Studies in American Indian Literatures

In 1899 H. B. Cushman observed that when a Chickasaw died, tribal lamentations would last for several days and would conclude with a feast (410). Nearly one hundred years later in 1997, in the prologue to her novel Solar Storms, Chickasaw Linda Hogan recounts a “mourning feast.”¹ But in her presentation, Hogan changes several mourning-feast customs, the most salient of which requires that the mourned be deceased. The alteration of the traditional mourning feast serves not merely as a signpost for changing Native American rituals. Rather, the transformed mourning feast in Solar Storms indicts white culture for causing Native American famine, both physical and emotional. But in blurring some demarcations of culpability and in providing a role model in the form of the character offering the feast, Hogan points to ways in which the Native American community might respond to the emotional, bodily, and cultural starvation inflicted through postcolonialism.² In this manner Hogan eschews what David L. Moore deems construction of reductionist binaries concerning colonization.³

Hogan’s Solar Storms recounts the story of Angela (Angel) Wing, a beleaguered seventeen-year-old whose disfigured face bears the scars of an unremembered trauma. Angela’s deranged mother Hannah Wing necessitated Angela’s placement in foster homes, from which Angela has fled for years. In a court record Angela discovers the name of Agnes Iron, whom she contacts, believing her to be a relative. Agnes, Angela’s great-grandmother, immediately sends money for Angela to join her in Adam’s Rib, an economically [End Page 50] depressed town situated between Minnesota and Canada in the Boundary Waters area.⁴ Through her gradual identification with the Adam’s Rib community, Angel’s psychic wounds heal, even as events bring Angel to a confrontation with her mother and the restoration of the memory of her repressed past.⁵

Before asserting the degree to which Hogan changes mourning feast norms, we first might consider what a “normal” mourning feast would entail. Determining such normalcy proves difficult, if not impossible, in part because different Indigenous nations at various times alter specific traditions. As Homi K. Bhabha notes, “The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address” (207). Yet according to Ernest Stromberg, in the past, ignoring First Nations’ cultural specificity “served to reduce hundreds of complex individual cultures into a single category” (98). As Craig S. Womack maintains, “Native literature, and the criticism that surrounds it, needs to see more attention devoted to tribally specific concerns” (Red on Red 1). Since both Bush, the character preparing the feast, and Hogan herself hail from the Chickasaw nation, some concordance between the feast in Solar Storms and Chickasaw mourning feasts seems likely. But perhaps more importantly, Bush even inverts the feast’s would-be cross-tribal common denominators.

For some Westerners who associate feasts with joyous occasions such as births, weddings, liberation from oppression, and gloriously heroic feats, holding a feast in order to mourn might in itself appear an inversion. This might seem true even though the Irish, for example, provide ample food during wakes, and people frequently offer bereaved families prepared dishes as tokens of affection and support. In any case, within the definition of any “mourning feast,” the most fundamental characteristic proves so obvious that we can easily overlook it: the person whom the community mourns should indeed first be dead. Another prominent feast attribute relates to food preparation: since participation in the feast involves virtually all group members, food preparation involves community cooperation. As with any feast, we might [End Page 51] expect the quantity of food to be great and the quality of it the best that could be provided. Furthermore, in Native cultures, mourners often share their food with the departed. W. M. Beauchamp notes that “It was a prevalent idea that the dead liked the good food of this world, and this was often placed on graves. If it disappeared . . . it was supposed to be eaten by the dead. . . . [It was] thought the soul lingered near the body until the...