The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

past, present, and future, incorporating vision and dream into the
action as the story moves toward its inevitable conclusion.
Because the novels are designed to reflect ritual or tribal worldviews,
the distinctions usually made between “realism” and
“surrealism” are inverted, reversed, or ignored entirely. In
accordance with ritual literature of the oral tradition, in these
novels the time line is achronological; that is, the ritual nature of
time is the measure used, so action sequences include memories,
legends, histories, dreams, and visions, the combination of
which suggests the integrative nature of ritual consciousness. So
crucial is the difference between mundane timekeeping and ritual
time that the sense of time used in tribal novels determines what
kind of consciousness is reflected in the novel—western,
industrial, secular or tribal, wilderness, ritual consciousness.
In House Made of Dawn Momaday makes direct reference to
the centrality of ritual time for an understanding of tribal
literature and tribal life. He describes a time when Francisco
took his grandsons, Abel and Abel’s brother Vidal, out to
Campo Santo, “south and west of the Middle.” There Francisco
instructed the boys in the importance of ceremonial time telling:
There, at the rounder knoll, it was time to plant corn and
there, where the highest plane fell away, that was the day of
the rooster race, six days ahead of the black bull running
and the little horse dancing, seven ahead of the Pecos
immigration; and there, and there, and there, the secret
dances, every four days of fasting in the kiva, the moon
good for hoeing and the time for harvest, the rabbit and
witch hunts, all the proper days of the clans and societies;
and just there at the saddle, where the sky was lower and
brighter than elsewhere on the high black land, the clearing
of the ditches in advance of the spring rains and the long
race of the black men at dawn. (p. 177)