SOURCE: "The Journey Back to Female Roots: A Laguna Pueblo Model," in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, New York University Press, 1990, pp. 339-54.

In the essay below, Van Dyke offers a thematic analysis of The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, arguing that Allen employs tribal concerns to discuss alienation, sexual identity, lesbianism, and, more specifically, "a journey to healing—a journey to the female center."

Paula Gunn Allen is a mixed-blood Native American lesbian who says she is Laguna Pueblo/Sioux/Lebanese-American and that she "writes out of a Laguna Indian woman's perspective" (Sacred Hoop). Allen continues her cultural traditional in her novel by using it in the same way in which the traditional arts have always functioned for the Laguna Pueblo. She has extended traditional story-telling into the modern form of the novel by weaving in the tribal history...