The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

that is, accepted the whites’ peace terms and left their traditional
life, becoming ranchers or farmhands. Mostly it is concerned
with the loss of the ritual center of the people, the Feather Boy
medicine bundle that is their source of psychic and spiritual
identity. The ultimate fate of the Indians is left to the imagination
of the reader, but McNickle gives little doubt as to what that fate
will be. In the words of Two Sleeps, an old man whose visions
have guided the traditionals for some time, “This is where we
end. All our days are here together at last” (p. 256).
N. Scott Momaday and James Welch:
Transition and Transcendence
Dypolah. There was a house made of dawn. It was
made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old
and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and
the plain was bright with different-colored clays and
sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the
plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains
beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful
all around.
—N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn
Scattered in the wind
Earthboy calls me from my dreams:
Dirt is where the dreams must end.
—James Welch, Winter in the Blood
American Indian novels can easily be read as novels of
protest. Such a reading is of course heavily influenced by
contemporary social attitudes toward all colonized people in the
United States—black and Chicano as well as Native American.
Male Indian novelists further the impression of protest because