The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

protagonist is required to choose between good and bad, and the
survival of his people rests on his decision. Abel is required to
understand that all ritual is sacred and leads to the continuance
of the tribe.
Gerald Vizenor reconciles the opposing forces of good and
evil in the manner of his Anishinabe (Chippewa) people. He
evokes the power of Wenebejo, Trickster, who is the
personification of the chaotic creative power that accompanies
his main characters on their pilgrimage to find “nothing more
than a place to dream again” (206). With this tribal and ritual
device, Vizenor cuts through Christian-based dichotomies about
good and evil, creative and destructive forces, and their
analogues. Thus far the funniest and most brutal American Indian
novel written, Bearheart reflects the facts of Indian life more
faithfully than its predecessors and removes Indian fiction
entirely from its colonizer-influenced frameworks.
Like all trickster narratives, Bearheart is obscene and
occasionally scatological because it is founded on the tribal
perception of the essential humor of earthly life. As is usual in
trickster rituals such as those enacted by clown societies in the
Southwest and Northwest or by false-faces in the Northeast,
every aspect of contemporary American and American Indian
life, even the sacred, is targeted for ridicule. But it is also a
serious and profoundly reverent book, and in joining these
usually divergent impulses, Vizenor establishes the kind of
chaotic equilibrium that the wilderness itself establishes.
Its thirteen pilgrims, each of whom reflects some aspect of
Wenebejo’s nature, are led by an old Anishinabe shaman,
Proude Cedarfair. Along with seven “clown crows” and one
shaman-dog, Pure Gumption, they journey across the Plains from
the Mississippi to northwestern New Mexico where they find
their new place to dream. Along the way all but two of the
pilgrims die, including the clearest Wenebejo figure, Double