Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen (born October 24, 1939, Albuquerque?, New Mexico, U.S.—died May 29, 2008, Fort Bragg, California) was an American poet, novelist, and scholar whose work combines the influences of feminism and her Native American heritage. She played an important role in the late 20th century in advocating for the inclusion of Native writers and texts in the canon of American literature.

(Read Britannica’s article “13 Great Indigenous Writers to Read and Celebrate.”)

Background and education

Born Paula Marie Francis in Albuquerque (although some sources say that she was born in Cubero or Grants), she was from a family of five children and grew up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. Her father, Elias Lee Francis, was Lebanese American and served as lieutenant governor of New Mexico from 1967 to 1970. Her mother, Ethel Francis, was of Laguna Pueblo, Scottish, and Oceti Sakowin (Sioux) heritage. (Allen later published under her maternal grandmother’s surname, Gunn, in addition to her married name.)

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A Study of Poetry

She attended a Roman Catholic school in Albuquerque and, later, a mission school in San Fidel. Initially, she enrolled at Colorado Women’s College, but she left, to marry, before completing a degree. She had two children before divorcing her first husband in 1962. She then returned to school for further education, studying English literature (B.A., 1966) and creative writing (M.F.A., 1968) at the University of Oregon, Eugene, and earning a Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she concentrated on Native American studies. While completing a doctorate, Allen published her first book of poetry, The Blind Lion (1974). Married and divorced once more, Allen had two more children (one of whom died in infancy) and began to identify as a lesbian. Later in life she would call herself a “serial bisexual.”

Works

In her works and in interviews, Allen explained that scholars of American literature typically excluded Native writers from the literary canon and that the very existence of Native American literature was often denied. A turning point, as she told John Purdy in 1997, was novelist N. Scott Momaday’s debut novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), for which Momaday became the first Native American author to win a Pulitzer Prize. She told Purdy, “Without Momaday and House Made of Dawn and the Pulitzer Prize, none of us would be here, because it made people in publishing and the academy more willing to pay attention than they had ever been.” She also said, “I started doing criticism because nobody could read my work. Nobody could read Momaday’s or anybody’s, and so I started writing about it because there was no other way to get a readership.”

Reclaiming a part of her own heritage, Allen helped establish a Native American literary presence in the United States with several anthologies, including Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales & Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989; winner of an American Book Award), Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900–1970 (1994), and Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974–1994 (1996). She also focused on the experiences of Native American women in her own writing and has been credited with helping to dismantle stereotypes of Native women as passive or hypersexual. Her first novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), weaves traditional tribal songs, rituals, and legends into the story of a woman of mixed heritage whose struggle for survival is aided by Spider Grandmother, a figure from tribal mythology. In the essay collection The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), she argues that feminist and Native American perspectives on life are compatible, claiming that traditional tribal lifestyles were never patriarchal and were generally based on “spirit-centered, woman-focused worldviews.” The book contains one of her most anthologized essays, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,” which proposes that early white American feminists were inspired by the matriarchal Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Her biography Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2003) was praised for offering a more complex and culturally correct view of the Powhatan princess than had been portrayed in American history and in the 1995 Disney film.

Allen edited several general works on Native American writing, including the pioneering Studies in American Indian Literature (1983) and Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book (1991). Her other books of poetry include Coyote’s Daylight Trip (1978), Shadow Country (1982), Skins and Bones (1988), and Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962–1995 (1997). America the Beautiful: Last Poems was posthumously published in 2010.

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Teaching career and honors

In addition to writing, Allen taught courses in Native American studies and English at numerous universities, including San Diego State University, San Francisco State University, the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Her honors included a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1977) and a Lannan Foundation literary fellowship for poetry (2007). She also received the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association (1999) and a lifetime achievement award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas (2001).