The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

views the Indian ways of her Okanogan grandmother (the
Stemteema) with scorn. Uninterested in the advances of the halfbreed
cowboy Jim, she becomes infatuated instead with a white
easterner on the make for money and position who courts
Cogewea because the ranch hands lead him to believe that she is
wealthy. Predictably, the white man betrays Cogewea and nearly
murders her. Recovering from her loss of trust and selfconfidence
by reconnecting with tribal traditions and the spirit
world, Cogewea heals and marries the faithful Jim.
Mourning Dove herself was caught between the contradictory
imperatives of her editor’s desires and tastes and her knowledge
of how an Okonagon story should go. Her lack of formal
schooling increased her dependence on her editor’s tastes and
opinions about novel writing. Her attempt to satisfy both white
and tribal literary requirements resulted in a maimed—I should
say martyred—book. Cogewea, the Half-Blood is far from being
great literature. Rather, it is a melodramatic dime-novel western,
but in focus on the anguish of a halfbreed it “introduces a theme
which dominates Native American fiction of the 30’s and of the
last decade.” 5 It also incorporates myth and tribal history,
political viewpoint, and spirit-based, ritual understanding and
uses them to further plot. The resolution of Cogewea’s dilemma
rests on her acceptance of spirit and ritual approaches as having
real significance in her life. For all its “cowboy” English,
contrived plot, and polemical pronouncements, it integrates
ritual symbolic, thematic, and structural elements and as such is
one of the first Indian books of its kind.
Like Mourning Dove, D’Arcy McNickle (Salish) was born
and raised in the Northwest. In addition to publications on
American Indian history and ethnography and one children’s
novel, McNickle published two adult novels, The Surrounded
(1936) and Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978). 6 From invasion,
which stretches from 1492 in the Caribbean to the 1880s in the