Weaving the Visions

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Chapter OneOur Heritage Is Our PowerThis section opens with Paula Gunn Allen's evocation of the Grandmothers of the North American land and closes with Luisah Teish's eloquent and practical assertion that our wholeness depends on honoring our spiritual connections with our personal ancestors. In between we are given glimpses of empowering history in more distant pasts. The authors in this section agree that our heritage is our power, but they hold different views of what heritage is "ours." Some argue that authenticity is to be found in allegiance to the biblical pasts, while others reject biblical religions and seek heritages both nearer and more distant. Recovering the history of women is no simple task because so many resources have been lost or destroyed. The histories of women and female leadership have for the most part been excluded from the Jewish and Christian Bibles. The history of lesbians has been further obscured by biases against sexuality and homosexuality. Those attempting to recreate the histories of women and female power within traditions conquered by Christianity face an even more difficult task: the resources they need have often been destroyed not only by Christians, but also by pre-Christian patriarchal groups, such as, for example, the Indo-Europeans and the Aztecs.Perhaps in part because of the scarcity of resources for recovering women's heritages, the authors in this section employ a variety of methods. Some rely on written or archaeological evidence, while others freely invoke personal memory or imagination to fill gaps in the androcentric record. While these differences in method are significant, they should not be taken as absolute. All agreethat the history we have inherited is not objective, that it contains gaps and distortions created by the androcentric and other biases of those who have had the power to write history. Judith Plaskow speaks for many others when she writes that historiographical reconstruction o