Paula Gunn Allen's anthology, Spider Woman's Granddaughters, combines traditional Native American tales with compelling contemporary writings from a variety of native voices and, most importantly, all told by tribal women. As Allen puts it in her extensive introduction, "One of my major concerns has been that these stories not be read as 'women's literature' as that term has come to be applied in contemporary feminist writing. Rather, it is of great importance that they be read as 'tribal women's literature.'"

This collection is unique historically, culturally, and creatively. It brings together and brings to life a special group of women. Some of them are long dead—for example, the Crow wise-woman Pretty Shield, who told her life to Frank Linderman, and Zitkala-Sa, whose stories were first published in The Atlantic Monthly at the turn of this century—yet their voices remain immediate and alive. Some have acquired respect and attention as writers, such as Louise Erdrich, Leslie Silko, Linda Hogan, and Anna Lee Walters. Others, such as Misha Gallagher and LeAnne Howe, are just beginning to see their work in print. What all of them have in common, though, is that their work teaches us, making us more aware of what being female and being Native American means. We begin to understand this in Allen's introduction, as she tells us why and how she went about collecting the stories for this book, giving us a history of Native American literature and the difficulties faced by native women in finding publishers.

Most helpful to the reader is the concise, chilling history she provides of the destruction and dislocation of Native American cultures. She truly gives, in her own words, "a sense of the cultural values that informed Anglo-European culture at the time of conquest and throughout the conquest and colonization periods" which succeeds in aiding one to understand "some of the differences between Native and non-Native understanding of both aesthetics and history." In the face of the white male domination of Anglo- European aesthetics, it is a tribute to the strength of female-centered, non-materialistic Native American cultures that they were able to survive at all, much less produce powerful writers less than a century after full-scale genocide was attempted against them.

The anthology is divided into three parts: "The Warriors," "The Casualties," and "The Resistance," further evidence of Allen's awareness of the sort of victory this volume symbolizes. In the first section, "Oshkikwe's Baby," a traditional Chippewa tale of supernatural baby-stealing, precedes and is set against Louise Erdrich's superb "American Horse," on the same subject. (The separation of children from parents is only one of the important themes running through this anthology.) Ella Cara Deloria's "Blue Bird's Offering" (which comes from Deloria's novel Waterlily, completed in 1944 but not published until 1988) tells of a young woman's discovery of the power of prayer as she saves her baby and finds her own "camp circle." The eleven stories in this section, arranged in such a way as to form a coherent whole, are all memorable. None, however, is more meaningful than the story which lends this section its title. In Anna Lee Walters' "The Warriors," two young sisters learn pride in their Pawnee heritage from their Uncle, a disillusioned homeless alcoholic.

The second section of the book includes only five tales, closing with "Grace" by Vicki Sears and "Making Do" by Linda Hogan. The power of the Sears story is not in its depiction of the physical and sexual abuse of two small Indian children, but rather in the short respite from that abuse. The sweetness of the children's time with kind foster parents makes their forced return to the orphanage that much more horrifying. "Making Do" is yet another example of Hogan's special ability to capture moments of bleakness and despair and fill them with rich spiritual and physical beauty.

The final section of the anthology, "The Resistance," continues to match traditional narratives with powerful contemporary stories. It links, for example, Leslie Silko's often anthologized "Yellow Woman" with the Laguna Pueblo traditional tale of how Whirlwind stole Yellow Woman (a powerful being who represents not only "concerns of loss, persecution, rescue, and the relation of these to the sacred," but also the sacred ears of corn which sustain human life).

Upon finishing this anthology, I found myself in complete agreement with Allen's introduction which said, "The stories are informed with humor and rich in insight. They sing the songs of the tribes as we make our way from near extinction at the beginning of the century to increased health and vitality as we near its end." This book is a treasure which informs, inspires, and leaves one wanting to hear more from these "tribal voices."