Spider Woman's Granddaughters

Paula Gunn Allen, a Native American scholar, literary critic, poet, and novelist, collected and edited 24 short stories by seventeen prominent and less well-known Native American women authors into the book Spider Woman’s Granddaughters. Drawing on the traditional figure of Grandmother Spider, who, according to the Cherokee, brought the light of thought to her people, Allen gathered both stories from folklore and contemporary fiction in order to fill the void she saw as an academic: that the writings of Native people, and especially women, have been marginalized by the Western literary canon. Allen, who is herself a Laguna Pueblo-Sioux Indian, set out to both understand and remedy this lack, writing an extensive contextualizing apparatus around the short stories in her collection in order to address a variety of issues that might be keeping Native Authors from mainstream success.

The collection opens with a long introduction from Allen. In this essay, she discusses the differences between Native American and Euro-American storytelling. In particular, she describes the ways in which oral and written literary traditions yield different kinds of narratives. She also writes about the ways in which Native stories do not valorize individualism in the same ways that European ones do – instead, the purpose of Native stories is to promote community and common purpose. All of this serves to give non-Native readers a way to understand relevant background and cultural nuances that give shape to the stories. Allen then dives into the uphill battles against intellectual apartheid, racism and sexism facing Native women authors, contextualizing these conflicts with an overview of the relationship between Whites and Natives from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Finally, she grounds this history and explanatory content with her strategies for organizing and selecting the stories she has edited together, which deal with themes of defeat and conquest; loss of personal autonomy, as well as national and personal identities; the struggle to maintain tradition, kinship, and values during the onslaught of a dominant culture.

The collection is divided into three distinct sections. Each section is preceded by Allen’s explanatory writing, in which she explains the way the section’s title reflects a Native concept; each story also features a short introduction by Allen which situates it within the larger canon of Native literature.



The first section is titled “The Warriors,” and features narratives about the bravery and resourcefulness of women in battle, women’s heroism in the face of defeat, and the ways in which girls are taught how to be battle-ready. But, as Allen explains, a warrior isn’t necessarily someone who goes to war – instead, it’s often a defender responding to an outside threat.

This section opens with a traditional tale, “A Woman’s Fight,” as recounted to anthropologist Frank B. Linderman by Crow wise-woman Pretty Shield. Shield’s narrative revolves around the priorities of battle, the nature of warriors and the power of women in traditional tribal society. This section also contains the thematically paired traditional Chippewa folktale “Oshkiwe’s Baby” and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich’s short story “American Horse.” In Erdrich’s work, during a dark North Dakota night, a young boy named Buddy huddles with his mother Albertine American Horse in an old shed as government workers determined to abduct the boy “for his own good” descend on them. Although Albertine is ready to die for her son in battle, she is forced to simply give him up to an overwhelming outside force.

The collection’s second section is titled “The Casualties,” and it features narratives that show the results of what Allen calls cultural genocide – families torn apart as children are removed from their parents. These tales focus on the act of holding on, even in the fact of devastating losses. One such story is Vickie L. Sears’s “Grace,” a contemporary fiction about two Native-American siblings who spent their formative years horribly abused in an orphanage. When they are adopted by a kindly Native couple, they don’t know how to respond to affection or care. Slowly, the kids grow to understand a few things about their own culture, and to start forming tentative bonds with their new caretakers – but in a cruel twist of fate, they are forced to return to the orphanage when their new father dies.



The third section of the collection is called “The Resistance.” It deals with ways that Native people can work against their cultural decimation – by incorporating and valuing oral tradition, by holding onto the ironic distance created by a Native outlook on the dominant culture, and by rejecting the shame that sometimes accompanies bicultural identity.

In this section, four stories make up a Yellow Woman cycle, revolving around a key figure from folklore whose abduction has a striking effect on her people. Two of the stories are traditional ones from the Cochiti Pueblo and from Laguna Pueblo mythology. The third is Leslie Marmon Silko's "Yellow Woman," in which a contemporary young woman is transformed into the mythological Yellow Woman, who is then lured away – or voluntarily goes with – a Kachina spirit. Eventually, she is freed both from the abduction and from the spell, but even after she returns to her family, the ambiguity of her experiences can’t be resolved. The fourth story in the cycle is LeAnne Howe's "An American in New York.” Here, the magical qualities of the myth are gone, and instead on the surface, the story is about a Native woman who goes on a business trip to Manhattan – a trip that is destined to be treated like a tall tale when she returns.

The collection ends with a glossary, and Allen’s notes about each of the collected authors so that readers can find more of their work.