The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

esult in either genocide or deicide. Although he does not in the
end spare Abel, the protagonist of House Made of Dawn (1968),
pain and mutilation, he weaves the suffering into the context of
both a Walotowa (Jemez Pueblo) and Navajo ritual framework
in which they are comprehensible and necessary in the life of the
tribal hero. 8 In this way Momaday makes male ritual traditions
the basis of a plot that transforms Abel from a fragmented,
isolated human being into a member of a supernatural
brotherhood and from an alienated man into a spiritual
participant in the cosmic being of the tribe. Abel, the mixedblood
(Walotowa and probably Navajo) grandson of a
Walotowa named Francisco, is so alienated from his people that
he cannot speak to his grandfather in any of the three languages
they speak. Although he has exhibited symptoms of alienation
throughout his youth, Abel’s alienation, intensified by
alcoholism, has reached nearly psychotic proportions by the time
he returns from his stint in the U.S. Army during World War II.
Shortly after his return, he engages in a sexual affair with a
pregnant, wealthy white woman from Los Angeles, Angela St.
John, who is taking the baths at Los Ojos near Walotowa. The
relationship only heightens his alienation and adds to his
inarticulate rage. At the Feast of Santiago during the rooster pull,
he is savagely beaten with the dead rooster by the winner, an
albino tribesman. That night he kills the albino because he
believes (rightly, it seems) that the albino, who is usually
referred to in the text as the white man, is a witch and that “a
man kills such an enemy if he can” (95). 9 But it is not the fact of
his witchery that makes the albino a victim of Abel’s murderous
rage; Abel murders the witch because, for personal and
historical reasons that become apparent as the plot develops, he
believes that paganism is evil and that it must be destroyed. His
dilemma is one that Native Americans have faced since white
contact: how does one remain whole while accepting the