[Le Guin is an American novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, critic, editor, poet, playwright, and author of children's books. In the following, she discusses the arrangement and focus of the stories collected in Spider Woman's Granddaughters.]

Louise Erdrich has become a best seller, and Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan and other Native American women rank high among modern writers. First with her critical essays in The Sacred Hoop, and now with this fine collection of stories [entitled Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women], Paula Gunn Allen gives us a much needed context for their work. In her introduction and in notes to the stories, Ms. Allen, a professor of Native American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses who these writers are, why they write as they do and how they are linked by tradition, by experience as women and as Indians, and above all by an understanding of what a story does.

For underlying these narratives, conventional as some of them appear, is a very different idea of the function of art than the Euro-American one. The difference is exhilarating. Ms. Allen helps us to appreciate it and to use it to get past the merely ethnic to the value of the stories as works of art.

And every story in the book, which covers nearly a century of tradition, is interesting, written with intelligent passion; several are real treasures. Impressive, too, is Ms. Allen's arrangement of them, so that they interact to form larger patterns, giving the book an esthetic wholeness rare in anthologies. That wholeness may itself be seen as a demonstration of a Native American esthetic principle: "Tribal art of all kinds," Ms. Allen writes in the introduction, "embodies the principle of kinship, rendering the beautiful in terms of connectedness of elements in harmonious, balanced, respectful proportion of each and any to all-in-All." So, despite its richness, the book may be read right through without surfeit. But one will want also to dwell on individual pieces, as one's gaze returns to the bluest turquoises in a fine bracelet.

Grouping the stories in three sections, "The Warriors," "The Casualties" and "The Resistance," Ms. Allen explains a guiding theme: "In the tribal way, war means a ritual path, a kind of tao or spiritual discipline that can test honor, selflessness, and devotion, and put the warrior in closer, more powerful harmony with the supernaturals and the earth."

Such a use of the war-warrior metaphor is familiar from the works of Carlos Castaneda, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. But I find myself asking if, in a world where war in fact means genocide in the service of institutionalized power, the word can be reclaimed as spiritually meaningful. Does it appropriately describe these stories? Are they war stories? There is indeed violence in them, underlying every one of them, though some don't show it directly. There is anger and determined courage in them. And the Native Americans' perception of themselves as being in an invaded country, at war, is neither metaphor nor exaggeration. But still I have to force myself to read these stories as hero tales about warriors. Ms. Allen's title, Spider Woman's Granddaughters, points to another central image in these stories—the family, a deeper, richer idea than that of war.

The characters in these stories are seen not only against, but with. They are members of a great family, honoring the propriety of kinship, grieving when relationship is dishonored or betrayed, celebrating familiarity with people, animals, places, suffering when isolated, striving to maintain connection under the indifferent, dispersing pressure of an alien power. These are sisters and brothers, parents and babies, uncles and nieces, grandsons and grandmothers, wives and husbands, cousins, orphans, lost children, adopted children, children of the People, of the earth. They are all related.

Pointedly and charmingly, Ms. Allen distinguishes the oral and the written as "told to people" and "told to the page." She shows how the two narrative modes work together in contemporary Indian literature. Leslie Marmon Silko's haunting story "Yellow Woman" gathers new echoes and depths by being placed after three traditional tales of Yellow Woman, Corn Woman of the Pueblos.

Reading an oral piece translated from its original language to English, and from voice to print, is like reading a musical score: you have to know a lot before you can hear what's happening. On the page, oral literature seems stiff and "primitive," because it's less than half there; it's only the notation of a performance. Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock and other scholars have solved some of the problems; I wish Ms. Allen had used examples of more readable oral transcription. But though we miss the music, we can pick up the story line; we can begin to get some sense of the world in which Yellow Woman has her multiple and immortal being.

One of the pieces in the anthology is a "told to the white-man" story, an excerpt from the extraordinary autobiography narrated to an ethnographer by a Crow, Pretty Shield. "Pretty Shield makes it clear," Ms. Allen notes, that "the one who tells the stories rules the world." Rather than ruling the world, perhaps, for Crow women had little political power, the storyteller runs it—she keeps it going, holds things together, weaves and reweaves the thought-web. That is what the women in these stories and the women who wrote them are doing.

Old-fashioned and melodramatic in style, "As It Was in the Beginning," published in 1913 by E. Pauline Johnson, tells of the betrayal of one way of life by another, the betrayal of a woman by a man, the vengeance she exacts and the loss she suffers. The loss is total. Nothing is palliated. The missionaries "teach me of [hell], only to fling me into it." The fierce clarity of this story is transmuted, three quarters of a century later, in Vickie L. Sears's "Grace." The tone now is quiet; the subject is an interlude of grace in a child's short lifetime of abuse and endurance. It is unforgettable. As in Chekhov, the voice of the child narrator gives pain a luminous edge almost too bright to bear.

"The Warriors" of Anna Lee Walters's story are Uncle Ralph, a drunk and a bum, and his sister and her children, who watch their warrior lose his war and do not cease to love and respect him. "He knew that we must live beautifully or not live at all." In this, as in so many of the stories, it is very important that the women talk together, stay together, keep the tale going.

The enchanting tale "The Clearing in the Valley" by Soge Track is a kind of many-leveled dream, like a pueblo dwelling where you climb up the ladder to come out into the light. That a girl child could actually take over the sacred duty of the hochin, the "watcher," as a character does in the story, is unlikely, Ms. Allen says in a note; but the passionately vivid detail of the telling compels belief. After his death, an Old Man talks to the child by the water, under the trees. He tells her a story; the story is true. Its truth is her obedience to it. "In beauty shall you sing for your people."

Humishima, or Cristal Galler, wrote her novel Cogewea, the Half-Blood while working as field laborer in the 1920's. Terms like "squaws," "papooses," "many snows"—the stock lingo of prejudice—impede appreciation of the real purity of the language and vision in the excerpt here presented, but soon one is caught, and longs to read the whole book. Linda Hogan, a fine poet, writes with great control and art, but her story "Making Do," about a woman who loses her children, has that same purity as Humishima's, and the same aching sense of betrayal and loss. "She looked at his small roughbox and said, 'He died of life and I know how that can happen.'" Every word of her story weighs heavy, like gold. "We make do," she says. "We make art out of our loss."

Indian humor is probably the quietest and driest in the world. The title of LeAnne Howe's 1987 story "An American in New York" is a good example. Her narrator goes on "high-stakes bond business" to the Big Apple; it doesn't take long for the worm to turn. "No wonder we sold the whole place for twenty-six bucks and some beads," she remarks. She talks to immigrants—an Irishman after the good life, a Nigerian cab driver who wants to "do something" about the plight of Native Americans. When she gets to the Statue of Liberty, she decides that Emma Lazarus was really an Indian.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

"You did," says the narrator. "Now where do we go from here?"