The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

stature, like Sweet Medicine of the Cheyenne.
A tribal member’s estrangement from the web of tribal being
and the conflict that arises are the central preoccupations of
much of contemporary American Indian literature. The ancient
thrust toward integration of the individual within the common
whole is not lost in modern American Indian literature, but it is a
movement fraught with pain, rage, and angst, beset by
powerlessness, denial, loss of self, normlessness, and anomie,
and often characterized by political and personal violence.
Within longer works, violence usually leads to some sense of
integration for the protagonist. In shorter works the conflicting
forces of absorption and the fear of it are expressed in terms of
the bloody history of colonization, of rage at the white man, of
despair; often these are accompanied in the same work or in the
same writer’s body of work by poems or stories replete with
sentimental idealizations of the old ways. In brief, what is too
often portrayed in shorter works is a world that might have been
or that might yet be, but not one that was or is.
The process of creating an American Indian world-that-is-not
began with earliest Anglo and European travelers and
raconteurs, who took all manner of tales about American
aboriginal life back to England and Europe (or, later, back to the
white colonial settlements). These stories were all untrue to a
greater or lesser extent because they were partial, they reflected
the values and perceptions of the travelers and their world-view,
and they were bereft of context. However, the conventions
developed through these accounts continue to inform present
political, social, creative, religious, and educational writing
about American Indian life, past and present. And these
conventions are followed in one way or another by Indian and
non-Indian writers alike.
For instance, consider Peter Martyr, the first historian of the
“New World”: