Paula Gunn Allen
Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo. Gunn Allen wrote numerous essays, stories and poetry with Native American and feminist themes, and two biographies of Native American women. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary writing. In addition to her poetry and fiction, in 1986 she published the book, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, in which she posited that Europeans had de-emphasized the role of women in their accounts of Native American cultures because of their own biases, as they were from patriarchal societies. Biography Born Paula Marie Francis in Albuquerque, New Mexico Allen grew up in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land grant village bordering the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Of mixed Scottish American, Lebanese-American, and Laguna descent, Allen always identified most closely with the Laguna, among whom she spent part of her childhood. She was not enrolled in any Native nation. Her Lebanese-American father, Elias Lee Francis II, owned a local store, the Cubero Trading Company, and later served as