The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

I live, but I will not live forever.
Mysterious moon, you only remain,
Powerful sun, you alone remain,
Wonderful earth, you remain forever.
All of us soldiers must die. 18
This attitude is not superstitious, though it can degenerate into
superstition when the culture disintegrates. It is based very
solidly on experience, and most members of the tribe share that
experience to some degree. The experience is verified by
hundreds and thousands of years of experience and is a result of
actual perception—sight, taste, hearing, smell—as well as more
indirect social and natural phenomena. In the West, if a person
points to a building and says, “There is a building,” and if other
people looking in the direction indicated agree, and if that
building can be entered, walked through, touched, then the
building is said to be really there.
In the same way, traditional American Indians encounter and
verify metaphysical reality. No one’s experience is
idiosyncratic. The singer who tells of journeying to the west and
climbing under the sky speaks of a journey that many have taken
in the past and will take in the future. Every traveler will
describe the same sights and sounds and will enter and return in
like fashion.
Generations of Western observers have noticed this
peculiarity of psychic travel, and many attempt to explain it in
psychoanalytic terms, referring to Jung’s “collective
unconscious,” for example, or to Freud’s notion of the projection
of repressed conflict. Nevertheless, the evidence, however one
interprets it, suggests that the psychic life of all humanity is the
same. Western sophisticates presume that the experiences—
sights, sounds, and beings encountered on psychic journeys—are
imaginary and hallucinatory; they are equally inclined to