The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The Ceremonial Motion of Indian
Time: Long Ago, So Far *
The traditional tribal concept of time is of timelessness, as the
concept of space is of multidimensionality. In the ceremonial
world the tribes inhabit, time and space are mythic.
Years ago Fred Young, the Navajo mathematician and
physicist, explained to me the essential movement of time and
space. He said that if you held time constant, space went to
infinity, and when space was held constant, time moved to
infinity. That was why it was not possible to determine the exact
location of a particle on a grid. The tribal sense of self as a
moving event within a moving universe is very similar to the
physicists’ understanding of the particle within time and space.
There is plenty of time in the Indian universe because everything
moves in a dynamic equilibrium and the fact of universal
movement is taken into account in the ritual life that is tribal
existence.
Achronology is the favored structuring device of American
Indian novelists since N. Scott Momaday selected it for
organizing House Made of Dawn. Particularly in that novel,
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and my own The Woman
Who Owned the Shadows, events are structured in a way that
emphasizes the motion inherent in the interplay of person and
event. In them the protagonist wanders through a series of events
that might have happened years before or that might not have
happened to him or her personally, but that nevertheless have
immediate bearing on the situation and the protagonist’s