SOURCE: A review of Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 344-45.

In the following negative review of Spider Woman's Granddaughters, Berner claims that the book is at times historically inaccurate and that Allen's editorializing and rhetoric have the potential to mislead readers and reinforce stereotypes.

[In Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women] Paula Gunn Allen has combined several traditional stories with short works by seventeen writers, eleven of them contemporary. One can only hope that anyone who buys her book will read the stories and ignore her introduction and notes, which are marred by extraordinary historical errors. Some of them, such as referring to the Dawnes Severalty Act (Dawes) and John Rolling Ridge (Rollin) and implying that Calhoun was Jefferson's secretary of state, may be due in part...