SOURCE: “There is Wilderness in My Blood: Spiritual Foundations of the Poetry of Five American Indian Women,” in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Beacon Press, 1986, pp. 168-72.

In the following excerpt, Allen explores Hogan's views on spirituality and conservation as rooted in her Indian beliefs.

Like Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) directly integrates a spirit-based vision in her work. She is conscious of its vibrant spherical power to unify divergent events and conflicting views. Like all the American Indian women writing poetry and fiction, Hogan is conscious of the real nature of spirit presence in the world and so includes it as a basic assumption about reality in all of her work.

Hogan speaks of a phase she went through when she was first conscious, in an adult's way, of having visions. Because she had not been raised by traditional Indian people within...