The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

multitudinous, and so are the themes of their novels. But more
and more, American Indian novels by Native American writers
are concerned with tribal and urban life and have taken up
themes that characterize and define that life in Native American
terms. Most of these contemporary novels are ritualistic in
approach, structure, theme, symbol, and significance, even
though they use an overlay of western narrative plotting. They
are the novels most properly termed American Indian novels
because they rely on native rather than non-Indian forms, themes,
and symbols and so are not colonial or exploitative. Rather, they
carry on the oral tradition at many levels, furthering and
nourishing it and being furthered and nourished by it.
American Indian novelists use cultural conflict as a major
theme, but their work shows an increasing tendency to bind that
theme to its analogues in whatever tribal oral tradition they write
from. So while the protagonists in Native American novels are
in some sense bicultural and must deal with the effects of
colonization and an attendant sense of loss of self, each is also a
participant in a ritual tradition that gives their individual lives
shape and significance.
American Indians are tribal people who define themselves
and are defined by ritual understandings, that is, by spiritual or
sacred ceremonial shapings. What they choose of the options
offered to or forced on them and how they shape those options
and integrate them into their lives are determined by the form
those choices can take within the ritual context of their tribal and
personal life. Ritual rather than politics or language forms the
basis of the tribal world and contemporary novels by American
Indian writers reflect this grounding. This is not to say that the
novels are rituals; rather, they derive many of their structural and
symbolic elements from certain rituals and the myths that are
allied with those rituals. 2
Traditional tribal narratives possess a circular structure,