The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

or in long cotton stockings and tennis shoes. Cheering signs of
new life characterize contemporary dances, especially the
swelling numbers of participants: drummers and dancers,
families happily socializing with neighbors and strangers as they
eat fry bread and Indian tacos and drink gallons of soda and
Coke. This joyful increase has been spurred by a new
willingness among a number of tribes to accept the participation
of mixed bloods, heretofore mostly prohibited from onreservation
dancing at the Pueblo.
At urban powwows I have seen two particularly moving
events in the past two years. The first was a dance sponsored by
Vietnam veterans who, in recovery from alcoholism and drug
addiction, became active participants in a Lakota alcohol and
substance abuse program called The Good Red Road. The
warmth and quiet joy with which their dance and honoring was
greeted was deeply moving. We were all very proud of their
strength and beauty. The other special event I have enjoyed was
an honoring dance for a young man who was about to depart for
the Persian Gulf. Among those who received gifts from the
youth’s family were some mothers of soldiers, who received
lovely shawls. At that same powwow I learned that over 12,500
native people were serving in the Gulf. I had long known that
more Indians per capita served in World War II than any other
group, and I know that thousands served in Korea and Vietnam,
though the statues at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington ignore that fact.
At one powwow I attended, the huge one held in Albuquerque
every spring, a Cree man selling some lovely articles from his
home reserve showed my mother and me a straw-plaited doll
and described her part in an ancient dance ceremony. He
reported that the dance underscored and reminded the people of
the centrality of women to the tribe. Speaking engagements and
seminars have also provided me with accounts of the importance