The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

on human life, largely because conflict is as basic to
contemporary white fiction as ritual is to tribal Indian narrative.
In this way, they are novels of colonization and treat its impacts,
effects, and disasters as part of a novelistic plot.
Early novels by American Indian novelists leaned heavily on
the same theme of the dying savage partly because it was most
acceptable to potential publishers. In addition, popular and
scholarly images of Indians as conquered, dying people had
deeply affected American Indian self-perception, leading even
Indian novelists to focus their works on that stereotype. But
Indians used the colonization theme coupled with the western
plot structure of conflict-crisis-resolution to tell their own
stories largely because these structures appeared to explain
tribal life and its chaotic disorganization since invasion and
colonization. In such westernized Indian novels the Indians are
portrayed as tragic heroes, beset by an unjust but inexorable fate.
In a sense they become a race of dying kings. In all of the novels
that use the story of conquest, devastation, and genocide as their
major theme, white civilization plays the antagonist and becomes
imbued with demonic power reserved in classic literature to fate
and the gods.
The experience and the traditions of American Indians are
complex and diverse rather than simple and unitary. We are
much more than victims of white invasion and colonization,
though that is a part of our common experience. But the ritual life
of the tribes, the “religion” of the tribes, is also a common
factor. For although our traditions are as diverse as the tribes
who practice and live within them, they are all earth-based and
wilderness-centered; all are “animistic,” polytheistic, concerned
with sacred or nonpolitical power, and all incorporate patterns
that many in the western world identify as profane.
Indians have ever been polymorphous. Although commonly
tribal in outlook and culture, Indians and their traditions are