Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Allen's scholarly works, including her popular essay collection The Sacred Hoop (1986), deal
with women's issues, the oral tradition, lesbianism, and female deities. In Spider Woman's
Granddaughters, an anthology of tales by Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Louise
Erdrich, Anna Lee Waters, Pretty Shield, and other Native American women, Allen attempts
to introduce "tribal women's literature" to non-Native readers. She similarly collects creation
myths concerning Native American goddesses in Grandmothers of the Light (1991),
projecting historical fact and her own insights onto these tales.
Critical Reception
Allen's works have generally received positive acclaim. Her poetry is recognized for its
musical qualities and her novel, though faulted at times for its broad focus, has been praised
for its examination of racism and sexism. While occasionally criticized for their lack of
documentation, her nonfiction works have been lauded as attempts to preserve Native
American culture for all individuals regardless of their ethnic heritage. Elizabeth I. Hanson
has asserted: "Where Allen registers her strongest Western literary key is in the shade and
movement of her hymns to the sacred in Native American experience. By discovering her
own mode of American sacred, Allen creates her own myths; she reinvokes primordial sacred
time with a contemporary profane time in order to recover and remake herself. That restored,
renewed self suggests in symbolic terms a revival within Native American experience as a
whole. Like Allen's own vision of self, contemporary Native Americans exist not in a
romantic past but instead in a community which extends through the whole of American
experience."