The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

stasis of Loney as he approaches the moment when he must
encounter his isolated reality and come to terms with a life
entirely devoid of human contact and personal significance.
Like the nameless narrator in Welch’s Winter in the Blood,
Loney is driven beyond despair into decision by lack of love.
Indeed, while lovelessness is not usually named by sociologists
as an aspect of alienation, it may be the primary factor. For
without relationships with significant others, meaning, selfesteem,
a sense of belonging expressed in the establishment of
norms and experienced as a sense of power cannot exist. And for
one like Loney, who has been severely deprived of close,
nurturing relationships with others he could depend on, the
crippling effects of alienation must necessarily cast a shadow on
an entire life.
The absence of love is not a mere matter of sexual intimacy.
Loney has a lover, Reah, who cares deeply for him. But Loney,
wounded beyond repair in childhood, cannot experience the
bonding, the dependence, the knowing of self through another
that a meaningful human relationship requires.
He had two chances to learn about loving, about being loved
and cared for, but both came to an end before he developed a
sense of what belonging, what meaning something to another
human being might signify. He ran out of time. The first time,
while Jim was still very young, his sister had decided to teach
him what she learned at school. It became an obsession with her,
and she continued it for several years. Then, when their father
left, she thought, “for a few exhilarating days … that she would
raise her brother herself.” 16 But that proved impossible—the
authorities wouldn’t allow it, though by then she was fifteen and
Jim was ten. So his father’s lover offered to take them in. Kate
refused, because “she had felt she would lose her brother and
she couldn’t take that.” 17
The two years Jim spent with Sandra were his only