The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

United States (and is still occurring in parts of Central and South
America), onward as far as the colonizers, particularly
Americans, were concerned, Native Americans were faced with
a choice between assimilation and extinction. This choice,
forced on them through wars and policies that made other
options such as resistance appear untenable, was eventually
accepted as inevitable by many Native Americans. McNickle
explores the Indian view of their dilemma in his novels, writing
within the constraints of western literary forms. He focuses on
tribal perspectives, pitting traditional values and customs against
those of the alien invaders. Although this approach makes him
the first Native American novelist to successfully use the novel
to present a tribal point of view, he does not rely on ritual
tradition to inform his work in any intrinsic way. Consequently,
his novels treat the Indian as tragic victim as do the novels of
non-Indian American writers. Like Mourning Dove, McNickle
uses references to tribal beliefs as a way of furthering the plot,
illuminating the terms of the conflict the Indian characters face,
and providing the basis for resolution. The resolution for both
his novels is the colonial solution to the Indian dilemma:
resignation to inevitable extinction.
Like Cogewea, the protagonist in The Surrounded is a halfbreed,
Archilde Leon. Leon, inextricably caught in the conflict
between Indian and white worlds, is largely an innocent victim
of that clash, helpless to alter his fate or that of his Salish
people. Wind from an Enemy Sky has full-bloods as main
characters and more fully and more significantly uses ritual to
advance the plot. Wind from an Enemy Sky begins with the
completion of a dam, which in the traditionals’ view kills the
water, and the book ends with the murder of the traditional
leader of the longhair band that had held out against accepting
white ways. Long before, the same white man whose company
built the dam bought the Feather Boy medicine bundle, which