The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

supernatural and ritual practices of the tribe and simultaneously
assimilating white Christian attitudes required by white presence
and white colonization? Abel’s personality, his alcoholism, and
his rejection of tribal ways lead him to violence as a response to
the dilemma, a response that characterizes him as
psychologically disturbed among a people who do not condone
interpersonal violence as a means of resolving difficulties,
however arcane those difficulties might be.
Charged in the white courts with murder, Abel is sent to
federal prison. On his release, he is relocated by the parole
board to Los Angeles, where he tries unsuccessfully to hold a
job and find companionship among the Indians there. This is
impossible, partly because of Abel’s intransigent traditionalism
and partly because that traditionalism arouses the scorn of the
community’s leader, a highly assimilated Kiowa named
Tosamah. Abel reverts to drinking and is beaten nearly fatally by
a Mexican-American police officer named Martinez. Lying on
the Los Angeles beach where he crawled after the beating, he
understands, finally, his own place in the universe. After he is
released from the hospital, he returns to Walotowa, still
wounded and mutilated, in time to watch over his grandfather’s
death. When the old man is dead, Abel smears himself with
ashes and joins the ritual runners. So marked, he participates in
the ancient “race of the dead” (195) and takes his place behind
his grandfather in the long line of “hombres negros” (175) in
their eternity-long run that keeps evil in its place. He runs behind
them into clear seeing and into the ritual song of healing that
Benally, Abel’s Navajo friend in Los Angeles, sang for him so
often: “House made of pollen, House made of dawn” (191).
From the beginning to the end of the novel, Momaday focuses
on rituals and traditions of the Walotowa, Navajo, and Kiowa.
The plot loosely follows a conflict-crisis-resolution pattern, but
the novel is more deeply structured to match the Navajo