The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

presume that thoughts are idiosyncratic events of no real
consequence. Nowhere in the literature on ceremonialism have I
encountered a Western writer willing to suggest that the
“spiritual and the commonplace are one.” 19 Many argue that
these “hallucinations” are good, others that they are the product
of diseased minds, 20 but none suggests that one may actually be
“seated amid the rainbow.”
Symbols in American Indian systems are not symbolic in the
usual sense of the word. The words articulate reality—not
“psychological” or imagined reality, not emotive reality
captured metaphorically in an attempt to fuse thought and feeling,
but that reality where thought and feeling are one, where
objective and subjective are one, where speaker and listener are
one, where sound and sense are one.
The many kinds of American Indian literature can be
categorized in various ways, but, given the assumptions behind
the creation and performance of the literature, a useful division
might be along functional lines rather than along more
mechanical ones.
It might be said that the basic purpose of any culture is to
maintain the ideal status quo. What creates differences among
cultures and literatures is the way in which the people go about
this task, and this in turn depends on, and simultaneously
maintains, basic assumptions about the nature of life and
humanity’s place in it. The ideal status quo is generally
expressed in terms of peace, prosperity, good health, and
stability. Western cultures lean more and more heavily on
technological and scientific methods of maintenance, while
traditional cultures such as those of American Indian tribes tend
toward mystical and philosophical methods. Because of this
tendency, literature plays a central role in the traditional cultures
that it is unable to play in technological ones. Thus, the purpose
of a given work is of central importance to understanding its