The woman who owned the shadows / Paula Gunn Allen.

Reprint. Originally published: San Francisco : Spinsters Ink, 1983.

When first published, this was the first novel written by an American Indian woman about an Indian woman published in fifty years. It starts where the rest of the world leaves Native Americans off: at the brink of death. Ephanie Atencio is in the midst of a breakdown from which she can barely move. She has been left by her husband and is unable to take care of her children. She leaves New Mexico for San Francisco, where she begins again the process of remembering, of trying to sort out the parts of her, ultimately finding a way to herself, relying no longer on men, but on her primary connections to the spirit women of her people and to the women of her own world.