ABSTRACT
Both Paula Gunn Allen and Leslie Marmon Silko are mixed-blood writers from Laguna Pueblo, in New Mexico. They both draw on traditional tribal stories – for example, Keres myths, Navajo sand painting and chantways, Spider Woman stories of the Hopi Indians – as well as local oral traditions of storytelling and gossip. Concomitantly, they both draw on canonical modernist texts, for example T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or the writings of Gertrude Stein. As Louis Owens has demonstrated, these are mixed-blood authors of mixed-blood narratives. Consequently, for the non-Indian reader familiar and unfamiliar literary forms and narrative techniques jostle and combine in their novels. Although the European reader needs to inform herself about Native American culture, geography and history to fully understand this literature, it is possible, indeed desirable, to attend closely to the narrative techniques and substantive contents of the novels themselves. Written in American English and marketed for a wider audience than tribal peoples, these novels address their implied readers in such a way as to extend and deepen non-Indian knowledge and comprehension of tribal and mixedblood cultural and political issues. Paula Gunn Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, was published later than Silko’s Ceremony, yet it has not achieved the canonical status of that text. However, it provides a good starting point for an initial exploration of the ways in which mixed-blood novels raise issues and implicitly invite the reader to respond to them. Specifically, this text combines familiar and unfamiliar materials and techniques, allowing the Westernized reader to approach that which is alien through comprehension of that which is heimlich.
