Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings

2. Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of Transformation

2 Self-Help, Indian Style? Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light, Womanist Self-Recovery, and the Politics of Transformation ANALOUISE KEATING Like an individual, America can be whole only by going back to its roots—all of them. My premise is this: the Native American story— and the holistic mode of thought it embodies—springs from the original root in our homeland. The story is designed to move among the strands of life’s web both within the individual and within the community , to restore balance and harmony. —Marilou Awiakta (1993) Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook (Allen 1991) represents a startling departure from Paula Gunn Allen’s earlier academic work in Native American studies. As in her groundbreaking collection of scholarly essays, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), Allen examines Native cultures , mythic worldviews, and feminist themes. But in Grandmothers of the Light, she employs a distinctly nonacademic tone and combines her personal experiences and beliefs with theory, history, story, and myth to construct a contemporary feminist, indigenous-based worldview, which she invites readers (of any cultural/ethnic/racial background) to share. Shaped by her belief in the “magical” power of thought and targeted at a wide, multicultural female audience, Grandmothers of the Light can easily be (mis)interpreted as a mainstream self-help book heavily influenced by New Age thinking. (For definitions and discussions of New Age thought, see Heelas 1996 and Aldred 2000.) And indeed, Allen makes a number of claims that could strike many readers as outrageous: she relies on her own “spirit guides” for information 31 concerning the stories she retells (1991, xiii); insists on the reality of the “spirits, the supernaturals, goddesses, gods, . . . holy people” (xvii), “extraterrestrials” (5), “little people,” and “giants” (6) she describes; speaks respectfully of the “channeled information” she received from the “Crystal Woman” (195); and asserts that the stories in her book, “when used as ritual maps or guides, enable women to recover our path to the gynocosmos that is our spiritual home” (xv). As she explains in the preface, she has drawn from “the vast oral tradition of Native America” to select twenty-one stories that have been personally empowering for her; she believes that these stories can assist other women in “navigat[ing] the perilous journey along the path that marks the boundary between the mundane world and the world of spirit” (xiii). Outlining what she describes as the seven-fold path of “the medicine woman’s way” (10), Allen suggests that the stories in her collection can teach readers how to follow this path in a sacred manner. But what can it mean to use indigenous stories as “ritual maps,” or to follow “the medicine woman’s way”? Given the brutal history of interactions between Native and non-Native peoples in the Americas—a history which Allen herself has explored in painful detail (1986, 1998)— how do we interpret this open invitation? Does Allen rely on sentimentalized Indian stereotypes in an attempt to pander to non-Native readers who crave authenticity, certainty, and escape from their meaningless lives (Vizenor 1994)? Has she succumbed to the “plastic shamanism” of Lynn Andrews and other non-Indian women and men who make their fortunes through the “commercial exploitation of indigenous spiritual traditions ” (Aldred 2000)? In other words, does Grandmothers of the Light represent yet another version of what Allen herself has criticized as the ongoing “New Age cooptation and recontextualization of Native thought” (1998, 97)—in this instance authorized, authenticated, and essentialized by Allen’s family ties to the Laguna and Sioux? I would suggest that, despite some apparent evidence to the contrary , Grandmothers of the Light cannot be dismissed as a “New Age” self-help book that trivializes and commercializes Native spiritualities and beliefs. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. While New Age self-help generally reinforces the status quo, Allen attempts to transform it. Building on her personal experiences and her extensive knowledge of indigenous storytelling traditions, Allen uses these traditions to expose and alter the dominant culture’s epistemological-ethical system. Like the intricate, holistic story Awiakta (1993) describes in my epigraph, the stories in Grandmothers of the Light, drawn “from the original root in 32 CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT our homeland,” are designed “to restore harmony and balance” on both individual and collective levels. Allen attributes the personal and social dis-ease...