This dissertation argues that numerous parallels exist between Native American literature, especially that by women, and contemporary feminist literary and cultural theories, as both seek to undermine the hierarchy of voice: who can speak? what can be said? when? how? under what conditions? After the ideas find voice, what action is permitted to women? All of these factors influence what African American cultural theorist bell hooks terms the revolutionary gesture of "coming to voice." These essays explore the ways Native American women have voiced their lives through the oral tradition and through writing. For Native American women of mixed blood, the crucial search for identity and voice must frequently be conducted in the language of the colonizer, English, and in concert with a concern for community and landscape. Among the topics addressed in the study are (1) the negotiation of identity of those who must act in more than one culture; (2) ethnocentrism in ethnographic reports of tribal women's lives; (3) misogyny in a "canonical" Native American text; (4) the ethics of intercultural literary collaboration; (5) commonality in inter-cultural texts; and (6) transformation through rejection of Western privileging of opposition, polarity, and hierarchy.

The polemical debate, within feminist theory in North America, in the 1980s, around essentialism is the central focus of this thesis. / In particular, this work attempts to critically examine the notion of essentialism, the resistance to accepting a feminine "essence," and the loosely defined and employed terminology surrounding this field of inquiry. In accomplishing these objectives I draw upon, and critique, the more recent work elaborated around theorizing with/through the "body." / Aspects of feminist theory which are examined as contributive towards the above aim are an analysis of the explicit, and implicit, dangers of accepting or discarding essentialism, and an analysis of the inherent ontological and philosophical tenets that function within this present discourse. / It is maintained that by addressing the issue of essentialism, the relationship between subjectivity, identity, and gender, within feminist theory, will be liberated from further constraining propositions.

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