SOURCE: Holford, Vanessa. “Re Membering Ephanie: A Woman's Re-Creation of Self in Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 6, no. 1 (spring 1994): 99-113.

[In the following essay, Holford underscores the role of memory and writing in Ephanie's quest for self-discovery in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows.]

Paula Gunn Allen's novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows charts the near-fatal emotional breakdown of Ephanie, a “half-breed” Guadalupe Indian living in New Mexico who, torn between the conflicting demands and beliefs of two cultures; feels incomplete to the point of panic but, initially, lacks the strength to overcome all that oppresses her. Gradually, though, she begins to create connections and build foundations by reflecting on her past, on the forces that have taught her self-hatred, on the relationships that have harmed her, and on the necessary decisions she needs to make to remember her own creative potential. Ephanie's story is at first the retelling of a painful struggle, but, as she begins to re-discover her self, her recovery becomes an affirmation of the power of language for self-definition, the creative power of united women, and the necessity of memory for self- and tribal-preservation. Ephanie must spin her own “web” of identity to re-forge connections with her tribal community, her family, her history, and her strength as a woman.

But, the ability to spin these webs of identity requires memory and knowledge that were denied to Ephanie during her education in boarding school. By putting her story into words, Ephanie relearns the art of remembering and is able to establish a connection with the Grandmother's spirit who eventually helps reunite Ephanie with her history, her body and her self. She “had forgotten how to spin dreams, imaginings about her life, her future self, her present delights. Had cut herself off from the sweet spring of her own being” (203). Ephanie struggles to articulate and thus celebrate those “imaginings,” and so Gunn Allen's use of writing as self-discovery and as a self-preserving act has an affinity with Hélène Cixous's call to women: “Woman must write her self” (Laugh 245). Like Cixous, Gunn Allen sees women's writing as the potential for self-actualization. Indeed, Shadows [The Woman Who Owned the Shadows] is a log of Ephanie's rediscovery through language, of her personal value and abilities after years of membership in a culture that demands guilt and self-effacement as its entrance fee. Ephanie is a colonized American woman forced to deny her identity in order to fit into a social structure that ignores her value. In a dream, Ephanie sees a museum; describing it to her therapist later, she unwittingly describes herself:

I am a bulwark. A strength. Half of what is stored in me is unrecognized by the people who work here. They can't begin to understand the knowledge and the treasures that I hold in me. But I keep these things safe. For sometime when there will be those who can understand, who can recognize what the artifacts and treasures I keep are worth.

(86)

As she begins to articulate her unrecognized value through metaphor, she starts to piece together her own long-forgotten treasures.

Critic Elizabeth Hanson questions the stylistic choices Allen made in writing the novel. She calls it an “episodic, uneven, seemingly unedited novel,” and she feels that it results in “unfulfilled promise” (35). Indeed, Shadows often jumps from thought to thought, scene to scene, without transition or explanation. But women writers within different cultural contexts have recognized the necessity of self-exploration through language, and this kind of search often uses fragmented discourse. Hélène Cixous and other French feminists hail ecriture feminine, or feminine writing, because it strives to “undermine the dominant phallogocentric logic, split open the closure of the binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality” (Moi 108). Despite cultural differences among women around the world and despite accusations that Western feminists are part of the effort to “divide and weaken … [Native American] communities by defining ‘male energy’ as ‘the enemy’” (Jaimes 335), the goals of Cixous' approach to writing make her feminist theory useful in examining Gunn Allen's creation of the character Ephanie. There is an urgency behind women's self-expression that has resulted from years of oppression. In the case of American Indian women, this urgency is unique and tenfold. Gunn Allen herself stresses this uniqueness:

I want the reader to understand that tribal women—who have many differences from and with Indian men, to be sure—have even greater differences from non-Indian women, particularly white women. … We are not so much ‘women,’ as American Indian women; our stories, like our lives, necessarily reflect that fundamental identity. And as American Indian Women, we are women at war.

(Spider Woman's Granddaughters 24)

The urgency of “women at war” enlivens Gunn Allen's text with the possibility of change. With its life-preserving purpose, Gunn Allen's writing responds to years of colonization with the same vigor and drive that Cixous attributes to colonized people in a larger context:

colonized peoples of yesterday, … those who have known the ignominy of persecution derive from it an obstinate future desire for grandeur; those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air.

(258)

While all women have known “the ignominy of persecution,” Anglo-European women writers like Cixous struggle to taste that “free air” by breaking down the male constructs of writing, searching for meaning in its gaps. Cixous' deconstructive action is not the same as the creative action Gunn Allen uses in her novel; Gunn Allen creates layers of meaning and cycles of memory in Ephanie's story that are informed by ritual and tribal membership. But Ephanie, too, must struggle with alienation from her native language and with the restrictions of the English language:

Ephanie did not talk Guadalupe. … She did not know the tongue, but she knew the thought, its complication that piled one thing atop another, folded this within that, went from within to without and made what was without within. She knew that everything moved and everything balanced, always, in her language, her alien crippled tongue, the English that was ever unbalanced, ever in pieces, she groped with her words and her thought to make whole what she could not say. … Ever she moved her tongue, searching for a way to mean in words what she meant in thought. For her thought was the Grandmother's, was the people's, even though her language was a stranger's tongue.

(69-70)

Ephanie tries to piece together self-definition in “a stranger's tongue,” and by the end she is able to make that tongue her own. Like Cixous, Gunn Allen's character is struggling for free air as she struggles to articulate meaning into her life:

But the words she had. The language wasn't built for truth. It was a lying tongue. The only one she had. It made separations. Divided against itself. It could not allow enwholement. Only fragmentation. And it was the only language they all knew together—the people in her world … The only words she had. The only containers for the food, the water, the soil of recovery, uncovery, discovery. To re learn. To re member. To put back what had been shattered. To re mind. To re think. The beginning so as to grasp the end.

(190)

Ephanie must struggle within the confines of the language of her colonizers, yet it is “the only language they all knew together.” Ephanie works with the language she has been forced to adopt, using the medium through which others will be able to share in her story. She uses English to include as many complications, folds and layers of meaning as possible. It is clear that Gunn Allen and Cixous, two women from such different cultural contexts, both present women with a means of redefining, rewriting, reenvisioning themselves through language.

Cixous says that “Flying is woman's gesture—flying in language and making it fly” (258). In Shadows, Gunn Allen flies from image to image within her discourse. Her apparent failure to use transitions is intentional and carefully crafted both to disrupt the confinement that English has placed on Ephanie and to communicate Ephanie's emotional state through sensory representation within language. We experience Ephanie's panic by reading it. Spasmodic flight between images and thoughts communicates Ephanie's personal fragmentation, while increased use of repetition begins to create a cyclical, more unified narrative whole.

In times of panic, Ephanie longs to fly, perhaps as a means of escaping the sense of helplessness she learned in boarding school. When Ephanie's beloved childhood companion, Elena, tells her that they can no longer see each other because her parents consider their friendship sinful and somehow wrong, Ephanie longs for the power to fly: “She put out her hand. Took hold of Elena's arm. Held it, tightly. Swaying. She looked over the side of the peak and thought about flying” (29). Ephanie needs to fly, to escape the relationships that oppress her, to seek out relationships that will strengthen her through complementarity, and to rise above the cultural constraints that have subjugated her healthy-strong womanhood. She feels this need, knows that it is imperative, and attempts to remember her way back to herself through storytelling. But this flight is an awkward and shaky one for Ephanie; she has some trouble taking off underneath the weight of guilt and self-doubt with which she has lived throughout her adult life. She had been numb to her own oppression, and the beginnings of her realization that change is vital take the form of an awakening: “I must wake up completely … I've been asleep for years” (Shadows 16).

Part of Ephanie's struggle for self-definition requires her to distance herself from the relationships by which she had tried unsuccessfully to derive meaning and completion. The first of her relationships described in the novel is with Stephen, an Indian man and childhood friend, whose own personal suffering has turned him into a victimizer. Ephanie sees his denial of memory and suffering mirrored in many of the faces that later surround her in San Francisco:

They all went about their lives as though the anguish had nothing to do with them. Like Stephen, lost behind the mountains, who in such fear refused, would not give himself away in word or deed. Who would not betray the pain. … He wanted to mean everything, be nothing. To live quietly with the anger, the lying, the blood. He did not ever want to acknowledge the brutal terror that was the certain measure of their lives. At home and here.

(58)

In his determination to remain “nothing, n he refuses to allow her any attempts at becoming something, a whole being. Under his restraint she has been restricted, kept from spiritual exploration.

The portrayal of minute detail in Ephanie's life serves to illustrate how deeply centered is Ephanie's fear. For too long, Ephanie relied on her relationship with Stephen for self-definition, and the effects he had on her self-vision were harmful. Stephen's poorly veiled manipulation of Ephanie is oppressive in both its subtlety and in her reaction to it. She simultaneously recognizes and denies his control over her:

[She] did not realize that it was he who told her often, every day, more, that she would surely die without him to secure her, to make her safe. She was helpless, he said. The blow to her. The mothering. She could not do. He said it. She silent, sick and exhausted, believed.

(10)

Ephanie, on Stephen's suggestion, is separated from her children who are the only “living proof” of her creative power, and now she needs to begin her search for a creative self in the apparently mundane dailiness of her life. She begins this search too terrified to contemplate a task larger than mere self-preservation. When she finally stops believing that she is helpless, Stephen insists that her desire to redefine herself is silly. Her pleas for understanding fall on his deaf ears:

“I want to be able to tell you how it was for me so you can understand.” She said. … Reaching back into myself … I have to keep renaming everything, Stephen, as though it were new. As if I were new. … “You are,” he said. “You are new, Ephanie. I have remade you.” He smiled, calm and certain. She saw how her hands shook.

(17)

As she struggles to find the words to express her rebirth, he uses language like a weapon against her, to cut off quickly the possibility of her new-found strength. Uncomfortable with her own ability to create, Ephanie trembles, afraid, over even a slight assertion of her right to personal discovery.

Her rebellion must begin quietly, privately, with the slightest of actions:

Among the litter of my own things, she kept thinking … As though it was a prayer, a ritual, a rite. Among. Pick up the robe. The litter. Walk with it. Of my. Put it down. Own things. Turn out the bedroom light. (Among.) Turn on the hall light. (The litter.) Go downstairs. (Of my.) And begin again. (Own things.)

(6)

Although she is hesitant in acting with strength for her own benefit, she at least realizes the possibility of beginning again. This seemingly small ritual is a precursor to the greater connections she will later succeed in creating for herself.

After leaving Stephen and moving to San Francisco, Ephanie finds herself still afraid to exist on her own. In another attempt to define herself through a relationship with a man, she chooses to marry Thomas, a Nisei (second generation Japanese American), who spent some years of his childhood in the World War II confinement camps for Japanese-Americans. But Thomas, like Stephen, is too wounded to provide her with the wholeness she seeks. As Ephanie wonders about her ability to help Thomas heal, we gain some understanding of his present cruelty:

how could she protect him from the years? The pain of knowing that his face, his manner, his blood, had kept him from eating food his hands had planted, had picked? … How did a child grow, seeing his presence causing scorn and hate on those stranger's faces? … And she knew what he felt, hiding it from his face with the correctness of his language, the nonchalance of his description. What words were there to describe people who would damage a child beyond repair and at the same time eat the food the scorned scarred one had picked?

(94)

Like Ephanie, Thomas was taught self-hatred as a child. But now, as she seeks a larger truth that will save her from self-destruction, he resists the memories that such a truth would unearth and refuses to listen to her attempts. Instead, he is left in the “unending quest for vengeance, for righteousness, for forgiveness, for salvation” (97). Like Stephen, Thomas uses language as a distancing device to remove himself from the memory of his childhood and the grimness of his current reality. Both the men in Ephanie's life can't love her because of the depth of their own wounds. Their denial of memory denies her the support, the acknowledgement, the connection for which she continues to seek through examination of memory. Stephen and Thomas keep her distant from the proof of women's strength that lies within her own history; they refuse to hear her stories. Both men turn their frustration, inability to live with their own realities, onto her. Victimized, they become her victimizers. Ephanie wants to be supportive of Stephen and Thomas, but, still too weak, she is unable. She must first become whole herself before she can help others, but her wholeness will require a partner, a balancer. Her healing will not be completely possible in isolation because she needs to find another half: “Half mind half knowing. Halves, pieces. Halves, doubles. Halves, wholes. When doubled. Placed together in the right way” (77). Ephanie needs to find her other half, to become whole, and for her this becomes possible with another woman.

Ephanie was prevented from learning the value of women's unity from Stephen and Thomas, and at the boarding school she was not allowed to learn her own people's history that would have provided her with strong female role models. Gunn Allen protests against selectivity—be it intentional or inadvertent—within history and warns of the dangerous potential of this “power-destroying blanket of complete silence … to prevent us from discovering and reclaiming who we have been and who we are” (Hoop [The Sacred Hoop] 259). Shadows lifts that blanket of silence, and in doing so it disturbs some readers. Those disturbed by the fact that Ephanie is a lesbian are intimidated by the refusal of mainstream, in this case heterosexual, confines. But lesbianism in the novel is vitally important because it is representative of woman's self-love. The characters who forbid Ephanie to love Elena are forbidding her to love herself, to be complete. Distrust of lesbianism is fear of women's renewed strength, self-value, and unity. A description in Shadows of the two girls' relationship recalls the twin sisters described in the creation story that begins the novel, “Uretsete and Naotsete … double woman … from whose baskets would come all that lives” (1). Ephanie and Elena are like these twins who create together as one woman: “They understood the exact measure of their relationship, the twining, the twinning. … With each other they were each one doubled. They were thus complete” (22). Like the creation twins, their identity is referred to as a single entity: “Though their lives were very different, their identity was such that the differences were never strange” (22).

United over time and through memory, women are complete; they are creators. Forced apart, forced to forget, and denied spiritual bonding between themselves, they partially lose their identities and thus their power, and “What Is Divided in Two Brings War” (189). When Ephanie finds a lover in Teresa (a white woman), she finds new potential for spiritual bonding, for twinning. Notably, it is Teresa who first offers Ephanie connection with her grandmother's spirit during a psychic reading. Ephanie's return to the creation stories of the Grandmother means a rediscovery of her self: a reconciliation with the body, a renewed ability for twinning, and a new realization of feminine power. She has rediscovered her memory, and “Memory leads to completion eventually” (5). As she begins to throw off the learned self-hatred “That made her forget the ancient secret knowledge of balance between opposing things” (97), she begins to gain a new acceptance of her own duality as a “half-breed.” In the final dream vision of the novel, the Grandmother will tell her, “‘Two face outward, two inward, the sign of doubling, of order and balance, of the two, the twins, the doubleminded world in which you have lived’” (207). But before Ephanie can completely understand such balance, she must unlearn the education that has kept her from achieving balance.

In boarding school, Ephanie learned the religion of her colonizers, and an essential part of that education was the lesson of guilt. The turning point of her childhood took place when, after being tempted by Stephen in a dare, the young Ephanie fell from an apple tree and broke a rib. The obvious allusions to Eve's fall allow Ephanie's descriptions of the change that took place in her after this fall to speak for all women who have felt forced to suppress their own views, lower their own voices, stifle their own cries, and squelch their own potentials. The guilt Ephanie experienced after her fall drastically altered her self-esteem, and it is only after years of torment that she is able to recognize the significance of the event:

Because I thought I should have been smarter than to listen to Stephen's dare. Because I was hurt … alone and scared and feeling so guilty. So guilty I never trusted my own judgment, my own vision again.

(205)

Her retelling of her own life history becomes a regaining of trust in her own vision.

Ephanie's childhood dreams of heroism were replaced by Anglo-European society's prescription for femininity. Her new distrust of her own abilities lead her to stop taking risks, and thus, denied her the potential to recreate her self through language. She became a “willing partner in the theft of her own soul” (19). No longer able to run free, no longer comfortable with her own body, Ephanie became instead a non-person, an acceptable woman:

Instead sitting demure on a chair, voice quiet, head down. Instead gazing in the mirror … curling endlessly her stubborn hair. To train it. To tame it. Her. Voice, hands, hair, trained and tamed and safe. … [She] dreamed of being tall and pretty and dated. Adored. Mated. Housed in some pretty house somewhere far from the dusty mesas of her childhood, somewhere that people lived in safe places and … spoke in soft voices.

(203)

This new Ephanie tamed her curiosity, tamed her bravery, tamed her strength. She became passive and plastic: “The old ease with her body was gone. The careless spinning of cowboy dreams” (202). Her former ambitions were off-limits to women, reserved for men and boys. She distanced herself from the mesas and memories of her childhood, forgetting what she was, what she is. Her body became a stranger to her.

An essential part of Ephanie's “education” at the boarding school was a forced detachment from her body. It is suggested that the young Ephanie was molested by a doctor in the presence of a nun, and as an adult she cannot bring herself to remember the details. Also, the threat of “sin” was the only explanation given for her forced separation from her childhood friend Elena. As Cixous has recognized, a re-writing of self will also entail woman's reclaiming of her own body:

By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display … the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.

(Laugh 250)

Indeed, the enforcement of rules in the boarding school censored Ephanie's breath and speech:

“Don't climb those weak branches, you'll fall.” Hearing the nuns say “Don't race around like that. Be a lady.” Punishing her when she forgot the rules and ran, yelled, jumped on the beds and broke the slats. Sending her to confession to tell the father her unruly sins. “Bless me Father for I have sinned. I jumped on the bed. I fell from the apple tree.”

(204)

This stifling suppression of natural energies squelches Ephanie's potential for self-expression and growth.

Allen emphasizes the danger of such censorship preventing unity and support between women. A male-oriented society distrusts the spiritual bonds that exist between women, and so the possibility of female bonding is stifled under the guise of piety. Lesbianism is made taboo because such cohesion between women represents a threat not only to male sexuality, but to male power. Even as a young girl, Ephanie was denied the positive, creative influence of women loving each other. She describes the relationship of two nuns in the boarding school who, because of their love for each other, brought happiness, song and dance into the dour, loveless place where the children were forced to live. That love was fleeting, however, and eventually the two nuns were separated:

The girls said, they must have been in love. And nodded to each other, and whispered. No one said anything about it being wrong. Ephanie thought now, all these years later, how glad they had all been that someone there was able to love. To laugh and shine and work and play and dance. And how very bereft they all felt when that love was sent away.

(156)

This passage echoes how very bereft Ephanie felt when Elena was sent away, and how Ephanie almost ended her life after sending Teresa away, and how Stephen's leaving left the room feeling “no emptier, no more silent than before” (17). Elena offered Ephanie the twinning, a creative unity; the sisters offered each other love and companionship that they shared with the young girls so starved for love at the boarding school. Now, Teresa offers Ephanie understanding; through Teresa, Ephanie makes the first connection with the Grandmother spirit woman.

Critics and historians of American Indian women's literature and culture are often uneasy with the issue of homosexuality, some even going so far as to claim conspiracy amongst non-Indian gays and lesbians to appropriate Native American spiritual beliefs toward their own political ends. For example, M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey accuse Gunn Allen of “pandering to the needs and tastes of non-Indian gay and lesbian organizers” (333), claiming that:

the desire of non-Indian gays and lesbians to legitimate their preferences within the context of their own much more repressive society, and to do so in ways which reinforce an imagined superiority of these preferences, has led many of them to insist upon the reality of a traditional Native North America in which nearly everyone was homosexual.

(333)

This rather strong reaction to Gunn Allen does not take into account the larger implications of preventing any union because of the genders of the individuals involved, nor does it address the role of lesbianism in Gunn Allen's novel.

In Shadows, Ephanie seeks spiritual union with both men and women, but in her case it is Elena and later Teresa with whom she achieves the twinning she seeks to create her own identity. When Ephanie is at her weakest, it is Teresa who is there for her, “offering comfort to Ephanie, strength, acknowledgement, making her who was fast becoming shadow feel almost tangible for the space of time when she was there” (178). Jaimes and Halsey paraphrase a poet (who is identified only as “Inuit” and “lesbian”) as warning that the connection between “Indianness” and homosexuality is dangerous: “the danger is that it could eventually cause divisions among us Indians that never existed before, and right at the point when we're most in need of unity” (333). But unity, or the erasing of divisions, is just what Ephanie is denied because of the homophobia around her and the “education” with which she was raised. With her final understanding comes memory of the “women who directed people upon their true paths” (211):

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 mothers, 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.

(211)

The “much more repressive society” to which Jaimes and Halsey allude is a reality that cannot be ignored because it is the society that has educated Ephanie, the society that forbade her memory, and the society in which she must survive. Before she can contribute to the total unity so very essential to tribal preservation, she must rediscover her own power among the women of her history. WARN founder Phyllis Young comments on women's unity as a first step in the larger project of liberation:

Our creation of an Indian women's organization is not a criticism or division from our men. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Only in this way can we organize ourselves as Indian women to meet our responsibilities, to be fully supportive of the men, to work in tandem with them as partners in a common struggle for the liberation of our people and our land … So, instead of dividing away from the men, what we are doing is building strength and unity in the traditional way.

(Jaimes 329)

In Shadows, Gunn Allen's vision of traditional female unity is adapted to encompass the doubleminded” reality of tribal existence within the United States by offering spiritual connection that allows for differences among its members; she does not portray a community that is closed to all but the purist full-blood members.

Allen writes about preservation of the “web” of tribal identity: “the oral tradition has prevented the complete destruction of the web, the ultimate disruption of tribal ways” (Hoop 45). However, a simultaneous, and very important, part of Gunn Allen's project is to modify the tales to incorporate new elements of outside influence:

The aesthetic imperative requires that new experiences be woven into existing traditions in order for personal experience to be transmuted into communal experience; that is, so we can understand how today's events harmonize with communal consciousness”

(Spider Woman's 8)

In Ephanie's story, specific details of her individual experience are woven together with memories of, and allusions to, communal experience, providing her with strength through connection to her ancestors' traditions. As Ephanie remembers the story of Kochinnenako, she realizes that Kochinnenako was the name of any woman who, in the events being told, was walking in the ancient manner, tracing the pattern of the ancient design” (209). Gunn Allen comments that the modifications of traditional tales within the collection of short stories, Spider Woman's Granddaughters, is a positive change:

because present-day Native cultures and consciousness include Western cultural elements and structures. Assuming they do not seriously dislocate the tradition in which they are embedded, this inclusion makes them vital rather than impure or ‘decadent.’ If they are really good, they are as vital as the oral tradition which also informs and reflects contemporary Indian life.

(Spider Woman's 7)

Gunn Allen's own inclusion of Western influences in her retelling of the Spider's creation story represents such vital flexibility in storytelling.

When Ephanie is visited by the Grandmother, who tells her the Guadalupe creation story, Gunn Allen presents a flexible version of the Spider's story and the Bible's story:

First there was Sussistinaku, Thinking Woman, then there was She and two more: Uretsete and Naotsete. Then Uretsete became known as the father, Utset, because Naotsete had become pregnant and a mother, because the Christians would not understand and killed what they did not know.

(207-08)

The implied fact that Thinking Woman precedes or encompasses Christian beliefs illustrates confidence in a unified world view which allows for differences instead of punishing them. In a passage that echoes the Holy Trinity, Spider Woman describes spiritual unity in the creation myth:

And Iyatiku was the name Uretsete was known by, she was Utset, the brother. The woman who was known as father, the Sun. And Utset was another name for both Iyatiku and Uretsete, making three in one.

(208)

The interchangeability between sexes here represents Gunn Allen's modification of sex roles and modification of tradition. Helen Jaskoski's recent reading of Gunn Allen's poem, “Grandmother,” highlights this difficult but vital negotiation between development and tradition: “the poem asserts change as well as continuity, evolution and growth as well as preservation” (248). Jaskoski goes on to read the woven blankets in the poem as “representative of androgyny” (248), suggesting that Gunn Allen's blurring of traditional gender lines is an ongoing project through which to negotiate tribal traditions' survival within the context of larger American society. An important part of the change she is initiating is evolution of storytelling into a medium to communicate with new listeners, a wider audience, outside the immediate tribal circle. In the novel, Teresa becomes the representative of this wider audience, and Ephanie's decision to tell her story to her daughter and to Teresa is a handing down of tradition to both the next generation within the tribal community and to new listeners, a move towards preservation.

When Ephanie re-evaluates the nature of her education, she understands her past and her self: “Because she fell she had turned her back on herself. Had misunderstood thoroughly the significance of the event” (204). As an adult she re-educates herself by reading about her own history, and her new education provides her with lost memories. Her remembering, which was impossible earlier because she would not allow herself to remember, is the key to her self-discovery:

And now remembering rose in her body, … and with it from somewhere far off, from beyond the shattering heat and the buzz of shade, of humming silence, of suffocation, there came, thin and wailing, unhuman in its wail, a long moaning rising scream.

(15)

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is that scream of outrage, of understanding, of remembering. Ephanie understands that her self had been stolen, a portion of her life spent in a prison, where she was kept unaware. Her remembering is essential to her survival; by recreating her memory, she recreates her self. The resistance to memory she revealed in early passages about Stephen and about the doctor was a psychological defense against the necessary outrage she would inevitably experience when remembering came. Now with remembering has come knowledge, and this time Ephanie will not let herself be punished for that knowledge. She does not remain trapped in her anger, but instead moves beyond it to seek a creative union with Teresa.

Cixous senses this unity and sees it as the driving force behind Woman writing her self: “In Woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history” (252). Old Spider Woman advises Ephanie to begin by sharing her story with her lover, Teresa, who is white. Teresa represents both woman's love for other women and the possibility of a feminine unity that transcends race. The Grandmother says of Ephanie's story, “Give it to your sister, Teresa. The one who waits. She is ready to know” (210). Paula Gunn Allen leaves her white audience asking, what place does the growing number of white readers of American Indian literature have in this arena of tribal renewal? Are we a welcomed audience? If Teresa's character is read as an answer to this question, then Ephanie's story ends with an invitation—to share in the stories if and when we are “ready to know.” We are now invited to remember our selves along with Ephanie and, regardless of race, to know again our full potential. Ephanie's newfound strength is the ability to pass on her story, and through telling her story, Ephanie makes real that potential for other women while preserving the stories and memories that are a part of her.

Works Cited

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtivron. Brighton: Harvester, 1980.

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

———. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters / Aunt Lute, 1983.

Hanson, Elizabeth I. Paula Gunn Allen. Boise: Boise State U P, 1990.

Jaimes, M. Annette and Theresa Halsey. “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North America.” The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance. Ed. M. Annette Jaimes. Boston: South End, 1992. 311-44.

Jaskoski, Helen. “Allen's ‘Grandmother.’” The Explicator 50.4 (Summer 1992): 247-49.

Moi, Toril. Sexual / Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985.

Niethammer, Carolyn. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Macmillan, 1977.

Seale, Doris. Rev. of Paula Gunn Allen, by Elizabeth Hanson. American Indian Quarterly 16.2 (Spring 1992): 301-02.