The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

transformative process engenders the ritual cycle of dying, birth,
growth, ripening, dying, and rebirth. In the transformation from
one state to another, the prior state or condition must cease to
exist. It must die.
Ritual-based cultures are founded on the primary assumption
that the universe is alive and that it is supernaturally ordered.
That is, they do not perceive economic, social, or political
elements as central; rather, they organize their lives around a
sacred, metaphysical principle. If they see a cause-and-effect
relationship between events, they would ascribe the cause to the
operation of nonmaterial energies or forces. They perceive the
universe not as blind or mechanical, but as aware and organic.
Thus ritual—organized activity that strives to manipulate or
direct nonmaterial energies toward some larger goal—forms the
foundation of tribal culture. It is also the basis of cultural
artifacts such as crafts, agriculture, hunting, architecture, art,
music, and literature. These all take shape and authority from the
ritual tradition. Literature, which includes ceremony, myth, tale,
and song, is the primary mode of the ritual tradition. The tribal
rituals necessarily include a verbal element, and contemporary
novelists draw from that verbal aspect in their work.
Western fiction, in contrast, is based on nonsacred aesthetic
and intellectual precepts such as the importance of the unities of
time, place, and action, and it is structured to create the illusion
of change in the characters occurring over a period of time as a
result of conflict and crisis. Myth criticism to the contrary,
western novels are not ritual-based; that is, although they might
incorporate elements drawn from ritual-based cultures such as
those of pre-Christian England or ancient Greece, those
borrowings are intellectual, aesthetic, or allusive. Indeed, critics
of the 1970s and 1980s question whether rituals on which
certain plots, such as that of the dying king, are based ever in
fact existed. 3 Such questions are not germane to Native