The Land’s Last Cry: Healing Ecological and Cultural Wounds in Mean Spirit”

Abstract

              Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit is a sensitive eco-Indigenous book that reveals the destruction of the environment, ecological wisdom, Indigenous cultures and the strength of Native spiritual. Set in the early 1900s during the Osage oil boom is also known as the Reign of Terror. The story shows how settler colonial greed destroys both the soil that supports it and the people who live there. Indeed, Hogan uses literature to bring back to life a forceful and often ignored past where she places land at the centre of Indigenous identity. The paper shows that colonial exploitation harms the Indigenous people as well it damages the Earth. Moreover, Hogan stories are ecological restoration, which happen with cultural survival, political justice and the renewal of Indigenous bonds with place. Further, the paper analyses cultural traumas, collective memory, integration of ecological, healing routes of land, Indigenous perspectives and spiritual fortitude. Besides, it claims that Mean Spirit transcends a mere story of pain, emerging as a literary act of healing and reclaiming of land’s memory and Indigenous cultural. In addition, the sovereignty through the lenses of eco-Indigenous critique, postcolonial theory and environmental justice frameworks are revealed.