The central drama of Hogan’s novel is based on the conflicting views of nature between Native Americans and Caucasians. The Native Americans in the novel perceive Nature as sacred and animate, and possessing the same feelings as humanity. In her first winter at Adam’s Rib, Angel hears “the lake talking to the sky, revealing some part of itself or what lay inside its blue-green light,” with the lake “recalling the memory of last year’s ice, the jewelry lost in its waters, the fishermen who’d fallen through storms, and who lay inside it even now” (95). 

In the above description, the lake’s human ability to communicate and remember links it intimately with humanity. Similarly, benign human actions, from the Native American perspective, are natural actions, and therefore part of nature. Angel’s ability to see inside water and communicate with it makes her take nature’s side when she opposes the dam construction and the re-routing of the river in the Land of the Fat-Eaters: “Water, [Angel] knew, had its own needs, its own speaking and desires. No one had asked the water what it wanted” (279). While to someone who has grown up with the Caucasian worldview, the act of asking water for its opinion might seem supernatural, for Angel, it is essential and entirely natural.