The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

future. For in a world where no normative understandings apply,
where one is perceived as futile and unwanted, where one’s
perceptions are denied by acquaintance and stranger alike,
where pain is the single most familiar sensation, the loss of self
is experienced continually and, finally, desperately.
To be sure, American Indians are not the only people who
suffer alienation in the modern world, but they are among the
most beleaguered, the most wounded by it. For, like the
protagonists in their novels, and like the speakers in their poems,
they live in a land that is no longer their home, among strangers
who determine, senselessly, the patterns of their lives. And they
are, for the most part, powerless to do much more than determine
the cause of their deaths.