Many voices fill the pages of Lois Beardslee's The Women's Warrior Society. In this text premised on vignettes rather than linear narrative, Beardslee explores the lives of Native American women across America. These women are all identified as warriors, part of a community of Native American women who draw energy and support from one another. Yet, they all also face economic hardship at large in a society where, Beardslee suggests, educational achievement will not help you obtain a job if you're Native American.

In order to connect these vignettes together, Beardslee relies on repeated phrases and scenes, which she also deploys in order to offer up a depiction of Native American women that departs from and contradicts stereotypical notions. Many of the vignettes begin with a variation on "…these three Indian women warriors walk into a bar" (p. 54), a statement the speaker immediately corrects again and again by showing the reality of the situation where the spaces occupied by these women warriors are instead libraries and job sites. Beardslee presents the use of repetition here and elsewhere as attempts to destroy the incorrect visions that society at large generates and perpetuates.

Her mission, then, is one of rewriting narrative and with each repeated scene or phrase, the intensity of the prose increases, swelling at apt moments into diatribe, such as when she again reminds her readers, "Do you get it? Do you get it yet? It’s a LIBRARY. The Indian women warriors are walking into a LIBRARY. And they’ve all been to college. And they can all read and write. And they are not alcoholics" (p. 75). Although a text with repetition as one of its key features could easily slip into monotony, Beardslee instead builds energy with repetition, illustrating the didactic quality of such moments.

These instances reveal how The Women's Warrior Society.knowingly acts as a feminist text, with section titles that recall Simone De Beauvoir's formative The Second Sex: "Wimen Warriors [sic] Are Not Born, They Are Made" (p. 30) and "Wimen Warriors Are Not Born, They Are Trained" (p. 85). Yet, this is not a feminism where all women are united, but it is a feminism very much aware of how white feminists have ignored and even stifled the rights of native women. One of the women warriors in the text interprets Barbara Kingslover's The Bean Trees, often read as part of the feminist project, in this manner, arguing that her ridiculous portrayal of native women is harmful because "IT PROMOTES STEREOTYPES THAT HURT [NATIVE WOMEN] IN SOCIOECONOMIC TERMS" (p. 89). Moreover, in the narrative itself, white women in the roles of librarians and directors of nonprofit nature institutions are also unable to tap into or properly understand the world of these women warriors. Rather, the women occupy a separate space, which echoes Gloria Anzaldúa's conception of the third space, populated by societal rejects. Beardslee's work also operates as a text of third-world feminism in pinpointing how the universalizing that Western feminism promotes falls apart where women of color are concerned.

Her book thereby continues the questioning of mainstream feminism that situates it within the postcolonial feminist tradition. Beardslee also begins to bridge the divide between these women and society by helping readers understand their world. These warriors may appear demure and unassuming in the world at large, but when they come together in libraries, homes, or other meeting spaces transformed into nouveau sweatlodges, they undo their barrettes and thereby release the "elk and windstorms and wild mustangs and '57 Chevys running in their hair" (p. 15). The unclipping of their barrettes reveals the entirety of their identities, which they conceal from the outside world. In juxtaposing these spaces of community and release with the difficult quotidian existences of these women, Beardslee creates a compelling narrative that draws the reader farther and farther in as the scenes build off of one another.

Beardslee's past texts also specifically treat the plight of Native American women, and, along with this text, work to address the liminal position of native women in relation to society, as well as to redress any false ideas that these women might be subservient, even if they have to take up jobs beneath them due to discrimination. Her words are often harsh in tone, especially when she includes non-native voices who disparage these women warriors, but her text is never so virulent as to be off-putting. Rather, her text, in tackling these tough issues face-on, serves as an important piece of literature that situates Native American women in the many spaces they occupy in their daily lives—both in their internal communities and in the outside world. This multi-faceted text not only serves as an engaging read in the richness of its words and images, but it also functions as a manifesto and vessel of hope where the space most often presented in the book—the library—acts as the site where the women warriors hatch their plans and help both young and old in an effort to overcome the hardships that society imposes on them while retaining vital connections to their community.



Reviewed by Margaret Galvan, City University of New York (CUNY).

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