The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

accretive structuring to build toward comprehensive significance
in her novel, as do traditional storytellers. Some sections in her
narrative do not have any overt connection to the story being
told. One is about a small boy, Tayo, who lives in the Gallup
arroyo with his mother and a number of homeless Indians.
Another is about a young woman who went to boarding school
and tried to become white. These stories are analogues within
the narrative; the former gives the reader a clear picture of the
protagonist Tayo’s early life before he was taken to live
permanently at the pueblo with his mother’s sister, and the latter
describes a process analogous to the one that caught Tayo’s
mother in a world she could neither enter nor leave.
Silko also inserts a clan story from Laguna set in short poetic
lines into the conventionally set prose of the novel, adding a
definite traditional flavor and providing a text by which to
determine the significance of ritual tradition in the novel. The
clan story is about Reed Woman and Fly, the rainbearers in both
the narrative and ritual versions of the rain-bringing event. Silko
uses this clan ritual narrative in a ceremonial way as an
analogue to her own story about Tayo and the long drought he
helps the region recover from, thus illuminating the connection
between the ritual tradition, the storytelling tradition, and a
contemporary working out in a novel of both tribal forms. By
using a nonsequential structure that is accretive, achronological,
and interspersed with the traditional clan ritual narrative about
how the rain is made to return to the village, Silko shows that
clear understanding of a given narrative depends on proper
understanding of the stories attached to each significant word. In
this way stories are themselves ritual events (though their ritual
power comes from their relation to the actual rituals they refer
to). Silko explains the process in the following sequence, in
which Ku’oosh, a Laguna priest (“medicine man”) tells the
seriously ill Tayo how the world works and how the words that