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Spider Woman's Web: Traditional Native American Tales About Women's Power
In the Americas, the oral tradition has created one of the oldest surviving bodies of literature on earth. Native American storytelling, in particular, stands out for its distinctive honoring of womanly power and the female forces of the universe.Gathered here are traditional versions of stories and songs that best portray this strength and vitality. Illuminating the scope of human behavior—from treacherous mates and medicine men to magical sages and murderous mothers—these tales offer universal truths. And for readers who wish to explore the transformative healing gifts of these stories in a more personal way, each is accompanied by thought-provoking exercises and meditations. Also included are brief introductions to provide historical and cultural context.
Entertaining, educational, and inspirational, this collection of timeless wisdom will shed light on the lives of readers for generations to come.
Entertaining, educational, and inspirational, this collection of timeless wisdom will shed light on the lives of readers for generations to come.
256 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 26, 2013
Picked this one up on our trip to Arizona because, hey, I like me some stories about women, and I'm not very familiar with Native American folklore. "Picked up" does not mean "looked at the content inside before purchasing." I liked about half this book. That would be the half that recounted tales that included women from various Native cultures. The other half, located after each story, was the "connecting the story to your own life" section. In each section, the reader is asked to do various things, some of which seemed more "new age hippie" than others. Put yourself in the place of each character. Okay. How would you (or did you) react in similar situations? Okay. Write a poem, story, or song about your struggles with the situation? Draw a picture. Make a sand painting. Make a shrine. Go get ears of corn and put them on your shrine. Go stand in a strong wind, then make something creative about how that made you feel. Write your death song, then sing it to somebody. And I'm sure all that is great for some people; but for me, it led to a whole lot of mental, "Really? Arts and crafts? Meditate in front of my special lady shrine? Riiiight...." So overall, the stories were interesting, but the self-help bit was irritating and over-the-top.
February 9, 2018
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.
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.
July 8, 2024
Existence, and the requirements for existence, have different meanings for people of other cultures and time periods. This book includes many different stories about women and other people. Each story includes actions or thoughts for the reader to do or ponder to help her/him better understand themselves.
November 27, 2022
One day I’ll read it again and actively do the exercises. I feel like I needed an intro read through first.
August 1, 2024
half logos, half mythos
February 24, 2024
This book didn’t do much for me. The stories were written in such a dry manner that there was no driving force behind them. As a reader I thus had a hard time connecting to this book. Also, the metaphorical connections made by the author in each reflection segment felt contrived and impertinent. Perhaps if these stories were fleshed out a little more, there would’ve been no need for the author to have to explain them! And then the stories…
Most of the women in these stories were protagonists because their beauty attracted men with nefarious intentions. They were beautiful, and we don’t hear much else about them. They were not reflected as empowered beings either- usually undergoing traumatic situations, it is the spirits that help them through, while much of the time they themselves are portrayed as a bit helpless. Or, the trauma endured by the women at the hands of men were what granted them their godlike powers. Much of their lives were framed as a reflection of the men around them. Lots of stories of women falling into marriages because they were pretty and wanted by a man for no other reason.
I’m not saying that these stories carried absolutely no weight- and there were one or two that gave me something to really think about. But I’m tired of the trope of women having to endure trauma to gain some sort of spiritual ascension. I’m tired of a woman’s value being determined by whether or not she is attractive. I’m tired of the stories of women fighting each other for a man’s attention.
I know there are many empowering native stories out there about women’s power, but these ones were conveyed in a way that felt definitively disempowering to me!
Most of the women in these stories were protagonists because their beauty attracted men with nefarious intentions. They were beautiful, and we don’t hear much else about them. They were not reflected as empowered beings either- usually undergoing traumatic situations, it is the spirits that help them through, while much of the time they themselves are portrayed as a bit helpless. Or, the trauma endured by the women at the hands of men were what granted them their godlike powers. Much of their lives were framed as a reflection of the men around them. Lots of stories of women falling into marriages because they were pretty and wanted by a man for no other reason.
I’m not saying that these stories carried absolutely no weight- and there were one or two that gave me something to really think about. But I’m tired of the trope of women having to endure trauma to gain some sort of spiritual ascension. I’m tired of a woman’s value being determined by whether or not she is attractive. I’m tired of the stories of women fighting each other for a man’s attention.
I know there are many empowering native stories out there about women’s power, but these ones were conveyed in a way that felt definitively disempowering to me!
February 27, 2016
If you think the old European fairy tales are violent then these stories are not for you.
I feel looking at these stories through the lens of Jungian interpretation, which the author does, is a wonderful thing. Understanding them from a psychological perspective makes the stories more understandable, at least to me. It also makes them more universal, in that the psychological issues being told about are common to all races. One does not need to be a Native American to know about abandonment, love, loss, abuse, etc. one simply has to be human.
It's also nice that the author includes exercises at the end of each story that one can do to help explore one's own psyche.
I feel looking at these stories through the lens of Jungian interpretation, which the author does, is a wonderful thing. Understanding them from a psychological perspective makes the stories more understandable, at least to me. It also makes them more universal, in that the psychological issues being told about are common to all races. One does not need to be a Native American to know about abandonment, love, loss, abuse, etc. one simply has to be human.
It's also nice that the author includes exercises at the end of each story that one can do to help explore one's own psyche.
December 1, 2011
This book is a collection of Indian tales involving women. The book is organized so that it can be used as a meditative journey into one's own life with thought-provoking questions at the end of each story. I particularly liked the inclusion of other similar tales also at the end of many of the primary stories. The author has coded each story as to what tribe it primarily represented across the USA.
December 16, 2013
This is one of my all time favorites! I feel like my spirit guides seriously sent this book to me for me to gain spiritual insight about myself and others in my life as it discusses the different archetypes. It definitely is a good one to read around a campfire or cuddled up by the fireplace for the evening..
June 10, 2016
I had hoped to find empowering and inspirational tales about women in this collection. Sadly aside from a few most of the tales paint women as weak, deceitful or even monstrous. I felt that the tales briefly mentioned as fallow up examples would have been more to my liking than those Hazen-Hammond told.
December 19, 2012
The stories were very interesting, but I thought the meditations that went with each one were very dark.
February 6, 2010
Would have been better without the psychoanalysis at the end of every story. This is why Anthropologists and Psychologists just don't get along....
August 16, 2011
Thoroughly enjoyed this book and the thoughtful questions and writing suggestions at the end of each chapter.
March 18, 2012
I actually think this is still the most loveliest book I have ever read on Native American Tales. This opened my eyes to incredible morals.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews