SOURCE: Bredin, Renae. “‘Becoming Minor’: Reading The Woman Who Owned the Shadows.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 6, no. 4 (winter 1994): 36-50.

[In the following essay, Bredin argues that The Woman Who Owned the Shadows provides an examination of the respective positions of reader, writer, and text.]

I know you can't make peace
being Indian and white.
They cancel each other out.
Leaving no one in the place.

—Paula Gunn Allen, “Dear World”

Chela Sandoval, in “U.S. Third World Feminism,” posits the possibility of using the outsider position, or the borderlands, as a position of “tactical subjectivity” out of which existing modes of oppression can be confronted (14). Critical debates at this point have an ongoing history of inquiry that centers around the politics of identity, the constitution of cultural inclusion/exclusion, and the problem of the speaking subject, when the speaking subject is speaking outside of the dominant order. The question to be asked addresses the position of the other within the dominant framing of ideology. Is the other complicit and resistant in ways that affect the construction of a “white self”? In what ways can the subaltern alter the discourse of racial formation? No longer is the question who may speak, but rather: speaking or not speaking, does the constructed other operate as more than a blank page, thereby revising the text of the “white self”? In a similar gesture, Cherríe Moraga writes in “From a Long Line of Vendidas” that “the Radical Feminist must extend her own ‘identity’ politics to include her ‘identity’ as oppressor as well” (188). I would like to place Sandoval's and Moraga's positions into circulation together and argue that Sandoval's “tactical subjectivity” in the space of the much-discussed borderlands operates effectively in tandem with Moraga's call for the inclusion of the position of oppressor and oppressed in the scripting of speaking subjects in dialogue, thereby revising the dominant version of self, scripted as white, male, heterosexual.

This essay interrogates the work of Paula Gunn Allen, who positions herself as essentially Native American, lesbian and “feminine,” identities chosen from among several possible identities which she has taken up and set aside within the body of her oeuvre. In Allen's novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, the central figure in the text, Ephanie, (re)constructs herself in much the same way that Allen has autobiographically. This text provides a decentering confluence of the subject positions of reader, writer, and text, within which we can begin to examine the issues of positionality and essentialism. In her most recent collection, Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970, Allen asserts a unified, monolithic “Native people” participating in a “Native Narrative Tradition,” a community of people “who belong to the Turtle Island branch of the [multicultural] encounter” (5-8). Allen's work stands in a unique relationship to the debates over racial identity as socially constructed or biologically determined because her claims to authority to speak from an essential identity as Native American are made within a constructed domain of blood and bones.

READING

The reading transaction is precisely the space I wish to explore as the borderland of self and other, a potent location in which to raise these questions. I come to Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows as an outsider—someone not Native, nor Keresan (Laguna)—but as someone seduced, taken in, as it were, transformed by the text. The questions taken up are those that interrogate this particular transaction as one between positions of insider and outsider. If it's in the blood and bone, then the reader (presumed white) is outside. On the other hand, if identity is being constructed in the act of textual construction, then the blood and bone are only partial sites of difference, or similarity.

In Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss posits that the two seemingly opposed concepts of socially constructed identities and biologically essential selves actually “underwrite” or “prop” each other. Using Lacan's “concept of the ‘split subject,’ divided against itself,” Fuss offers “the strategy of positing the reader as a site of differences” and asserts that subjectivity allows for “the notion of the reading process as a negotiation amongst discursive subject-positions which the reader, as a social subject, may or may not choose to fill” (34).¹ Reading becomes a “borderland” in which subjectivity is negotiated at will.

In the terms of Fuss's argument, then, a reading by someone outside of Paula Gunn Allen's own “discursive subject position” in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is a negotiation of different subject positions, with “fluid boundaries,” positions “always constructed, assigned, or mapped … undermining any notion of ‘essential reader.’” For Fuss, “all of these points suggest that if we read from multiple subject-positions, the very act of reading becomes a force for dislocating our belief in stable objects and essential meanings” (34-35). While Fuss is speaking of gender as a category of analysis, a similar approach to subjectivity might possibly work in the dislocation of reading in and from other subject-positions, in particular, that category designated “race.”

In Woman, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha articulates the relationship between writing, reading and textuality in this way:

In a sense, committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. Bound to one another by an awareness of their guilt, writer and reader may thus assess their positions, engaging themselves wholly in their situations and carrying their weight into the weight of their communities, the weight of the world.

(11)

If, in Trinh's formulation, Allen is a committed writer, and our discursive positions are situated in a historicized guilt, the weight of my guilty conscience as I occupy a dominant (white, heterosexual) subject position within prevailing power relations will, of necessity, require me to assess my own position and engage myself wholly with race as a primary feature of the writings of women committed to tribal consciousness and tribal survival, carrying the weight of their tribal communities. There is a way in which occupying this position as a reader is one that silences. My acts of resistance to illicit power may be in listening to the ones speaking in that place, in listening to what Allen, Trinh and many U.S. third world feminists are speaking of, and how they are speaking.

How then might a white, heterosexual woman speak of Paula Gunn Allen's text without playing Prospero? The exclusionary practice of essentialism falters when our “selves” are socially constructed, but the social construction of identities threatens to evacuate the political possibilities of essences in blood and bone. As Gayatri Spivak notes in “The Problem of Cultural Self-representation,” “What can the intellectual do toward the texts of the oppressed? Represent them and analyze them, disclosing one's own positionality for other communities in power” (56). I would argue that there are sites from which I might read, beyond a guilty silence, grounded in a weave of theoretical strategies. Determined by the text itself, informed by the aesthetics of the multiplicity of contexts out of which the writer writes, positioned in the fluctuating power relations of what Trinh signs as I/i, in this mesh I/i as reader might find a place from which to read, learn, and engage with the text in order to speak in the writerly/readerly dialogue.

WRITING

Contemporary Native American writers occupy subject positions that are not monolithically Native American but rather are embedded in specific tribal communities (Sioux, Navajo, Paiute, Cree). This does not, however, divorce them from sites within those constituted as Native, sites that are in turn surrounded by non-Native/dominant cultural and political discourses. Because Native and tribal aesthetics and assumptions about art and creativity often inform and underlie writings by Native women, and because those systems are not divorced from either the sacred or the secular for many tribal people, my responsibility to attempt an understanding of those systems is clear. However, as Richard Dyer has noted in relation to gay and lesbian authorship, “… all cultural artifacts, are not culturally pure … uncontaminated by [white Anglo-European] norms and values” (190). Therefore, an examination of the aesthetics that underlie and inform writings by Native American women must include the “contaminating” elements of dominant regimes.

Aesthetic determinations emanate from individual moves within larger cultural regimes. Those regimes as understood and enacted by the writer are part of what I as reader must come to understand in order to engage in this dialogue. Allen has constituted in her critical writings a paradigm which she calls the “Native Narrative Tradition,” a unifying paradigm for identifying and reading a generalized Native American literature. In her desire for the inclusion of themes of magical transformations, social change, cultural transition, shifting modes of identity, as well as “certain structural features—diversity, event-centeredness, nonlinear development … and transitional modes,” Allen expresses some of what constitutes her personal aesthetic (Voice 8). These features are refinements of what Bevis, Owens, and others have identified elsewhere as necessary features of a text in order for it to be defined as Native American, including use of the oral tradition, a sense of place, and time as “circular” (rendering simultaneous past, present, and future).² In earlier interviews, and in fact in her poetry and prose, Allen also claims Joyce, Shakespeare, Keats, and Shelley as influences, thereby also claiming the artistic and aesthetic practices of Western European literary discourse.³ How do these fluctuating authorial subject positions play out in a given text? And how do I read a text grounded in an oral tradition with which I have become familiar only through written texts, even as it is imbricated with discourses in which I participate?

The genres out of which Allen's text arises, like the literary and cultural influences of many Native women writers, are Anglo and Eurocentric traditions. The novel, poetry, and autobiography are all forms from within the Western literary tradition. They are forms (in collusion with language) that arise from and reflect on patriarchal, hierarchical, imperialist hegemonies.

The English language has been the linear tongue of colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of paracolonialism has been a language of invincible imagination and liberation for many tribal people in the postindian world. English, a language of paradoxes, learned under duress by tribal people at mission and federal schools, was one of the languages that carried the vision and shadows of the Ghost Dance, the religion of renewal, from tribe to tribe on the vast plains at the end of the nineteenth century.

(Vizenor 105)

The double-edged possibilities of liberation and oppression found in language and form become a space of community between “Native writer” and white reader—I, too, read and write with(in) and against the language and forms of the dominant discourse.

TEXT

Following in the tradition of Virginia Woolf, as have French feminist poststructuralists like Irigary, Wittig, and Kristeva, Allen breaks the sentence in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. In this linguistic subversion, the gaps and silences are so profound that there isn't a whole sentence that can be spoken; there is no way of using language—the sign system of the oppressor. So the sentence is broken, the narrative (to paraphrase Shadows [The Woman Who Owned the Shadows] 41) “inarticulate in the silence.” “Fear. Bloody fingers pressing her temple. Her breastbone. Her gut. I will not be afraid. Fear, the destroyer” (Shadows 6). In the connective tissue of the noun/verb—fear, separated by periods—her body is stressed, used, defining the thought. In the gaps, between the periods, are the unspoken, unspeakable parts of her body and her fear. This is the narrative of the broken sentence. The text is theory—it theorizes an impossible silence, an insurmountable gap between identity formation and received identity.⁴ Between speaking the self, and the silenced self.

And low, so low, she had finally managed to say. “Stephen. I want.” Pausing then. For a beat. One beat the length of one single word. Then finishing. “To go away.” She did not say that one, that crucial word. “You. I want you to go away.” Nor did he hear. What the tiny pause, that silence was intended, inarticulate, to say.

(Shadows 11)

There is silence, there are gaps, there are tiny pauses, filled with meaning, filled with the essence of Ephanie, the desire that is unspeakable. To write Ephanie—mixed blood, female, lesbian—is to write the impossible. In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Judith Butler points to this kind of silence, this “unnameability” as a covert strategy of hegemonic oppression:

Here it becomes important to recognize that oppression works not merely through acts of overt prohibition, but covertly, through the constitution of viable subjects and through the corollary constitution of a domain of unviable (un)subjects—abject, we might call them—who are neither named nor prohibited within the economy of the law. Here oppression works through the production of a domain of unthinkability and unnameability. Lesbianism is not explicitly prohibited in part because it has not even made its way into the thinkable, the imaginable, that grid of cultural intelligibility that regulates the real and the nameable.

(20)

To learn what Allen is teaching, to hear what she is saying, I must listen/read to/in the gaps and silences for the unthinkable, what Allen names, speaks in the gaps and silences, just as Ephanie wishes her lover/brother/double Stephen to do (but he doesn't because he can't). Listen to Ephanie's silence, the momentary pause, that contains the meaning, the self, the who of her. Like Stephen, I cannot necessarily hear what is in the silences, but unlike Stephen, I know that Allen's silences name the unnameable and speak the unspeakable in their subversive linguistic play.

TRIBAL STORIES

There is another location in the borderland where reader and writer meet. Allen's use of Native American narrative offers a space in which to write in words the unspeakability of race. By telling the stories over and over again, from as many discursive positions as possible, Allen writes Ephanie into the “shifting modes of identity” (Voice 8). Allen tells several versions of the Haudenoshonee (Iroquois) story “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.” It is a story she is also concerned with in her critical work. In “Grandmother of the Sun: Ritual Gynocracy in Native America,” Allen recounts the story this way:

Sky Woman is catapulted into the void by her angry, jealous, and fearful husband, who tricks her into peering into the abyss he has revealed by uprooting the tree of light (which embodies the power of woman) that grows near his lodge. Her terrible fall is broken by the Water Fowl who live in that watery void, and they safely deposit Sky Woman on the back of Grandmother Turtle, who also inhabits the void. On the body of Grandmother Turtle earth-island is formed.

(Sacred Hoop 15)

In “The Intersection of Gender and Color,” Allen calls for a way of reading texts that attends to “the actual texts being created, their source texts, the texts to which they stand in relation, and the otherness that they both embody and delineate” (314). One of the sources of the narrative of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky is that of written accounts of narratives told by Haudenoshonee tribal informants to white ethnographers and missionaries, then collected in Sanders and Peek's Literature of the American Indian.⁵ This is also a story that continues to circulate amongst Haudenoshonee tribal people as well as Native and non-Native writers other than Allen. My attention, then, is directed to the sources and versions of this and other texts, and how they work to create this new text.

Allen's use of a tribal story she would not necessarily have heard as a Keresan child, and with which her own Keresan cosmology may have no concrete connections, appears to be based on this notion of her “Native” subject position as assuring her unique access to material marked “Native” but not necessarily Keresan. An essentialist position would argue that because Allen is mixed blood, she would have a greater connection to and understanding of the original Haudenoshonee version than a non-Native would, even though she isn't Haudenoshonee herself but rather is Keres. She may, of course, have heard this story told by someone with tribal affiliations connecting the teller to its telling. In eliding the boundaries of tribal affiliation in favor of a generalized Indian, Allen in some sense co-opts this Haudenoshonee story as one of the strands of the web of The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. This move positions her within an essentialist dynamic that sets aside the socially constructed aspects of her tribal identity in favor of “Native” as an unexamined and naturalized essence. Allen in effect creates an essential Pan-Indian. This essentialist position forecloses my own participation in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows as an essentialized white reader. Leslie Marmon Silko, also a Laguna writer, sees this essentialist position as problematic. “The community is tremendously important. That's where a person's identity has to come from, not from racial blood quantum levels” (qtd. in Fisher 19). Since Allen does not participate in the Haudenoshonee community within which the story she is telling is embedded, we (reader and writer) are both inside and outside of the story, undercutting Allen's appropriation of tribal material unrelated to her own blood and bone.

By telling and retelling this particular story, Allen transforms it into more than a Haudenoshonee story. It becomes more than the sum of its tellings, rather a Native American story, part of the transtribal Native Narrative tradition. In Keeping Slug Woman Alive, Greg Sarris indicates that it is in a readerly reflexivity, an ongoing dialogue with Indian written literatures that readers of American Indian written literatures might best enter the dialogue. He argues that “the Indian writer is both Indian speaker and cross-cultural mediator, and readers must consider the Indian writer's specific culture and experience and how the writer has mediated that culture and experience for the reader” (130-31).⁶ While Allen's use of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky is de-contextualized from a tribal cultural specificity, she works to mediate cultural experiences with which she claims greater connection, a closer community. In this way, theory becomes fiction, and fiction reflects and becomes theory.

The story is told in the novel for the first time in a mode comparable to that of the version in The Sacred Hoop, as a brief, almost anthropological, recounting of the “legend.” “According to legend a woman had spoken to her dead father. He had told her to marry the sachem in the village downstream, who then put her to a series of unusual and cruel tests that proved her power greater than his” (Shadows 38). In this skeleton of a plot, devoid of the pulse of cultural context—an incomplete telling—Ephanie is disconnected from the story—it is not hers and it fails to offer her any healing at this point. But the story has now been remembered, and it is in the act of remembering that identity is (re)claimed. As Allen has so powerfully asserted elsewhere:

… we tell the stories and write the books and trade tales … My great-grandmother told my mother: Never forget you are Indian. And my mother told me the same thing. This, then, is how I have gone about remembering, so that my children will remember too.

(Sacred Hoop 50)

It is Ephanie's task to remember and tell the stories. Until she finds her place in those stories, she remains out of balance, without identity.

Ephanie herself falls through the sky and through the text, just as Sky Woman does, catching herself or being caught in the web of community and memory several times along the way. At the end of Part I, when she instead of Stephen leaves, she falls onto the road, leaving behind the community in which she has been embedded (mother, children, the apple tree of childhood). She falls into a new community consisting of urban Indians and Anglos in therapy. In Part II, she marries Thomas, a Nisei man, and gives birth to their twin sons. Ephanie falls again through the hole in the sky as she falls through the hole in her marriage. The fall is a document—her final divorce decree from Thomas. She falls into the next world, Part III, with her twin sons. This is when bits and fragments of her identity begin to cohere. The sickness caused by separations, silences, disconnection, and authority begins to be healed in dreams and remembering, learning to tell time and stories properly and finding a connection to “place.” But she continues to fall, because she hasn't yet fully understood her place in the story. Her final fall is a suicide attempt, which she survives with the help of Grandmother Spider, Naiya Iyatiku, a mythic and sacred Keresan figure.

The fall becomes a ritual death into life, into a “right relationship” with the stories and her “home location.”

She understood at last that everything was connected. Everything was related. Nothing came in that did not go out. Nothing was that did not live nestled within everything else. And this was how the stories went, what they had been for. To fit a life into. To make sense. Nothing left because there was no place else to go. Nothing left out because everything was remembered. Everything was told. What had happened in time immemorial, as the old ones called that time before time, happened now. Only the names were different.

(Shadows 191)

Everything is remembered and told, which brings us back to the notion of remembering as identity. If everything is remembered, then Ephanie's identity has been fully realized as Grandmother Spider brings Ephanie into the web, nestles her within the stories, thereby bringing her into a balanced community and a “right relationship to earth and society” (Sacred Hoop 209). As Silko asserts, identity is embedded in community.

The version of the story of Sky Woman told in Part IV immediately following Ephanie's suicide and return begins like a European fairy tale—“Once upon a time, long ago so far, a young woman was told by her dead father to go and marry a stranger” (192). Allen uses two culturally specific metanarrative framing devices. “Once upon a time …” is the traditional opening for Western European fairy tales, and “Long ago so far …” opens mythic Keresan stories. There appears to be a deliberate juxtaposition of Native American and Western European storytelling practices.⁷ This final version of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky sets in motion a merging of all of the versions and other stories used in the text, and it is with this telling that Ephanie becomes balanced, because she understands her place in the stories, both Western European and Native American, as they are merged in this final telling.

It is when Ephanie realizes that she is Sky Woman, the one who falls from the sky, in this epiphanic moment, that she remembers her first fall from the tree of light/apple tree as a little girl. “After she fell everything changed. How she dressed. How she walked. What she thought. Where she went. How she spoke. The old ease with her body was gone” (Shadows 202). It is after this particular, first fall that she is forced to separate from her friend, Elena, her first doubling friend. Their deep lesbian attraction for each other brings on authoritative, Christian intervention. “‘You know,’ she said, her voice low. ‘The way we've been lately … Hugging and giggling … I asked the sister about that, after school. She said it was the devil … That it was a sin. And she told my mother. She says I can't come over any more.’” And Ephanie understands “That she was falling. Had fallen” (Shadows 30). This original fall and separation from her other self sets off the cycle of illness and disintegration Ephanie suffers from for most of the text. And it is in her realization that this fall is only a repetition of all of the other falls—past, present, and future (mythic, historic, personal)—that she can be healed. She has fallen, separated and returned. Allen describes this same movement in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn: “It is not about redemption, for redemption is not a Pueblo (indeed, not an American Indian) notion; it is not about a fall from grace. It is about sickness and disharmony, and about health and harmony” (“Bringing Home the Fact” 571). The similarity between this insight into Momaday's work and Ephanie's trajectory is not accidental, I think. The text is, again, fiction theorizing.

The text itself is, in fact, another telling of the Sky Woman story which incorporates other versions of the same story (as well as other stories). Ephanie has a stronger power than Stephen, but she is unable to use it. She falls slowly through her sickness until Grandmother Spider saves her, and the soil of Ephanie's re-emergent identity forms around the community of the stories she has remembered and re-told. She is both inside and outside of the story, and “Inside and outside must meet, she knew, desperately. Must cohere. Equilibrate. No one mentioned it. They said it was all within. They said it was all outside. But she was the place where the inside and the outside came together. An open doorway” (Shadows 174).

CROSSBLOOD/LESBIAN

The open doorway is the one in and through which Ephanie comes into harmony and balance. As Allen's vision of balance and harmony, this text is an open doorway for me, the reader. Allen teaches her readers about who she is, through Ephanie, through both Western European and American Indian practices and world views. My reading of this text is not a “form of theoretical tourism on the part of the first world critic, where the margin becomes a linguistic or critical vacation, a new poetics of the exotic” (Kaplan 191). I am drawn to it because it seduces me, takes me in, moves me.

In “Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Caren Kaplan offers another possible position from which I might read:

For the first world feminist critic the process of becoming minor has two primary aspects. First, I must acknowledge that there are things that I do not know. Second, I must find out how to learn about what I have been taught to avoid, fear, or ignore. A critique of where I come from, my home location, takes me away from the familiar. Yet, there is no pure space of total deterritorialization. I must look carefully at what I carry with me that could help me with the process. This is crucial if I am to avoid appropriating the minor through romanticization, envy, or guilt. Becoming minor is not a process of emulation.

(194)

As Kaplan, Spivak and Sarris suggest, in order to read without foreclosing or appropriating Allen's “minor” position, I must include in this reflexive dialogue a critique of my own position in relations of dominance and subordination and acknowledge my “home location” in relation to Allen. The listing of identity affiliations (as in my case, white, working class, feminist, heterosexual, academic … and I could go on) has become the primary trope of the debates mentioned at the beginning of this essay. These lists never do enough. Rather, I hope to have performed a version of what Greg Sarris advocates, “written criticism” as a “kind of story, a representation of a dialogue that is extended to critics and other readers who in turn inform and are informed by the report” (Keeping 131). So, whether or not she intends it, Allen begins to teach me, strategically forces me to begin learning about what I have been taught to avoid, perhaps even fear. Crossblood, lesbian—these are the places in the borderlands and on the margins where I have not been or am unable fully to go. In speaking them, naming them, Allen troubles my relation to the center. Ephanie's disintegration will not happen to me, because where I come from is a different location in the margins. The ways in which Ephanie's story moves me may or may not be the same as the ways readers speaking and reading from other identity categories are moved. As Butler has suggested, identity categories are “invariable stumbling-blocks … sites of necessary trouble.” Yet it is the troubling nature of those categories that makes them so compelling (14).

Here I want to return to Butler's constitution of the “abject,” the lesbian as “unthinkability and unnameability” (20). It is precisely within the constitution of a lesbian identity that Ephanie is able to find balance and harmony. She in fact has access to a culturally specific practice, nameable and knowable, which allows her to draw together the disparate parts of a split self. Ephanie understands and names lesbian desire, after falling and landing on Grandmother Turtle/Spider's back.

And she understood. For those women, so long lost to her, who she had longed and wept for, unknowing, were the double women, the women who never married, who held power like the Clanuncle, like the power of the priests, the medicine men. Who were not mother, but who were sisters, born of the same mind, the same spirit. They called each other sister. They were called Grandmother by those who called on them for aid, for knowledge, for comfort, for care.

(Shadows 211)

From her home location as American Indian, Ephanie remembers the figure and presence of the “medicine-dyke.”⁸ And where I come from, the double women have become known to me, have been emerging from the closet. When they come out, they may or may not be punished; however, they are not called Grandmother and looked to for knowledge or comfort. They have been, in fact, unthinkable and unnameable—abject. Ephanie, however, does find a place where double women are nameable—they are double women—twice female. In speaking and naming lesbian identity, Allen centers the double women for reader and writer in a “mythic transformation.”

What I have brought to the text from my “home location” determines in part what I will take from the text. What I ultimately understand here is that I am required to learn before I can participate effectively as a reader. In speaking her own unspeakable position, Allen presses me to hear her speaking. I remain on the outside, but even as outsider I glimpse a bit of what it is to be Ephanie. Allen's tactical claims to authority as an essential identity of blood and bones construct a space in which she may speak and name, through Ephanie, a constructed social identity that transforms the borderlands of reader/writer/text—“an open doorway” (Allen, Shadows 174).

Notes

1. For a full discussion of both the uses of Lacan and the problems with the uses of such a theory, see “Reading Like a Feminist” in Fuss's Essentially Speaking.

2. See William Bevis, “Homing In”; Louis Owens, Other Destinies; and Andrew Wiget, Native American Literature. Bevis and Owens take cogent positions in constructing paradigms of what constitutes a Native American text. For a critique of Wiget and others working in similar ways, see Gerald Vizenor in Manifest Manners.

3. There are several interviews in which Allen refers to texts and cultural contexts which have influenced both her work and her sense of identity. See Joseph Bruchac's Survival This Way for a more complete discussion by Allen of these considerations. See also her most recent essay, “Glastonbury Experience,” in which she describes her pilgrimage to Keats's home for healing transformation.

4. To understand how the text writes itself as theory, we can turn to Barbara Christian's important formulation:

   For people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create … in the play with language. …

   (Christian 52)

   Christian's moves here are essentializing in that they assume an irreducible essence to which a kind of logic can be attributed, unexamined in its politicized, historical construction—“people of color” are always already “theorizing.” This unexamined essence is problematic, but if we take Christian's argument at face value, then we can see that Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows does just this kind of narrative theorizing via her use of tribal stories and in her play with language.

5. See Note 5 in “Grandmother of the Sun” in The Sacred Hoop for Allen's reference to this version of the story, as well as reference to the Mohawk version.

6. The troubling underlying assumption of Allen and others that the status of the reader of American Indian written literatures is that of an outsider presumes racial categories which define Native writer and non-Native reader. However, the reader's position, like that of the writer, is one of a multiplicity of subjectivities. So it is that the reader is coming to the text from many different positions, as does the writer.

7. Barbara Babcock develops the notion of framing devices as metanarration in “The Story in the Story.”

8. See Allen's essay “Hwame, Koshkalaka, and the Rest: Lesbians in American Indian Cultures” in The Sacred Hoop for her discussion of this term and American Indian lesbians.

Work Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. “‘Border’ Studies: The Intersection of Gender and Color.” Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. New York: MLA, 1992. 303-19.

———. “Bringing Home the Fact: Tradition and Continuity in the Imagination.” Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Eds. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 563-79.

———. “Dear World.” Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-1987. Albuquerque: West End, 1988. 56.

———. “Glastonbury Experience: Poem and Essay.” Religion and Literature 26.1 (Spring 1994): 81-87.

———. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

———. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters, Inc., 1983.

———. “Introduction.” Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970. ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: Ballantine, 1994. 3-19.

Babcock, Barbara. “The Story in the Story: Metanarration in Folk Narrative.” Verbal Art as Performance. Ed. Richard Bauman. Prospect Heights IL: Waveland, 1977. 61-79.

Bevis, William. “Native American Novels: Homing In.” Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Eds. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 580-620.

Bruchac, Joseph. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13-31.

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 51-63.

Dyer, Richard. “Believing in Fairies: The Author and The Homosexual.” inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 185-201.

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