The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

choose to perceive themselves as thoroughly westernized is
often worked out in bouts of suicidal depression, alcoholism,
abandonment of Indian ways, “disappearance” into urban
complexes, and verbalized distrust of and contempt for
longhairs, John “Big Bluff” Tosamah in N. Scott Momaday’s
House Made of Dawn represents this response to the forces of
alienation.
Others, aware that one cannot reject one’s race and culture,
either because the winds of fashion and politics have so
convinced them or because they are aware that such an action is
in reality impossible, choose the other course of self-rejection.
These persons often work out their struggle through rage directed
against whites and “apples.” Their violence tends to be otherdirected,
and they are the most likely to engage in abuse of
wives and children.
A third category of victims of alienation are people caught
between two cultures. These are the most likely to be suicidal,
inarticulate, almost paralyzed in their inability to direct their
energies toward resolving what seems to them an insoluble
conflict. Their lives are, as they see it, completely beyond their
control and any hope of reconciling the oppositions within and
outside themselves seems beyond their reach.
James Welch writes about those who choose to cling to their
Indian heritage in his moving “Winter Indian”:
Happy to think of good times
buffalo fat to fall in jumps.
When war was still a game and berries
stained a face fierce,
white women slaved to laughing squaws. 7
Unlike many who write about the past with longing, Welch
sees the terms of the conflict and in his anger and grief finds wit
for honesty, though the dire need of his people does not escape