The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

ecause ceremonialism has been his mainstay throughout his life,
he is able to heal Tayo and to help him find the mission he was
meant to complete. Betonie’s magic propels Tayo along his
ceremonial journey which takes him to Ts’eh, the mountain spirit
woman. Through her aid Tayo finds and rescues Josiah’s breed
cattle, and through loving he finds his own completeness.
The solution Silko offers, the acceptance of self through
ceremonial rite, is not one that is likely to occur for the average
half-breed. Welch poses the same situation in both his novels,
Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney
(1979), and resolves it in very different ways, though the final
resolution is, in both cases, a matter of personal integration
through insight and action.
I n Winter in the Blood, the symptom of speechlessness is
somewhat a quality of the protagonist, but it is most
characteristic of his grandmother who sits in her chair day after
day and seldom says anything. The powerlessness of the narrator
is symbolized in the theft of his razor and his gun by his Cree
sweetheart and by his bum knee, which prevents him from
walking with strength. His namelessness is also significant—
showing both the degree of his lack of power (an Indian without
a name is powerless indeed) and the extent of his selfestrangement.
He is isolated from his family and his tradition as the novel
opens; even his history has been cut off by the exigencies of
history and his grandmother’s past. His father, First Raise, and
his brother, Mose, are both dead. As the novel progresses, he
discovers his grandfather, a solitary man who converses with the
animals and the weather and only very occasionally with other
human beings. Through Yellow Calf, the narrator recovers his
family history, though this discovery does not at first appear to
lessen his isolation.
His mother, Teresa, decides to marry a man she has been