Rating: 
Summary: A Native Memoir, a Field of Healing
Review: A memoir is never a Native American tradition. But one of the reasons for Linda Hogan to create this memoir is to show her young clan people how she survived her life, which hopefully can motivate them or protect them from going astray. Replacing the common chronicle way to edit a memoir, Hogan used falling, forgetting, and forgiving as three major strands to weave her own story. Meanwhile, the natural objects and the tribal past were also interweaved into as colorful and impressive patterns.
From the broken clay woman sent by the museum gift shop to the stranded loon by the oil spills, Hogan associated the tribal people??s situations as broken and stranded as them, such as Navajo uranium miners whose bodies changed and mutated. Moreover, those historical traumas like the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Relocation Act, etc. quickened Native Americans?? falling. Hogan herself as an urban Indian was not exceptional and sometimes her cross-cultural case was more confused especially as what she said, ??for myself, being one of those people who survived, my tribal identity has always been chasing after me, to keep its claims on my body and heart ?? (27). Thus her loving a grown man twice her age and her later alcoholic addition became her hidden worlds.
But Hogan said, ??Hidden worlds are only a door we pass through beneath the difficult earth surface world?? (50). Then the journey from Europe to America was her first time of reflection. ??Like water, I rush toward a destiny, a balance, a harmony. I call it sea level?? (33). So we see the description about how she rose up from her drunken falls to look for her own sea level. Also for fulfilling the sense of loss, Hogan adopted two daughters, but found it difficult to build the intimate mother-and-daughter relationship because the two Lakota girls were the victims of their birth mother who herself was in predicament too.
Years later, the physical trauma ran parallel with the emotional ones. Especially the accident of falling from Mystery, the ungentle horse, made her suffer from amnesia for a while, but meanwhile ironically made her and her family more closer. As Hogan said, ??Life sometimes emerges from pain?? (48) and ??life sometimes comes out of tragedy?? (49). Thus from her amnesia??s forgetting, Hogan seemed to gain back her life. Her rebirth resulted in her hearty forgiveness. Standing in the middle of her life, Hogan would be willing to embrace the whole world in a more open-minded attitude.
After piecing her broken parts together to render a fresh self who can bravely face this outside world, Hogan left an interesting question for her young tribal people and even us to think more deeply. For fifty some years, she has been watching over this world and she has already recorded what she observed in this memoir. By reading this memoir, Native Americans of younger generation are expected to absorb some wisdom to solve the remaining problems because ????memory is a field full of psychological ruins,?K but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says ??I remember,?? all things are possible?? (15).
Rating:
Summary: Restore and Reconnect Human Beings to the World
Review: As a Native American writer, Linda Hogan uses a distinguished way from the traditional writing style of autobiography or the Western memoir in her memoir--The Woman Who Watches Over the World. Instead of the Western personal point of view, Linda Hogan starts her memoir from the Native American¡¦s concept of the landscape and the inseparable but broken relationship between the Native American people and the land, through the image of the broken clay woman who was reluctantly separated from her injured land, through the pain and the illness of losing the identity to her land and her tribal traditions, and through her journey to search the juncture on the forgetting and memory, and then to end with a finding of a healing way to match oneself to the world and reconstructing the tribal stories and history, and to keep continuing to spread ¡§love¡¨ across the world and pass down the pollen of the ¡§love¡¨ to the next generation and the next generation. Throughout the whole memoir, when Hogan finds out the loss of her tribal and land identity, she tries to find some ways to heal her physical pain and her spiritual lost identity through reconstructing the concept of Native American¡¦s landscape, history, stories, and memory. Comparing her ill and broken body as the injured land, Linda Hogan regards the symbolic meaning of the geography as the private landscape inside her spirit, her tribal thoughts and traditional knowledge. Keeping on searching and searching the Native American healing ways to the injured bodies and damaged land, Hogan seems not only to take a journey to begin and return her tribal identity, but also find a way out to try to match herself to the world, and to reach to the harmony between the land and the people. For her, the powerful force of healing seems to be ¡§love.¡¨ Only through love, people can take a journey to follow and match the world, to respect the nature as the teacher, and then, to retrieve the souls of the ill, and to restore the breath of the world.
Rating:
Summary: A great memoire of Linda Hogan
Review: As the title implies, this momoire arises form Linda Hogan her own perspective to tell the history of her tribe, her family and her own self. It is indeed a very impressive work for me. Many details and many depictions attract me very much, and I am going to illustrate some of them that impress me most.
Drunken is a very serious problem for Hogan??s family and relatives. By the description, we gradually realize that to drink is a way to elude from the painful history. ??I was drunk, not an alcoholic,?? their reason is that ??the drunk wants to lose the memory of every day.?? ??It was an escape from the pain of an American history.?? For them, so many memories are unacceptable and the solution they can do is to escape from it. The Indians are the Natives of the States. But the invaders occupied most of their land and even made law to restrain the Indian territory. It is very ridiculous event.
One thing that shocks me very much is about ??the Sand Creek Masacre.?? It is a very painful thing for the Native people, but the Whites choose to make fun of the deathes. It reveals all the horrible history. Besides the history of the Native and the tribes, Hogan also explores herself and confesses herself to the readers. I believe this book is absolutely a good one to read and you will get more by your own reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Going on life with nature
Review: Hogan divides The Woman Who Watches Over The World into several sections and each section she gives it a general image to present it; moreover, each section represents the different periods of Hogan's and Native Americans??history and the situations she and Native Americans confront. The memoir is not just Hogan's memory of her life, but also concentrates tribal history into the memoir. The memoir contains the circular feature that is quite important and common in Native American writers' works. In the first section, Hogan describes that human body as a map and life is like a geographic lesson. Through the journey of life, human beings use their bodies to feel and realize the sorrow and happiness of life.
From the clay woman that she bought, Hogan indicates the deep and intimate relation between Native Americans and the earth. Then, in the following sections, she uses many natural elements to represent the conditions of her/ Native Americans??lives and describe the destruction of Native American's original society in different periods. The title of each section not only presents Hogan's own problems but also the social problems that Native Americans have to deal with under the domination of white people. So, the basic belief?Xthe community is more important than individual that Native Americans believe supports the progress of the memoir. In the end, Hogan reinforces human beings??association with the earth through their touch of stone and their return to the earth with bones. I do appreciate this concept because it reveals that how harmonious relationship that human beings can have with nature. Native Americans live with the earth and then return to the earth after their death. No one can really distinguish where life begins and where life ends. Life is a circular; even though pain always comes along with life, life still goes on.
Rating:
Summary: History, Healing and Survival
Review: Hogan??s memoir is a book not only ??about love?? (16), but about ??healing, history, and survival?? (16). In this memoir of eleven chapters, the idea of history dominates the whole work in which Hogan retrieves not only her personal history but the communal history. The ??space-time?? relationship becomes a unifying force for each chapter to construct a unified whole and present a ??a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples?? (16). For Hogan as a Native American, history, no matter personal or tribal one, is present in geography, no matter a spiritual or spatial one. First of all, Hogan tries to relate her ??self-telling?? to the young people on reservations and thus connect her personal history with the history of the continent since ??I can lay a human history out before me and hold a light to it, and in that light is the history of a continent?? (14). She then identifies herself and the world with the clay woman, ??the Woman who Watch Over the World?? since she, the clay woman and the world/land are all broken. And the historical traumas are revealed and shown in human bodies and the land in itself. Thus, by retrieving the history of her physical pain, emotional suffering, and early inarticulateness inherited from her mothers, she presents us a suffering history of her tribe in this continent. By exploring both the personal and tribal history, she displays a map/path for herself and the young tribal men to pursue after her. It is then a map/path of healing. By healing, she means the power of words and the cure of nature. She offers a history of three generations of women in her family, herself, her mother and her two adopted daughters, who, because ??the destruction of the body and land have coincided in history?? (62~63), have been or are, in a way or other, voiceless of their emotional, physical, or spiritual sufferings. Thus, the power of storytelling/words is significant for her to deal with her personal problems and recognition of self-identity in the tribal community. Moreover, after years of experiences with pain, she finds her cure relies on ??earth, water, light and air?? (16). Its significance can be seen when several elements in nature are used to entitle six out of the eleven chapters. Finally, what unifies all these treads presented in the memoir into a spider web, separate but of the same direction, is the power of tribal survival through which personal survival is also attained. It is only because of a quest into her haunted past and tribal hardships can she find a power to refresh her spirit and a meaning for her life. Thus, with the presentation of both traumatic histories and ways of healings, she positions herself and establishes her subjectivity in a tribal world that, in turn, survives in face of possible genocide. And it is this urgency of survival, no matter personal or tribal, that makes the memoir and the Naitve American literature extraordinary to the Euroamerican literature.
Rating:
Summary: History, Healing and Survival
Review: Hogan¡¦s memoir is a book not only ¡§about love¡¨ (16), but about ¡§healing, history, and survival¡¨ (16). In this memoir of eleven chapters, the idea of history dominates the whole work in which Hogan retrieves not only her personal history but the communal history. The ¡§space-time¡¨ relationship becomes a unifying force for each chapter to construct a unified whole and present a ¡§a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples¡¨ (16). For Hogan as a Native American, history, no matter personal or tribal one, is present in geography, no matter a spiritual or spatial one. First of all, Hogan tries to relate her ¡§self-telling¡¨ to the young people on reservations and thus connect her personal history with the history of the continent since ¡§I can lay a human history out before me and hold a light to it, and in that light is the history of a continent¡¨ (14). She then identifies herself and the world with the clay woman, ¡§the Woman who Watch Over the World¡¨ since she, the clay woman and the world/land are all broken. And the historical traumas are revealed and shown in human bodies and the land in itself. Thus, by retrieving the history of her physical pain, emotional suffering, and early inarticulateness inherited from her mothers, she presents us a suffering history of her tribe in this continent. By exploring both the personal and tribal history, she displays a map/path for herself and the young tribal men to pursue after her. It is then a map/path of healing. By healing, she means the power of words and the cure of nature. She offers a history of three generations of women in her family, herself, her mother and her two adopted daughters, who, because ¡§the destruction of the body and land have coincided in history¡¨ (62~63), have been or are, in a way or other, voiceless of their emotional, physical, or spiritual sufferings. Thus, the power of storytelling/words is significant for her to deal with her personal problems and recognition of self-identity in the tribal community. Moreover, after years of experiences with pain, she finds her cure relies on ¡§earth, water, light and air¡¨ (16). Its significance can be seen when several elements in nature are used to entitle six out of the eleven chapters. Finally, what unifies all these treads presented in the memoir into a spider web, separate but of the same direction, is the power of tribal survival through which personal survival is also attained. It is only because of a quest into her haunted past and tribal hardships can she find a power to refresh her spirit and a meaning for her life. Thus, with the presentation of both traumatic histories and ways of healings, she positions herself and establishes her subjectivity in a tribal world that, in turn, survives in face of possible genocide. And it is this urgency of survival, no matter personal or tribal, that makes the memoir and the Naitve American literature extraordinary to the Euroamerican literature.
Rating:
Summary: The Twinning of the Interior/ Exterior Landscapes
Review: In Hogan??s Memoir, I see Hogan??s compelling attempt on retrieving not merely an individual but a communal and collective memory of Native American people whose existences had been obliterated by the dominant History and represented as simply silence and blankness. Like the broken clay woman who connects to the lands by ??her very body, the very same clay,?? Hogan is the woman who watches over ??the injured world?? with a broken soul and memory (17, 21). Hogan juxtaposes the inner landscape of a human spirit and the outer landscape of the Mother Earth to exemplify the correspondence and rhythms of human souls with the natural world, and further to demonstrate Native Americans?? worldviews of perceiving the world as an oneness full of interconnected organic beings. The pain of the human soul and human body parallels with the pain of the lands for the loss of the lands shears off Native Americans?? attachment to the earth, the places. To Hogan, the devastation of the lands corresponds to the destruction of the minds. Only with a sense of place, there comes a sense of history, a sense of identity. The outward landscape, the Mother Earth and all the elemental beings are the fountains of healing power never stop flowing out unless the interconnectedness and balances is destroyed. Thus, Hogan finds ??[her] doctors become earth, water, light, and air. They [are] animals, plants, and kindred spirits?? (16). Through interrogating the interior geography inside a human spirit, Hogan intends to restore and recollect the whole exterior natural landscape of the Mother Earth comprising all the coexistent elements as water, land, fire, light, stone, and animals.
Rating:
Summary: The Twinning of the Interior/ Exterior Landscapes
Review: In Hogan¡¦s Memoir, I see Hogan¡¦s compelling attempt on retrieving not merely an individual but a communal and collective memory of Native American people whose existences had been obliterated by the dominant History and represented as simply silence and blankness. Like the broken clay woman who connects to the lands by ¡§her very body, the very same clay,¡¨ Hogan is the woman who watches over ¡§the injured world¡¨ with a broken soul and memory (17, 21). Hogan juxtaposes the inner landscape of a human spirit and the outer landscape of the Mother Earth to exemplify the correspondence and rhythms of human souls with the natural world, and further to demonstrate Native Americans¡¦ worldviews of perceiving the world as an oneness full of interconnected organic beings. The pain of the human soul and human body parallels with the pain of the lands for the loss of the lands shears off Native Americans¡¦ attachment to the earth, the places. To Hogan, the devastation of the lands corresponds to the destruction of the minds. Only with a sense of place, there comes a sense of history, a sense of identity. The outward landscape, the Mother Earth and all the elemental beings are the fountains of healing power never stop flowing out unless the interconnectedness and balances is destroyed. Thus, Hogan finds ¡§[her] doctors become earth, water, light, and air. They [are] animals, plants, and kindred spirits¡¨ (16). Through interrogating the interior geography inside a human spirit, Hogan intends to restore and recollect the whole exterior natural landscape of the Mother Earth comprising all the coexistent elements as water, land, fire, light, stone, and animals.
Rating:
Summary: Life sometimes emerges from pain
Review: In this memoir, Hogan attempts to reveal not only an individual memory but the geography, and the history that is common to all human spirits, in particular, to Native American people. With the dominant image of broken things, such as the woman clay (broken body), the broken earth, and the fragmented Native American past, Hogan's inherited gene, blood, and cell from her families and tribal culture could make her become a witness to the whole journey of memory. What she sees, feels and interprets are a part of the past, the present, and the future. Her female body seems to be as vulnerable as the land and as Native American history. The trauma, physical or emotional pain, and wounds of an individual here are identical with those of tribal history so as to reconstruct the geography of Native American world and to get the healing. ¡§It wasn't healing I found or a life free from pain, but a kind of love and kinship with a similarly broken world¡¨(16). Because some matters are too sharp to be memorized, through elements and creatures of nature, Native people are able to regain the life-giving power and continue the generations. From another aspect, I am curious about the remedy of love toward the pain, whether it is presented inwardly or outwardly. It seems that Hogan does not regard love as the only therapy to conquer all the sufferings. At least, it is not the love only existed between human beings.
Rating:
Summary: Book Review
Review: Life is a journey form fragments to wholeness. Hogan's memoir tries to reveal her steps and processes of having harmony in her life. She divides her memoir into eleven sections with various topics to express her different experience of life. Each part of her personal experience is the part of life journey, though in the journey, no absolutely direction is shown to tell her when to go or what to do. In "Geography: An Introduction," Hogan says there is no maps of direction in life, even she wish to direct her life to others by saying "This way," (14) but she couldn't. From receiving the broken pieces of the clay woman named "The Woman Who Watches over the World" that she bought in the museum, Hogan starts to illustrate her journey of broken past in "Water: A Love Story," which narratives how she falls in love with a sergeant army in German, and how she decides to come back to America by through the sea. Then she says "through our time life-times it is water that sustains us, water that is the human substance, the matter of cells"(31). In her years of falling, Hogan concludes "falling isn't always bad. Sometimes it is better into world" (66). As the topics go, readers seem to have steps to penetrate Hogan's inner floating. From piecing the following topics together, including "Silence is My Mother," "Fire," "Dreams and Visions: The Given-Off Light," "Span: Of Time and Stone,?? ??Mystery,?? ??Bones, and Other Precious Gem,?? and ??Phantom Worlds,?? we gradually finish the journey made by Hogan's personal events by the topic steps she gave us. Reading Hogan's memoir is like playing jigsaw puzzle, which is the game from fragments to wholeness. The process of the play jigsaw puzzle is like the process of facing many events in journey life. As she describes herself from the broken past to the harmony in the living world, Hogan's memoir also reveals the situation of Native American today. Therefore, it is not only a memoir of self, but a reflection of her tribes.
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