Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Cannons - Softcover

Allen, Paula Gunn Gunn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807046418 ISBN 13: 9780807046418

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this captivating collection of unpublished and published essays, one of our most important scholars, Paula Gunn Allen, explores the symbiotic relationship between Native American culture and the larger Western world. Through her own history and that of other Native peoples, she searches for a connection that will link the eco-spiritual and implicitly multicultural heritage to the demands of an increasingly global and culturally unilateral community.

About this title

About the Author:

Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008) was a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Native American of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage. She authored many books, including The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition, and was the editor of Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, which won an American Book Award in 1990.

From Publishers Weekly:

While most prior efforts in the genre of the Indian professorial essay collection have drifted between incomprehensible and fanatical, this book from Allen (The Sacred Hoop), of Laguna Pueblo and Lebanese ancestry, is most often even-keeled (if on occasion overwrought: "Let me remind all of us that vegetarianism inevitably accompanies misogyny, racism, tyranny, gynocide, and infanticide"). As with most collections of the sort, the content is all over the map, from rape and misogyny, to criticism of literary criticism, to personal recollections and family ancestry, to an overview of Native spirituality. Even in this broad perspective, there seems to be a unifying theme. Allen best describes this cohesion when she states in the foreword, "Spanning thirty years, from the late sixties to the late nineties, each essay is, in its own way, an assertion that Indians are everywhere." There is some really compelling writing here, as in "Radiant Beings" and the whole last section, "La Frontera/Na(rra)tives." General readers will no doubt stumble through the middle section, titled "Wyrds/Orthographies," but the injection of Native sensibilities in every article takes this literate collection beyond the usual intellectual exercise.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0807046418
• ISBN 13: 9780807046418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272