[Ruta is an American short story writer. In the following, she praises Allen's storytelling skills, focus on Native American myth, and incorporation of historical fact in Grandmothers of the Light.]

Paula Gunn Allen is a lesbian feminist scholar of Native American literature, a critic (The Sacred Hoop), an anthologist (Spider Woman's Granddaughters), a mother, a grandmother, Laguna Pueblo and Lakota Sioux by birth, Cherokee by marriage. Grandmothers of the Light is a collection of Native American creation myths in which goddesses do all the work and even get the credit. But goddesses is probably the wrong word for these divinities, who don't dazzle or attack from distant thrones. Like the cultures that nourished them, they're down to earth, egalitarian, democratic, and resourceful, plunging their arms into the clay, the corn dough, the ashes, to come up with what's needed to create or sustain life. The Quiché Maya grandmother Xmucané grinds corn and mixes it with water to create the first men and women, after her previous attempts with mud and wood were comic failures. Spider Woman, another grandmother, is the Cherokee Prometheus. Old, slow, and weak in the joints, she invents pottery to carry a spark of fire back to her people from a neighbor country.

Unlike your run-of-the-mill tape-recorder anthropologist, transmitting tales verbatim down to the last grunt, Allen feels free to retell these stories in her own voice, conflating earlier versions, adding snippets of psychology, jokes, historical asides, and plenty of built-in interpretation. It's her tradition. She learned some of the stories from her great-grandmother, a Laguna Pueblo, and others from her uncle, who published collections of them, and still others from friends, swapping tales around the country. It's a live tradition and she's helping it grow, clearing away patriarchal accretions and restoring women's roles that were downplayed or cut out when male informants spoke to Jesuit priests or male anthropologists. Telling how White Buffalo Woman brought the sacred pipe to the Lakota Sioux, she's careful to note in passing that it was the woman of the tribe who put up the great lodge of four conjoined tipis, where the bestowal took place. And to shake up our preconceptions about the fierce warrior Sioux, she paints a slow, poignant portrait of the tribe at peace among themselves, during a time of plenty, before the Europeans came.

In the best stories, the gods are as close as family, only a bit older. Allen isn't afraid to fuse chant, landscape, and some fairly didactic bits of explanation to tell how Spider Woman thought the cosmos into being.

So she thought to the power once and knew a rippling, a wrinkling within. Then she knew she was old, and wrinkled, and that the power's first song was a song of great age. The wrinkling became tighter, more spidery, stronger. It became in one place. She named that place Northwest…. Later the earth would be ripples and wrinkles, spidery lines of power folded and enfolded into a tight moving shape, and it would also hold the great power within, like a mother holds new life. Others would also imitate this time: walnuts and acorns, apples and pineapples, cactuses and mountains, even the oceans would be like that. And humans, five-fingered beings, would grow wrinkled in their skin and brains, in honor of this time when she and the power made a song to form new life, new beings.

Some stories lack the personal touch. Allen's hushed, solemn account of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin's transformation under Catholicism doesn't begin to suggest the enormous vitality of her cult—as Our Lady of Guadalupe—in Mexico today. When she writes about the Maya it sounds worked up from books, and out-of-date books at that. At other times, her personality gets in the way of her message, as when she claims she has channeled communications form a crystallized human skull found in Belize some years ago. The last of the book's 21 myths is simply what the skull told her: a coy account of its genesis, discovery, and journey to Canada, where it now reposes. The channeled message ends with a prophecy of a new age of peace and harmony in the 21st century.

Goddess knows it's time for such a change. Allen's own pueblo, Laguna, lies just west of Albuquerque, where Sandia Laboratories, Los Alamos's evil twin, has engineered nuclear weapons since the 1950s, and just east of the New Mexico uranium mines that poisoned the Navajo water sources. The old stories foresaw these modern developments. The Quiché grandmother Xmucané made a race of people carved from wood who were too stiff and stubborn to bow down and worship. Because of their arrogance, their own inventions rose up and destroyed them in the end. The Navajo goddess Changing Woman wouldn't allow her son, Monster Slayer, to banish death from the world. "Some things are better left as they are," she told him, which could stand as a motto for the whole environmental movement. We need more of these wonderful myths. What we don't need is facile New Age optimism. Allen's power as a medicine woman derives not from talking skulls but from her own gift as a teller of unkillable tales.