The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

In his early thirties, Loney, who was one of the abandoned
children of a full-blood mother and an Irish father, has lived
alone since high school. He has a girlfriend, a Texas
schoolteacher, and though he knows most of the people in the
small town in Montana where he grew up, he has no close
friends. He is isolated from all the communities he might be
connected to: the small town community he lives in, the Indian
community his mother came from, the Catholic community he
was raised by, even the men’s community of ex—basketball
stars and their onetime fans. The novel makes it clear that ritual
does not necessarily lead to a sense of community; indeed,
Loney’s quest for understanding of himself, his history, and his
life leads him away from community. And his quest is largely
ritually embraced and prescribed. He makes his search because
he is having visions and waking dreams that he cannot control or
change and that he does not understand. His desire to understand
the significance of his visions leads him to the wilderness pass
where he dies, killed by a high school classmate, a full-blood
who has become a tribal cop.
Welch finds his resolutions in self-knowledge gained in
traditional ways that are adapted to modern contexts. His
characters go through a period of intense self-examination and
reflection about their lives and the universe they live in. In the
end, after a series of magical and extraworldly encounters, they
come to terms with their existence and with their personal
histories. Welch’s novels are best understood in the context of
the dream/vision ritual structure of Plains tribal life, for they are
structured along the lines of the vision rather than on the
chronological lines of mundane or organizational life, and the
structure of the works holds the major clue to the nature of the
novels as primarily tribal documents.
Like Momaday, Welch follows the accretive narrative
structure of the oral tradition. Their novels weave in and out of