When Mary TallMountain died in September 1994 at the age of seventy-six, she had been seriously writing and publishing for a little more than twenty-five years. Although her work never attracted the notice given to some Native American Renaissance women writers, her poetry and short stories have attracted a large and loyal following. Many of them are teachers who find that the spiritual quality of her work and her awareness of being a survivor (and more) often moves their students to tears. Her experience of being adopted out of her native Athabascan village at the age of six led TallMountain to write much about the pain of dislocation from one culture to another and of being displaced within American society. She has been a witness to the struggle for survival of the Athabascan people and of the poor and homeless who were her neighbors in the San Francisco Tenderloin...