She retired as a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999. Allen, who received her bachelor’s degree in English in 1966 and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 1968, both from the University of Oregon, also earned a doctorate in American studies with an emphasis in Native American studies from the University of New Mexico in 1976. As a result, Allen’s thinking has been deeply influenced by the Native American experience.

She spent much of her childhood absorbing the stories and beliefs of the female-centered Pueblo culture from her mother and grandmother. She is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop (1986) Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn (1986) Publishes The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen (1986) Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The (1986) American Indians and literature Literature American Indian Feminism American Indian cultures and Publications 1986: Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop Race and ethnicity 1986: Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop Feminism 1986: Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop Literature 1986: Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop Transgender/transsexuality 1986: Paula Gunn Allen Publishes The Sacred Hoop Allen, Paula GunnĪllen, born Paula Marie Francis in 1939 in Cubero, New Mexico, has a Laguna Pueblo-Lakota Sioux-Scottish mother and a Lebanese American father. The Sacred Hoop is of added significance to lesbian, gay, and transgender history because Allen comes out as lesbian in the book’s introduction. The book combines autobiography with historical narrative, poetry, literary analysis, and myth, and explores how homophobia, sexism, and racism have significantly distorted how American Indian cultures are perceived and interpreted. In 1986, Native American scholar and lesbian Paula Gunn Allen published The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, the first collection of essays in which gender Gender American Indian cultures and issues and sexuality Sexuality and American Indians are examined from an American Indian perspective. Paula Gunn Allen, a specialist in American Indian/Native American studies, published The Sacred Hoop as a challenge to the Anglo-European erasure of indigenous American beliefs about gender and sexuality.

Off the Reservation by Paula Gunn Allen