The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

After Tayo completes the first steps of the ceremony, he is
ready to enter into the central rituals connected with a ceremony
of cosmic significance, for only a cosmic ceremony can
simultaneously heal a wounded man, a stricken landscape, and a
disorganized, discouraged society.
He becomes a warrior, thus dissociating himself from the
people. A warrior in a peace-centered culture must experience
total separation from the tribe. He has been prepared for his role
by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing: Auntie was
especially forceful in propelling him away from the heart of
what he was. By virtue of his status as an outcast who, at the
same time, is one of the Laguna people in his heart, he is able to
suffer the ritual of war and dissolution. Only total annihilation of
the mundane self could produce a magic man of sufficient power
to carry off the ceremony that Tayo is embroiled in.
At the opening of the story, Tayo is still experiencing this
stage of the ceremony. He is formless, for his being is as yet
unshaped, undistinguished from the mass it sprang from. Like
rainless clouds, he seeks fulfillment—a ceremony, a story about
his life that will make him whole. He has the idea that if he had
died instead of Rocky or Josiah, the land would be full of rain.
This “story” of his is inappropriate. Perhaps because of his
status as an outcast, he does not understand the nature of death,
nor does he know that it is not in the deaths of two individuals
that the prosperity or the suffering of the people rests. Perhaps
no one has told him that the departed souls are always within
and part of the people on earth, that they are still obligated to
those living on earth and come back in the form of rain regularly
(when all is well), so that death is a blessing on the people, not
their destruction. What Tayo and the people need is a story that
will take the entire situation into account, that will bless life
with a certain kind of integrity where spirit, creatures, and land
can occupy a unified whole. That kind of story is, of course, a