The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

I felt like a tourist. 3
Simon J. Ortiz writes in “Toward Spider Springs”:
Our baby, his mother,
and I were trying to find
the right road …
We were trying to find
a place to start all over
but couldn’t. 4
The impact of normlessness and estrangement from oneself
and people is referred to many times by Ortiz in Going for the
Rain as well as by other poets. Ortiz is better able than many to
resolve the conflict by retreating into Indianness, but his retreat
inevitably lacks the conviction possessed by Pueblo Indians of
earlier generations who did not face the question in its recent,
profoundly disorganizing form.
Other poets who are not fully at home in either world have
less ease than Ortiz in pretending to discover balance through
identifying as purely Indian in their work. (Nor is Ortiz faced
with an easy task; writing poetry and stories and being actively
involved in radical politics are not traditional Acoma pursuits.)
Other poets express their anguish, anger, and dislocation more
polemically than he, and with less poetic finesse.
Politically conscious, romanticizing stances characterize much
of the work of contemporary American Indian writers. In that
work, alienation is everywhere in evidence, for political
activism is one way younger Indian writers (and older Indians
just beginning to get politically involved) can get a hearing, and
their own sense of alienation is often the motivating force that
propels them into writing to begin with. But it also tends to
produce a poetry that slides into easy oppositions: the red man
as noble and persecuted, an innocent victim of a fate he was and