The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

of person, ceremony, and land, and his healing is a result of his
recognition of this unity. The land is dry because earth is
suffering from the alienation of part of herself; her children have
been torn from her in their minds; their possession of unified
awareness of and with her has been destroyed, partially or
totally; that destruction characterizes the lives of Tayo and his
mother, Auntie and Rocky, Pinky and Harley, and all those who
are tricked into believing that the land is beyond and separate
from themselves.
The healing of Tayo and the land results from the reunification
of land and person. Tayo is healed when he understands, in
magical (mystical) and loving ways, that his being is within and
outside him, that it includes his mother, Night Swan, Ts’eh,
Josiah, the spotted cattle, winter, hope, love, and the starry
universe of Betonie’s ceremony.
This understanding occurs slowly as Tayo lives the stories—
those ancient and those new. He understands through the process
of making the stories manifest in his actions and in his
understanding, for the stories and the land are about the same
thing; perhaps we can best characterize this relation by saying
that the stories are the communication device of the land and the
people. Through the stories, the ceremony, the gap between
isolate human being and lonely landscape is closed. And through
them Tayo understands in mind and in bone the truth of his and
our situation.
Tayo is an empty space as the tale begins, a vapor, an outline.
He has no voice. “He can’t talk to you. He is invisible. His
words are formed with an invisible tongue, they have no sound,”
he tells the army psychiatrist (p. 15).
Invisible and stilled, like an embryo, he floats, helpless and
voiceless, on the current of duality, his being torn by grief and
anger. Love could heal him—love, the mountain spirit Ts’eh, the
“wonder” being, who was the manifestation of the creator of the