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Pocahontas
Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat
Paula Gunn Allen
HarperSanFrancisco: 350 pp., $26.95
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IN her new book, "Pocahontas," Paula Gunn Allen tries to convey the spirit world of Native Americans by inviting the reader to inhabit it with her.
A retired professor of English and American Indian Studies at UCLA and author of "The Sacred Hoop," Allen is no outsider, viewing Native Americans' imagination and world view as a detached observer. The great-granddaughter of a Laguna Pueblo woman of New Mexico, she enters into it fully.
Borrowing concepts and terms from the late theoretical physicist David Bohm, Allen divides reality into "implicate" and "explicate" orders, or implied and explicit realities. In the explicate order, she writes in this new, thoroughly Native American look at the woman so famous in Colonial history, "events, people, objects, even planets and galaxies, take on the guise human brains recognize and consciously interact with," she says. "A rock ... is a rock ... a mineral [is] constructed of measurable, definable molecules that hold to a definite pattern of organization."
In Algonquin terms -- Pocahontas was an Algonquin -- there...