hands with matter. For indigenous people, the link between the person and the land is a connecting point, not only with ordinary, daily life, but with the cosmos. It is about relationship. And relationship is the most central part of our lives, our being, not only relationship with other people, but with all things. I believe a lot of neuroses have to do with a lack of healthy relationship with the land, with self, with creation and the creative spirit.

I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths.