Somewhat--a whole lot--conflicted

Spider Woman's Web: 

Traditional Native American Tales About Women's Power

 
by Susan Hazen-Hammond

This book gave rise to a tremendous conflict within me--sarcastic dismissal versus respectful open-mindedness. First I'll write the sarcastic voice and get it out of my system, then speak more sensibly and kindly.

I wouldn't have bought this if I'd realized that half of the book is explanation, commentary, or "Connecting the story to your life" exercises. It says so clearly on the cover: each is accompanied by thought-provoking exercises and meditations.  The reviews I read must not have mentioned this.

For example, after one story she proposes this meditation: At what points in your own life have you had to set boundaries to protect yourself from people who claimed to love you have your best interests at heart?...

I don't mean to be a prickly agnostic, but the story in question didn't strike me as any sort of parable about looking out for yourself. In the story, a husband's two wives think he's died. One wife remarries and one remains faithful to his memory. When he comes back, he kills the unfaithful wife and lives happily ever after with the faithful one.

The meditation I would take away is,  "Think about times in your life when you let a man make unreasonable demands and get away with it." He was dead, for crying out loud.

One of the more imaginative tales is called The Quilt of Men's Eyes. It's about a group of women quiltmakers who rip out the eyes of young men and sew them onto a magic quilt. While the blinded victims wither away and die, the eyes stay alive. Great, spooky story--imagine being a child again, hearing it told over a flickering fire?

Then, two brothers are forced to walk through the quiltmakers' tent, but they keep their eyes strictly on the floor, refusing to look at the quilt. The eldest brother escapes but the younger is tricked into looking. He loses his eyes, falls into a spring, turns into a duck, then enters one of the women and is reborn as a baby. The baby grabs the quilt and runs, and all the women come chasing. Trying to hit him with hammers, they instead bludgeon each other to death. The brothers restore the eyes to all the men and live happily ever after.

But when it comes to, "connecting the story to your life," the author wants you to contemplate the times in your family history when talented women were denied an artistic career, or denied it to themselves, and what happened to them. How did they affect you?  Have you denied your own creative aspirations?

I don't get that out of the story at all. And I find it vaguely irritating that she feels the need to take a perfectly splendid tale and twist it to suit her her own devices. There were two other, equally farfetched exercises. Frankly, I'd rather contemplate the duck.

Despite my sarcasm, I think could be a valuable book for someone wishing to explore deep issues in his life. They're all perfectly valid, valuable exercises; all worth doing. I just disliked their pairings with the stories.

Enough ranting--back to the reason I wanted to read it in the first place. When I was reading The Prodigal Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, I was pained to see her struggles finding a woman's place in the Christian religious tradition. She eventually found support in the legend of Mary, the strong, faithful Mother of God, but that was all. (Although later in life, during visits to Greece, she began to recognize that all gods of all cultures weren't necessarily male.)

The native American tradition has many examples of the old, wise, and powerful Spider Grandmother. It's not Ms. Kidd's tradition, of course, but then neither is the Greek legend of Demeter and Persephone that she found so intriguing. In the book's introduction, Ms. Hazen-Hammond says:

Through the centuries, while their counterparts in Europe grew up on stories that depicted women as weak, helpless, sinister, or untrustworthy, Native American women grew up hearing tales about the powers and strengths of women. They heard stories about women healers, women warriors, women artists, women prophets. But above all, they heard stories of woman as the divine creator, woman as a supernatural power, woman as a force of transformation in the universe.

She concludes with a wonderful benediction that I want to remember forever:

May the spirit of Spider Woman, White Buffalo Woman, Nomtaimet, and all the other ancient Women of Power stay with you. May they protect you and guide you. May they encourage you and give you faith in yourself. May they help you feel connected with all those who have gone before. May your life become a dance of joy that celebrates your womanhood, your personhood, yourself.