The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

counseled by the Spirit of Thought, Spider Woman, who sits
near her or on her shoulder.
My novel centers on woman lore and the relationships it bears
to the events in the life of an individual. It is concerned with the
journey of the half-breed protagonist Ephanie Atencio toward
psychic balance and describes how the parallels between her
life and the lives of the god-women (as they are preserved in the
oral tradition) aid her finding that balance.
Ephanie traces her experience in four directions: New
Mexican colonial history, her intercultural family life, tribal
tradition, and personal emotion and perception. Living in
Albuquerque with her two children, Ephanie suffers a mental
breakdown after her husband abandons her. Stephen, her cousin
and lifetime friend, comes to stay with her to help her recover
her balance. At first unable to distinguish dream from reality or
memory from fantasy, she gradually begins to recover, until
Stephen devastates her by having sex with her. Enraged, she
leaves Albuquerque for San Francisco, where she gets a job,
brings her children Agnes and Ben to live, joins a therapy group,
spends time at the Indian Center, attends powwows, and
becomes involved in urban life. She also makes friends with a
white woman, Teresa, and eventually marries Nisei Japanese-
American, Thomas Yoshuri. When that marriage begins to
founder, she leaves Thomas and takes her children to live in
Oregon where her twin sons are born, one of whom dies. Shortly
afterward, she divorces Thomas.
When, years later, she returns to San Francisco, her older
children are with her parents much of the time and the surviving
twin, Tsali, lives with his father. Ephanie spends much of her
time alone, communicating mostly with Teresa, reading and
studying, trying to discover the history, the ritual traditions, and
the family and personal events that led her to this lonely life and
that will, perhaps, enable her to take charge of her fate. On one