The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

narrative counterparts, stories, and which is based in the
dream/vision tradition that informs the life of tribal people in the
Americas. The conflict between western ways and those of the
tribes has been a major theme in all the novels by and about
American Indians, but that theme has been treated increasingly as
a part of an ancient cyclical pattern of cultural dissolution and
revival by contemporary American Indian novelists. The novels
and other contemporary literature function, in a sense, as a
mapping of the possibilities, an exploration of our options as
native peoples as we enter the twenty-first century surrounded
by non-Indians. The novels respond to the question of whether
we can remain Indians and still participate in and influence
western culture or whether we will be junked or enshrined in
museums of culture, victims of what Gerald Vizenor has named
the “word wars” and “terminal creeds.”
Indians, as Acoma poet Simon J. Ortiz says, are everywhere,
and nowhere more articulate than in their novels. They are just a
few years short of five hundred years since first contact with
Europeans. In those five centuries, massive change has come
upon the native peoples of the western hemisphere, change that
they did not seek and did not control. But they have survived as
cultural entities, as McNickle strongly argues in his histories of
native peoples of Canada and the United States. As a
consequence of this persistence, which is a primary fact of
Native American life, the most important theme in Native
American novels is not conflict and devastation but
transformation and continuance. We change, of course, which is
one very important meaning of men’s ritual traditions, and of
course we remain the same, which is one meaning of women’s
ritual traditions. When seen together, the significance of the
ritual, ceremonial traditions of the tribes becomes clear. The
nature of the cosmos, of the human, the creaturely, and the
supernatural universe is like water. It takes numerous forms; it