I am Laguna, woman of the lake, daughter of the dawn, sunrise, kurena. I can see the light making the world anew. It is the nature of my blood and heritage to do this. There is surely cause to weep, to grieve; but greater than ugliness, the endurance of tribal beauty is our reason to sing, to greet the coming day and the restored life and hope it brings.
American writer (1939-2008)
Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Native American, and Arab-American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo and childhood years. She drew from its oral traditions for her fiction poetry and also wrote numerous essays on its themes. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary works and wrote two biographies of Native American women. In addition to her literary work, in 1986 she published a major study on the role of women in American Indian traditions, arguing that Europeans had de-emphasized the role of women in their accounts of native life because of their own patriarchal societies. It stimulated other scholarly work by feminist and Native American writers.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alternative Names:
Paula Marie Francis
From Wikidata (CC0)
There is a widespread belief that we, Native American and nonnative alike, have nothing to celebrate. All too many believe we should give forth with great trills of mourning. But it is of utmost importance to our continuing recovery that we recognize our astonishing survival against all odds; that we congratulate ourselves and are congratulated by our fellow Americans for our amazing ability to endure, recover, restore our ancient values and life ways, and then blossom.
The community is the greatest threat to the American Individual Ethic; and it is the community that must be punished and destroyed. Not because Americans take much conscious notice of community, but because community is what a human being must have to be human in any sense, and community is what Americans deny themselves - in the name of progress, in the name of growth. In the name of Freedom. In the name of the Hero...It is not so strange that everyman-America hates and fears Communism. The very word strikes at the root of the American way and at the heart of the American sickness: a communist is one who must depend on others. A communist is one who must cooperate. A communist is one who must share. (2. "The Savages in the Mirror: Phantoms and Fantasies in America")
In America, law substitutes for custom. In America, society substitutes for love of family, comrade, village, or tribe. Walden is the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual. Alone with nature, not in it. Not of it. One can be with it as a scholar is with a book, but as an observer, not a creative participant. (2. "The Savages in the Mirror: Phantoms and Fantasies in America")
Can we, as scholars and teachers facing the twenty-first century, fail to realize that "something there is that does not love a wall"? Can we in all good conscience persist in walling off the mainstream of American literature for a tiny group of writers, and from the great majority of writers in this century? Isn't it time we realized the absurdity of calling a tiny brook a mainstream, consigning the great river to marginality? It certainly makes the margins the center of the action-an odd way for margins to act! Surely in this time we can cease to behave as though Thoreau's Walden Pond requires we keep literature forever enclosed. Even Henry David came out of prison in time! Let's join him. Let's open ourselves to multiplicity, and let the winds of change and of life blow freely through our conversations.
PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.
The planet, our mother, Grandmother Earth, is physical and therefore a spiritual, mental, and emotional being. Planets are alive, as are all their by-products or expressions, such as animals, vegetables, minerals, climatic and meteorological phenomena. Believing that our mother, the beloved earth, is inert matter is destructive to yourself. (There's little you can do to her, believe it or not.) Such beliefs point to a dangerously diseased physicality. Being good, holy, and/or politically responsible means being able to accept whatever life brings and that includes just about everything you usually think of as unacceptable, like disease, death, and violence. Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decayings, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them. Your body is also a planet, replete with creatures that live in and on it.