The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

named Bird, a duck called Amos, and the perplexing fish who
magically appear and disappear from the filthy river. Most
significantly, he is required to consider the place of tradition in
his life. Tradition, for him, comes through his grandparents, as it
does in most tribal traditions, and his grandmother’s death at the
end of the novel signifies that he has incorporated the traditions
she represents into his own psyche, making her transition from
the material to the nonmaterial world possible and proper.
The novel follows the ritual tradition in structure as well as in
theme, for it incorporates dream/vision, the clown (or trickster),
reflection or meditations, seeking, adventure, humiliation,
suffering, desire, ritual accoutrements (such as the stolen gun, the
razor, and the tobacco pouch his grandmother was never
without), humor, insight, ancient lore, and tribal history. Like
stories from the oral tradition, it meanders through time with
little regard for chronology, beginning in the center, the here and
now, and moving around it in widening circles. By the end of the
story, the interrelationships of the events chronicled in the
narrative have become clear. The reason for their occurrence is
largely a matter of their interrelationships and the significance of
the events taken as a whole rests on their relationship to the
nonrational or “mysterious” aspects of being as tribal people see
it, so readers can understand the significance of the events and
can see how the narrator has located himself, has found a center
of balance from which he can move into adulthood.
Like Winter in the Blood, Welch’s second novel, The Death
of Jim honey (1979), is based on vision ritual. Like a questor
who seeks his vision alone and far from his community, Loney is
isolated, abandoned, neglected. He is mutilated, thirsty, and
starving, is entirely poverty-stricken in mind, body, and heart. In
this condition he obtains a vision that becomes the guiding force
in his life and his death, and he dies like a warrior in a place and
at a time of his own choosing.