Fluid Ways of Knowing: Narrating Indigenous Resistance and Sovereignty Through Water in the Works by Linda Hogan and Natalie Diaz
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2025-07-08
Language
en
Document type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Title
ISSN
Volume
Issue
Startpage
Endpage
DOI
Abstract
This thesis examines how Indigenous authors Linda Hogan and Natalie Diaz mobilize water in their literary works to reimagine Indigenous sovereignty and resistance beyond Western legal and political frameworks. Through a close reading of Hogan’s novels Solar Storms and People of the Whale, alongside Diaz’s poems The First Water is the Body, lake-loop, How the Milky Way Was Made, and exhibits from The American Water Museum, the thesis explores how water functions not only structurally but also thematically within the texts. While water has often been read symbolically in literary studies, this thesis argues that in Hogan’s and Diaz’s texts, water functions as more than a background. In their selected works, water is granted agency and contributes to how the works are structured, narrated, and how meaning is produced. Drawing on concept of relational sovereignty, narrative subjectivity, and the framework of watery relationality, the study positions water as an active participant in the works. The analysis highlights how water, in the selected works, connects characters, geographies, and temporalities, shapes embodiment and desire, and even challenges colonial and anthropocentric boundaries. Each chapter focuses on a different function of water, as a site of connection and relationality, as a force that flows within the body as well as transform it, and as a destructive agent that both challenges and reveals the limits of sovereignty. Ultimately, the thesis argues that both Hogan and Diaz present water as central to Indigenous survival, resistance, and sovereignty. As such, they offer a model of Indigenous sovereignty that is not centered on state recognition or territorial control, but instead, practiced through everyday relations with land, water, and more-than-human beings.
Key words: Indigenous literature, ecocriticism, Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous resistance, hydrofiction, Native American literature
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren