The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

signaled. Then, too, one can meet the formal standards and still
find oneself excluded from the community on social levels. Or
one might change communities and find oneself forced to
reestablish one’s Indian identity, often with respect to unfamiliar
standards and norms. This is particularly true for those who
come into a strange urban environment, though it is not as fraught
for rural people, who conform to physical standards of
appearance, speak an Indian language or use English in the way
that bilingual Indians of whatever tribal antecedents do.
Nor is it clear whether norms on reservations are more or less
stringent than those applied in urban areas or whether traditional
full-blood Indians make the same demands for “purity” that
partial-bloods or acculturated full-bloods make (though a
number of my aquaintance do).
It is very clear that belonging to the tribe in modern times is
precariously dependent on vague norms of others or on clear
(but unmeetable) standards officially declared by tribes,
individuals, or the U.S. government. The pervasive sense of
uneasiness, of having been shut out or disenfranchised, of anger
at circumstances that have resulted in overt or covert alienation
from the basic source of one’s consciousness, informs the
greater body of Native American writing, though its expression
is often disguised by historically justified anger and culturally
supported romanticizing of the old ways. The subject of
Indianness generates intense response because when belonging
is a central value, the excluded, who are likely to feel keenly the
importance of the value in question, are necessarily maimed by
separation. Thus we have the dimensions of alienation and the
poetry and fiction that ensue from the position of outsider—a
position that is all the more painful when the perceived right to
belong is greatest.
One poem that directly addresses the issue while
acknowledging its complexity is nila northSun’s “the way and