[In the following negative review of Spider Woman's Granddaughters, Berner claims that the book is at times historically inaccurate and that Allen's editorializing and rhetoric have the potential to mislead readers and reinforce stereotypes.]

[In Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women] Paula Gunn Allen has combined several traditional stories with short works by seventeen writers, eleven of them contemporary. One can only hope that anyone who buys her book will read the stories and ignore her introduction and notes, which are marred by extraordinary historical errors. Some of them, such as referring to the Dawnes Severalty Act (Dawes) and John Rolling Ridge (Rollin) and implying that Calhoun was Jefferson's secretary of state, may be due in part to careless editing; but others, such as saying that "the Allies liberated … Greece or Lebanon earlier in this century," can only be blamed on her faulty grasp of historical fact. These lapses are nothing compared to her claim that in the twenty-five years after the Civil War "the Anglo-Americans" slaughtered "millions" of Indians, a process of which she says later, "No holocaust in this millennium has been more destructive." One can only wonder what she expects any reader who knows anything at all about Hitler or Pol Pot or the demography of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century to make of such a hysterical statement.

Not that this would matter if Allen's editorial rationale derived not from this preposterous premise but from a real concern for the literature that has been produced by American Indian women. Certainly the thrust of this review would be toward the selections themselves rather than what Allen says about them, if she were able to say anything at all about her texts that is not merely political. Beginning with her wild genocidal charge—which actually belittles the real victims of Sand Creek and Wounded Knee by submerging them in her fictitious "millions"—she develops the premise that American Indian women are "women at war" and then selects works which reveal women who are warriors or whose exploits she can interpret as warriorlike. She reveals little interest in the great variety of roles played by American Indian women either before or since their conquest. Her rhetoric, in other words, is that of radical feminism; and because she has chosen to define the enemy of American Indian women as both male and white, it is that of the reverse sexism and reverse racism of the fashionably "progressive."

One can only wonder for what audience Allen intended her commentaries. Why would any male—white or Indian—be pleased to have read them? Why would any Jew or Cambodian? Why would any white woman? Why would any Indian woman who does not share Allen's political premises? Anyone really interested in the subject can find almost all of Allen's texts in other editions and can leave Spider Woman's Granddaughters to those who read only to reinforce their prejudices.