The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

We are the land, and the land is mother to us all. There is not
a symbol in the tale that is not in some way connected with
womanness, that does not in some way relate back to Ts’eh and
through her to the universal feminine principle of creation:
Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought Woman, Grandmother Spider, Old
Spider Woman. All tales are born in the mind of Spider Woman,
and all creation exists as a result of her naming.
We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the
fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life; the land
(Mother) and the people (mothers) are the same. As Luther
Standing Bear has said of his Lakota people, “We are of the soil
and the soil is of us.” The earth is the source and the being of the
people, and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not
really a place, separate from ourselves, where we act out the
drama of our isolate destinies; the witchery makes us believe
that false idea. The earth is not a mere source of survival, distant
from the creatures it nurtures and from the spirit that breathes in
us, nor is it to be considered an inert resource on which we
draw in order to keep our ideological self functioning, whether
we perceive that self in sociological or personal terms. We must
not conceive of the earth as an ever-dead other that supplies us
with a sense of ego identity by virtue of our contrast to its
perceived nonbeing. Rather, for American Indians like Betonie,
the earth is being, as all creatures are also being: aware,
palpable, intelligent, alive. Had Tayo known clearly what
Standing Bear articulated—that “in the Indian the spirit of the
land is still vested,” that human beings “must be born and reborn
to belong,” so that their bodies are “formed of the dust of their
forefather’s bones”—he would not be ill. But if he had known
consciously what he knew unconsciously, he would not have
been a major agent of the counterceremony, and this tale would
not have been told.
Tayo’s illness is a result of separation from the ancient unity