Allen, Paula Gunn 1939–2008

(Paula Marie Francis)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 24, 1939, in Seboyeta, Cibola County, NM; died of lung cancer, May 29, 2008, in Fort Bragg, CA. Educator, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and author. Allen is remembered as a champion and voice of the women in American Indian culture. Though her own background was quite variegated, it was her Indian ancestry that inspired her work and motivated her effort to add Native American writing to the canon of American literature. She also worked to add a female counterpoint to the traditionally male voice of Native American literature. Allen published several collections of her own poetry, in which she explored the lessons she learned during her childhood among the Laguna Pueblo of New Mexico and the wisdom she acquired from the women role models in her life. She collected the work of other indigenous Americans, both traditional and contemporary, and published her own essays on American Indian culture and its creative legacy. Allen also wrote the novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), about a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her native heritage and assimilate it into her contemporary journey through life. Allen's poetry collections include Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems, 1962-1995 (1997). She edited Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing (1989), for which she received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Allen's other awards include the Susan Koppelman Award from the American Culture Association and the Hubbell Medal of the Modern Language Association of America. She published her own nonfiction in books like The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986) and Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-Crossing Loose Canons (1998). One of Allen's last publications was a nontraditional "biography" of the Native American icon Pocahontas. Allen taught literature, Native American studies, and ethnic studies at several West Coast and Southwest institutions, including the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico, and Fort Lewis College.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 8, 2008, sec. 4, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2008, p. B9.