The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman,
William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne
Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn.
The whole body of American Indian literature, from its
traditional, ceremonial aspects to its formal literary aspects,
forms a field, or, we might say, a hoop dance, and as such is a
dynamic, vital whole whose different expressions refer to a
tradition that is unified and coherent on its own terms. It is a
literary tradition that is breathtaking in its aesthetic realization
and fundamental to coherent understanding of non-Indian
varieties of American literature.
6. Western studies of American Indian tribal systems are
erroneous at base because they view tribalism from the cultural
bias of patriarchy and thus either discount, degrade, or conceal
gynocratic features or recontextualize those features so that they
will appear patriarchal.
Americans divide Indians into two categories: the noble
savage and the howling savage. The noble savage is seen as the
appealing but doomed victim of the inevitable evolution of
humanity from primitive to postindustrial social orders. The
American belief in progress and evolution makes this a
particularly difficult idea to dislodge, even though it is a root
cause of the genocide practiced against American Indians since
the colonial period. This attitude, which I characterize as the
Progressive Fallacy, allows American Indians victim status
only. And while its adherents suffer some anguish when
encountering the brutal facts of exterminationist policies, they
inevitably shrug resignedly and say—quite directly—that Indians
have to assimilate or perish. So while the Progressives allow
the noble savage to be the guardian of the wilds and on occasion
the conscience of ecological responsibility, the end result of
their view for Indians is the same as its counterpart view of
American Indians as howling denizens of a terrifying