SOURCE: "Myth America," in VLS, No. 100, November, 1991, p. 26.

Ruta is an American short story writer. In the following, she praises Allen's storytelling skills, focus on Native American myth, and incorporation of historical fact in Grandmothers of the Light.

Paula Gunn Allen is a lesbian feminist scholar of Native American literature, a critic (The Sacred Hoop), an anthologist (Spider Woman's Granddaughters), a mother, a grandmother, Laguna Pueblo and Lakota Sioux by birth, Cherokee by marriage. Grandmothers of the Light is a collection of Native American creation myths in which goddesses do all the work and even get the credit. But goddesses is probably the wrong word for these divinities, who don't dazzle or attack from distant thrones. Like the cultures that nourished them, they're down to earth, egalitarian, democratic, and resourceful, plunging their arms into the clay, the corn dough, the ashes, to come up with what's needed to...