Paula Gunn Allen Critical Essay | Gretchen Ronnow

SOURCE: "Sorcery of Her Own," in American Book Review, Vol. 14, No. 5, December, 1992–January, 1993, p. 12.

Author of various critical essays on such Native American writers as John Milton Oskison and Leslie Marmon Silko, Ronnow has served as vice-president of the Association for the Study of Native American Literatures. In the following, she offers a mixed assessment of Grandmothers of the Light.

Paula Gunn Allen's Grandmothers of the Light—A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook is divided into three main parts—"Cosmogyny: the Goddesses," "Ritual Magic and Aspects of the Goddesses," and "Myth, Magic, and Medicine in the Modern World"—plus an introductory essay, a postscript that explains the tribes involved, a glossary, and a bibliography. Allen writes in the preface that she has "gleaned from the vast oral tradition of Native American" twenty-one stories that have served as her own "guides and sourcebook [to] navigate the perilous journey along the path that...
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