The Compelling Stories of a Conquered Nation : Books: American Indians live as captives in their own land, says Paula Gunn Allen, UCLA professor and poet. Her anthology tells of their troubles and triumphs.

“We are ever aware that we are an occupied people.” The words are written in ink and blood and vitriol and tears. There is a distant but perceptible sadness in the eyes of the woman who wrote them, Paula Gunn Allen, editor of and contributor to an award-winning anthology of American Indian literature, “Spider Woman’s Granddaughters.”

It is against that backdrop of conquest, she says, that “we tell the tales of love, death, separation and continuance.”

To the living, perhaps there is no pain greater than that of separation from a loved one. Among the most powerful of the traditional and contemporary stories in this anthology, winnerof a 1990 American Book Award, are those that deal with separation by abduction.

“A lot of abductions went on,” says Allen, husky-voiced, 50, single mother of three grown children.

“My grandmother tells me that Navajo kids were brought to Indian schools in chains when she was in Indian school in Albuquerque. The Pueblo kids would go more easily. But the Navajo kids would come in chains because they would run away. That was true even in the 1960s,” says Allen, an expert in American Indian history and literature.

The daughter of a Laguna Pueblo-Sioux and Scottish mother and a Lebanese-American father, Allen says she never lived on a reservation but grew up next to a Pueblo reservation on the Cubero Land Grant in New Mexico.

She has worked, however, on academic reservations--the ghettoized world of ethnic studies, she says. But this fall, after teaching Native American Studies at UC Berkeley, she joined the English department of UCLA as a tenured professor of literature.

“I am glad to be off the reservation” and in the mainstream of American literature, she says, teaching about the varied traditions that shape American literature.

In addition to “Spider Woman’s Granddaughters,” which was recently issued in paperback by Fawcett Columbine, she is author of a novel, “The Woman Who Owned Shadows,” a critically acclaimed volume of essays, “The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition,” and seven books of poetry, including “Skins and Bones.”

Her eyes, which sometimes sparkle, sometimes seem glazed, as if clouded by a mucky memory, focus on a space beyond the dimensions of the room. As they do, she returns to the theme of separation and repeats the word, “Abductions . . . particularly Christian missionaries would come and steal kids from their homes and take them to wherever. I think it still goes on; it certainly went on up until the ‘60s. At these schools (Indian children were) violently abused, sexually molested. They were starved . . . beaten . . . frozen. If they spoke their own language, they were put in little sheds smaller than this table,” she says, pounding the dinette in her small UCLA campus apartment. “They were left in there for days in the dark or locked in closets.”

Because her parents believed she was receiving an inferior education on the Cubero Land Grant, Allen was sent to a Catholic boarding school.

She agrees that she wasn’t getting a good education, “but you don’t do that, you don’t send a 6-year-old away to boarding school.”

She falls silent. There is nothing she wants to say about her boarding school days. Then her eyes sparkle and she reveals she always wanted to be an actress. “Still do,” she says, laughing.

But after three marriages and three children, she needed steady employment. She put aside daydreams of stardom and took an assortment of jobs, from bartender to optometrist’s assistant, then teacher.

But she definitely never intended to be an academic.

She did not like to study and was generally afraid of authority figures. That fear expressed itself in many different ways.

When her daughter was in fourth grade in an Albuquerque, N.M., public school, she recalls, “the teacher put her in the corner.” The girl, a “bright kid,” would talk when she finished her lessons, disturbing the other students. “When I complained,” Allen says, “the teacher refused to move her from that corner for a year, refused to let her see a counselor or to remove her from the class.”

Why didn’t she take her daughter out of the class?

“Because I didn’t have enough sense to do that,” she says with a throaty laugh. “I fought and then I got frightened and then I quit because she was being punished. Now, of course,” Allen pauses and slaps the side of her head, “all I had to do was take her out of there, the truant officer would have been called, she’d have to see a counselor then, and everything would have worked out. But I got frightened.”

Of what?

“You spend so many years, generations, being brutalized by people who have all the guns, have all the money, the land--and what you get to have is what they let you have when they let you have it. And that’s all.”

Even today, she says, if “a BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) agent doesn’t like your family for one reason or another, tough, the kids go without shoes. That was going on in my grandmother’s day as well as now.

The BIA agents, the Indian schools, the missionaries--”I often wonder if we will recover from the poisonous effects of Indian-saving.” Allen says.

In a section of the anthology called “The Warriors,” Allen introduces Louise Erdrich’s short story, “American Horse,” with an explanation of a traditional Anishinabeg (Chippewa) women’s motif: “The theft of a miraculous child, son of a deceased father (and a father’s people) by a wicked witch and the trickery involved.”

Throughout the “Spider Woman’s,” traditional and contemporary stories are told; the contemporary tales, such as “American Horse,” wed ancient themes to modern reality:

Buddy had been knocked awake out of hiding in a washing machine while herds of policemen with dogs searched through a large building with many tiny rooms. When the arm came down, Buddy screamed because it had a blue cuff and sharp silver buttons. “Tss,” his mother mumbled half awake, “wasn’t nothing.” But Buddy sat up after her breathing went deep again, and he watched.

There was something coming and he knew it.

Buddy and his mother are Michifs, “Indians of Cree Sioux and Chippewa ancestry who intermarried long ago with Scotsmen in the western Great Lakes region,” explains Allen, some of whose ancestors were Michifs, too.

Awakened, Buddy’s real nightmare begins: Two officer s and that social worker . . . .

The three people came to a halt in their husk of metal -- the car emblazoned with the North Dakota State Highway Patrol emblem which is the glowing profile of the Sioux policeman, Red Tomahawk, the one who killed Sitting Bull.

In the tradition of the women warriors--often excluded from American Indian history, Allen points out--Buddy’s mother, Albertine, defends her son against the abductors, remembering first her own father, American Horse.

American Horse took the butterfly, a black and yellow one, and rubbed it on Albertine’s collarbone and chest and arms until the color and the powder of it were blended into her skin.

For Grace, he said . . . .

Slowly and quietly she pulled her belt through its loops and wrapped it around and around her hand until only the big oval buckle with turquoise chunks shaped into a butterfly stuck out over her knuckles. . . . She hit him so hard the shock of it went up her arm like a string pulled taut. . . .

Her father’s hand was on her chest and shoulders lightening her wonderfully. Then on wings of her father’s hands, on dead butterfly wings, Albertine lifted into the air and flew toward the others. The light powerful feeling swept her up . . . . It was her father throwing her up into the air and out of danger. Her arms opened for bullets but no bullets came. Harmony did not shoot. Instead, he raised his fist and brought it down hard on her head.

When Quannah Karvar, a translator of Ponca oral history and mythology, reviewed the “Spider Woman’s” for The Times last year, she called the 17 stories so “intensely beautiful and poignant. . . . stories so lyrically rendered that when they are finished their spirits linger.”

“There is a tendency to stereotype American Indian creativity--whether they be visual or literary artists--as only being primitive or belonging to the realm of ‘folklore’ in the case of literature,” says Shawn Wong, a professor in the American Ethnic Studies department of the University of Washington and board president of the Before Columbus Foundation, which grants the annual American Book Awards.

This is not true, he says, as is clearly demonstrated in “Spider’s Woman,” which takes its name from the Cherokee account of Grandmother Spider Woman, who brought the light and intelligence of experience to her people. “The title alone intimates the traditional as well as what’s being done in contemporary American Indian literature,” Wong says.

Literary prizes rarely go to whole collections, he notes. “We are one of the few organizations that do (give them),” he says of the Before Columbus Foundation, which will present the 11th American Book Awards in November during the Miami International Book Fair.

In “Paula’s case,” Wong says, the foundation was aware of and admired her body of work as a writer and editor.

She is a fine writer, he says, and makes an important contribution to the anthology in that capacity--writing about an American Indian lesbian in the short story “Deep Purple.”

Her introduction to the collection is an important statement about literature from the American Indian perspective, Wong says, and an important contribution to literary criticism in general.

Writes Allen: “For all of us, Indian or not, stories are a major way we make communal, transcendent meaning out of human experience. What differs is structure and the respective communities’ sense of the aesthetic. What also may differ are the experiences themselves.”

Experience: No other group on American soil is a conquered nation of people in their own land, echo the voices in “Spider Woman’s Granddaughters.”

The varied abuse the American Indian has suffered at the hands of wave after wave of alien conquerors, has created more than just families that are dysfunctional, Allen says. “The whole community is dysfunctional . . . filled with violence and despair.” Personally, she says, she saved herself and her children by “going to a psychiatrist” and taking “seminars in raising children properly (while) in college.”

Indian people have to learn that the “violence, the degradation, the child battering and the women battering men--which goes on a lot as well--the abuse of the elderly, were learned under colonialism, learned in those schools more than anyplace else,” and because of the economic despair that breeds that violence, she says.

The unemployment rate among American Indians is “60% to 70%. Life expectancy only recently went up above 44. Any Indian over 44 is living on borrowed time--a lot of that is because of infant mortality.”

She sees no hope in American Indians gaining meaningful, political control over their lives by building coalitions with--according to demographic predictions--the nation’s emerging nonwhite majority.

African Americans, who are substantially Native Americans, “won’t claim us,” Allen says. Even though the relationship to their Indian kin “is as close as mine,” she points out. “I know because I ask them.”

Typically, they tell her, “ ‘Oh, yeah, we went to the reservation this weekend and visited grandpa.’ ” In “blood and cultural reality,” she says, the African-American community is African, Native American and white.

In the American Indian community “the Indian and white culture work together,” she says.

She is equally dismissive of coalitions between Latinos and Indians. “The Chicano people, they say they are bronze. . . . they are Indian. Yeah, well how come the Indian people are considered the lowest of the low, where I grew up in New Mexico, among the Chicano people?

“And the Asians, are they going to see us as vital? No-no-no-no. Except for the Filipinos, they are very busy competing for the top of the ladder. . . . “

For “us,” she says, “there is no place to go except to the religion and tradition.” But they are “paving it all . . . destroying the . . . centers of religious reality of Indian people. What is left are bingo parlors.”