The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

comes over her as a result. He strangles her, thus violating the
ceremony and separating himself further from the
religious/ceremonial life of the tribe.
Abel has no norms, no means of understanding and naming his
experience. He cannot structure what happens to him or around
him. His only response to events is violence, as he attempts to
destroy what is destroying him.
In the inarticulateness of his powerlessness and isolation, he
first talks to and then murders the albino, believing him a witch,
responsible for all the pain and grief that Abel has suffered.
Abel struggles with the stark facts of the destruction that
colonization brings, and he displaces his terror onto the strange
being who has humiliated him as the white soldiers humiliated
him during his tour of duty.
One of the arms lay out from the body; it was there, in the
pale angle of the white man’s death, that Abel knelt … The
white, hairless arm shone like the underside of a fish, and
the dark nails of the hand seemed a string of great black
beads. 10
So Abel tries to murder the alien other that he cannot accept
and integrate within his own psyche and that he perceives to be
the source of his pain and terror. Certainly, the albino in his
death resembles the white man, the Church, and the unseen,
nameless evil that Abel seeks to destroy or evade, and Abel is
destroyed in his struggle to make sense of modern imperatives
and history. He has no tradition to which he can relate and no
words in which to articulate his perception. He lacks the
security of self-knowledge and belonging that Francisco
possesses; his memories are not those of a priest or of an Indian
raised securely within a village untouched by tragedy. In his
attempt to reconcile opposites that he cannot control, he murders
the albino and ensures his own exile.