Seeds of Literature / Healing the community through Indigenous ecofeminist literature

Tatiana Viallaneix, Université de Picardie Jules Verne

Monday, February 9 2026, 5.15-7 pm, E002 room, Amiens Citadelle Campus

Zoom link: https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/94821638096?pwd=D1XBJTUVpdoMf1KtMvlRY1uQOnCDRf.1

The work of novelist, poet, and essayist Linda Hogan is deeply rooted in her Native American culture, that of the great Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. Although she was born in the neighboring state of Colorado, the author clearly emerges as the fruit and voice of the former “Indian Territory” and its specific, even exceptional, path of resilience and affirmation, to the point of becoming today a beacon of indigenous institutional and artistic vitality in the United States. From her own personal location, anchored in this unique territory, and in her powerful matrilineal culture, Hogan offers a broad ecofeminist approach and discourse, reflecting the complexity of the intersectional experience and Indigenous conversation, posing and addressing the entanglement of environmental, cultural, spiritual, social, economic, and sovereignty matters. Hogan draws on the sources of oral literature, cultivates it, and gives it a modern vitality, familiar and rooted in humanity. This accessible and lively oral literature plays its role to the fullest, that of building community by instilling in it mythical landmarks, values, and human depth. It is also driven by a clear desire to pass on and guide in order to educate or heal, both individually and collectively. Hogan’s storytelling thus becomes ceremonial.

Strikingly, each genre seems to have its own specific yet not exclusive function: while essays explain and teach, poetry speaks to the heart and soul, and novels depict the struggle for survival of individuals, communities, and the earth. Her novels stand out; while humor is not absent from them, they are the vehicle for the author’s anger and militancy. Hogan engages in political denunciations of colonization, assimilation policies, acculturation, and capitalism and its human and environmental destruction that afflict all of humanity. In her novels, women, especially matriarchs, are in charge, and they alone still know how to set the world right in the face of men often lost, weakened, or corrupt, and young people who lack direction. Ultimately, Hogan herself seems to take on these different roles—matriarch, activist, medicine woman—with her own characteristic agency, and her call for reconnection and regeneration takes on a universal dimension.

Tatiana Viallaneix teaches English language at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, and serves as an adjunct professor of US Cultural Studies and Native American Studies in the Department of English. In November 2025, she defended her doctoral thesis (CELIS, Université Clermont Auvergne) co-tutored by Anne Garrait-Bourrier (University Professor, UCA) and Rita Keresztesi (University of Oklahoma) and entitled “Vulnerability and survilience of Indigenous groups in Oklahoma (1830-2024)”. It follows a master’s dissertation on the Ghost Dance movement (“The Ghost Dance : The End or the Revival of Indian Nations?”) and papers dealing with the Ghost Dance; environmental protection among tribal nations in Oklahoma; ecofeminist author Linda Hogan (Chickasaw); the past and present of education in Cheyenne-Arapaho country in Oklahoma; the works and identity-related thinking of Cherokee scholar Dr. Joshua Nelson; the survivance and reconquest of sovereignty of Oklahoma’s tribal nations, as well as an ecocritical study of works depicting the Osage murders.