The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

their heroes are beset by difficulties, many directly attributable
to white presence. The hero is unable to overcome the deadly
onslaught of forces inimical to his survival, and the result is
often the hero’s death or the destruction of his accustomed life.
But the male novelist’s preoccupation with the theme of the
inexorability of death may be as much a function of male ritual
life as of recent Native American history. As far as I know, the
male tradition across the Americas centers on encounters with
death that lead to transformation. For tribes that follow the ritual
path of war, the warrior is able to face death with courage,
honor, and dignity. The warrior path requires that a man look at
death and face it down. Hunting rituals, when all is said and
done, are death rituals, and rituals initiating a male into
manhood, medicine societies, or shamanism are generally
formulated in terms of physical death followed by a transformed
life that is not the same as physical life but that in some
characteristics, especially bodily ones, resembles it. 7 Often the
novice experiences ritual death, and only when his “death” has
been accomplished can he enter into the ritual life he is being
readied for, transformed by his experience into a quasisupernatural.
In this way tribal men’s rituals enable them to
participate directly in the process of transformation, a
participation that women, by virtue of their ability to bleed
menstrually and to give birth, are naturally privy to. Initiation
into a medicine society or into shamanhood requires a
transformation analogous to that experienced by the hunted deer
or other creature. Men’s rituals often center on transformation as
an entity in itself.
In keeping with the ritual bias that informs American Indian
novels, the male writers’ focus on personal, cultural, or ritual
death reflects traditional tribal male understandings. Of the
Indian men who have published major novels, N. Scott
Momaday is the clearest in denying that cultural conflict must