Power: A Novel

Linda Hogan’s Power, published in 1998, is a coming-of-age literary fiction novel that explores racial and cultural identity of Indigenous Americans living in the modern-day Florida Gulf Coast wetlands. Poet and novelist Hogan is a member of the Chickasaw Nation who draws from the matrilineal and matrilocal oral history of the Chickasaw people in her writing. Power is Hogan’s second novel, and like her first novel, Mean Spirit (1990), it highlights Indigenous culture and practices.

This guide references the 1999 paperback edition by W.W. Norton & Company.

Content warning: This novel discusses domestic violence and references sexual assault.

Plot Summary

Deep in the Floridian Everglades, 16-year-old Omishto floats in her paddleboat, watching a large storm roll in across a red sky. She often sleeps on the boat in the swamp instead of at her mother’s house because she fears being attacked by her lecherous stepfather, Herman. Her real father left her family long ago for his secret second family, leaving Omishto with only his rowboat and her name, which means “One Who Watches” (4). From her boat, she feels something watch her from the trees, and she wonders if it might be a panther, the sacred symbol and ancestor of her dwindling tribe.