Indios
by Linda Hogan
9780916727857 || Cost: $12.95
Hardback , 80 pages
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Indios is set "in the timelessness of our lives," writes Linda Hogan. "Time is different in the cell structure of bodies created from and on this continent." Indios speaks to us the truth of a history twisted to suit the needs of a conquering power. It is an old story and yet a tragically contemporary one. Indios the character speaks to us from a jail cell, a Native woman falsely accused of the death of her children. In her plight we hear echoes of Malinche, cursed and blessed as both a race traitor and as the mother of all mestizos. We hear echoes of Pocahontas, of La Llorona, and ultimately, of Medea — not, Hogan stresses, the Medea of Euripides, but the captured princess of the original story in which her children were murdered by the people of Corinth — and Medea herself was feared for her cultural differences and her knowledge. As Indios says of herself, she is an "aftershock" of history. This powerful poem is her legacy.
Critical Praise for Indios
- Linda Hogan's Indios is an obsidian blade carving a tragic story of the exploitation of indigenous women. In Hogan's masterful hands, this lyric poem reveals one of the most heinous stains of colonization. Indios is an archetypal story, but one that still happens around the world. Seduced by the conqueror, the woman Indios is used to obtain tribal forest lands. Having secured the forest, he abandons Indios so he can marry a white woman. Indios's children are killed, and she is thrown into prison from whence she tells her story. As heartbreaking in its intensity as it is honed by superior craft, Indios is bound to become a classic.
— Pamela Uschuk, author of Crazy Love (American Book Award)
- Linda Hogan's Indios sacks colonialism in the New World, giving it a black-eye and a bad headache. Mixing domestic violence and gamesmanship, Indios is a first person account of what happens when an "indigenous" woman recites her fate as North and South, East and West collide in a woeful song hundreds of years in the making. As Hogan writes, "but still you come to me, as if my words will change the clouds of history." Hogan changes history!
— LeAnne Howe, author of Miko Kings and Evidence of Red
- Indios is like the ocean, a part of the life-force of the planet. We must honor that when we come into the presence of such a work. We are blessed, humbled and empowered by her words.
— Simon J. Ortiz, author of from Sand Creek
About This Author
Read more about Linda Hogan HERE.
