In her 1997 novel Solar Storms, Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan
emphasizes the role of water in decolonial resistance and
Indigenous healing. Solar Storms is a coming-of-age novel about
17-year-old Angel, who arrives at her ancestral homeland, a
community called “Adam’s Rib,” in the boundary waters between
Minnesota and Ontario. The language in Hogan’s text assigns
sentience and agency to bodies of water. Hogan’s water imagery
stresses the interconnectedness of humans and nature that
neocolonialism aims to sever with the construction of the dam in
the novel, echoing the real story of the James Bay Hydroelectric
Project and its destruction of the James Bay Cree and Inuit lands in
the 1970’s. Hogan's indictment of the hydroelectric industrial
complex and her use of water as a counternarrative to extractive
capitalism remain relevant, as Indigenous people continue resisting
in places such as Standing Rock and the lands of the Wet'suwet'en
Nation in Canada.