The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The violence in which Abel finds himself involved is a result
of the collision of tradition and history. The novel, in its careful
recounting of conquest and the religious transformation that
ensues and with it the witchcraft that withers the village and
blasts Abel’s youth, makes this collision and its consequences
clear.
Some within the novel do not accept violent solutions to grief;
like Francisco, they find their acknowledgment of the unknown
to be “nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire
to weep,” 11 and they find it possible to live out their lives in
relative tranquility.
There are several kinds of breeds in House Made of Dawn.
Benally, the relocation Navajo who finds a middle ground
between his economic need and his tradition, Tosamah, who
attempts to connect his Indian self and his white self by
becoming a Christian minister and a Peyote priest, and the lost
men who listen to Tosamah preach and who attend his Peyote
services all represent varying characterizations of the central
theme. They all suffer from some degree of alienation and
attempt, through drink and powwows on the Los Angeles hills, to
accommodate it and its attendant anguish.
Only Abel finds no way to bridge the enormous gap between
self and white. He, neither Christian nor pagan, neither soldier
nor warrior, neither brother nor son, can find nothing within
himself to form such a bridge but murderous rage. For him
alcohol is no tranquilizer, but a fire that feeds his sullen,
speechless rage until he explodes in a violence that results in his
near-fatal beating by the culebra policeman Martinez. When he
returns home, broken and diseased, to preside over his
grandfather’s death, he returns speechless—all power of any
kind, even that of his body, gone from him.
Tayo, the half-breed protagonist of Silko’s Ceremony, also
suffers from speechlessness. He will not speak because he