The Woman Who Owned The Shadows
Paula Gunn Allen1983

"The Woman Who Owned the Shadows" is the first novel written by an American Indian woman about an Indian woman published in the last 50 years. The book starts where the rest of the world leaves Indians off: at the brink of death. Ephanie Atencio is in the midst of a breakdown from which she can barely move. She has been left by her husband and is unable to take care of her children. To heal, Ephanie must seek, however gropingly, her own future. She leaves New Mexico for San Francisco, where she begins again the process of remembering, of trying to sort out the parts of her. She marries a Nisei man, Thomas Yoshuri, feeling that if he needs her, she has a structure she needs. She knows him, but she doesn't. And she can't know herself through him. She begins to spend more time with a white woman friend, Teresa, but realizes she can only talk so far with Teresa too. Then, she spends a summer alone, and it is there she comes to her final remembering, and the way to her future. No longer seeking herself through men, she discovers her primary connections are to the spirit women of her people and to the women of her own world.

Titre original : The Woman Who Owned The Shadows (1983)