Reassembling Skins and Bones: Indigeneity and Posthumanism in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms

While posthumanism has contributed to questioning the foundations of humanism and the process of exclusion it has engendered of those diverging from the universal category of ‘Man,’ numerous scholars have criticized this theoretical approach from Indigenous perspectives. Critics stress posthumanism’s tendency to appropriate Indigenous epistemes without acknowledging them. It thus runs the risk of becoming complicit with colonial violence. Projects of decolonizing posthumanist scholarship argue for a greater engagement with Indigenous studies, fostering a “multiepistemic literacy” (Kuokkanen 155). Acknowledging the productive potential of an alliance between Indigenous and posthumanist discourses in reorienting the conversation toward issues of settler colonialism, land sovereignty, and Indigenous self-determination, this paper aims to apply a lens attentive to both Indigeneity and posthumanism to Chickasaw author Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. On the one hand, the paper will focus on representations of taxidermy, deeply tied to colonial violence, which transforms animals into posthuman commodified objects. On the other hand, it will address instances of reassembling skins and bones in acts of regenerative creation, which, unlike taxidermy, acknowledge the need for processes of relational becoming. These combinations of matter constitute a way of envisioning counter-hegemonic modes of being human, relating to the more-than-human, and affirming Indigenous self-determination.