The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Francisco thus shows that the significance of the lives of
individuals in a tribal setting is inextricably linked to ritual.
Pointing to different spots on black mesa, which is the
geological calendar of the Walotowa, he shows his grandsons
how to determine what time it is, “for only then could they
reckon where they were, where all things were, in time.” (pp.
177–178)
Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald
Vizenor: Healing and Ritual
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.
—Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Whose dream is this, anyway?
—Gerald Vizenor, The Darkness
in Saint Louis Bearheart
The novels of Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor 12
move deeply into the traditional world. Their concern with tribal
perspectives is even more overt in plot, style, and structure than
is Welch’s and Momaday’s. Both Ceremony (1977) and The
Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) are noticeably closer
to wilderness and farther from civilization in setting and in
content. But they are situated along a continuum from tribal
narrative and ritual to western narrative and have structural
features in common with their predecessors’ books. Like
Momaday and Welch, Silko uses short blocks of narrative and
pays little attention to chronological timing. Locating events
within the ritual context that supports them, she relies on