The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

unquestioned power of such magnitude, attempts at total
conquest of the continents were bound to fail. In the centuries
since the first attempts at colonization in the early 1500s, the
invaders have exerted every effort to remove Indian women from
every position of authority, to obliterate all records pertaining to
gynocratic social systems, and to ensure that no American and
few American Indians would remember that gynocracy was the
primary social order of Indian America prior to 1800.
But colonial attempts at cultural gynocide notwithstanding,
there were and are gynocracies—that is, woman-centered tribal
societies in which matrilocality, matrifocality, matrilinearity,
maternal control of household goods and resources, and female
deities of the magnitude of the Christian God were and are
present and active features of traditional tribal life.
5. There is such a thing as American Indian literature, and it
can be divided into several interlocking categories. The major
divisions are traditional literature and genre literature of the
present. Traditional literature can be further divided into
ceremonial and popular varieties—that is, into canonical works
and those that derive from the canon but that are widely told and
appeal to audiences gathered on social occasions. Contemporary
works, or genre literature, can be divided into the classic
western categories of poetry, short fiction, the novel, and drama,
with the addition of autobiography, as-told-to narrative, and
mixed genre works. Structural and thematic elements from the
oral tradition, usually from the writer’s own tribe, always show
up in contemporary works by American Indians, and elements
from contemporary, non-Indian works sometimes show up in
contemporaneous tribal social literature.
Native American literature should be important to Americans
not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little
pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a
major tradition that informs American writers ranging from