The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

death with life.
Francisco understands, and in the end he moves from this
world into another. He runs into death as he ran into life as a
young man (pp. 186–188). He moves with what moves. And in
the end Abel understands, finally, after a lifetime of not
understanding, that the difference between a witch-inspired
death and a harmonious, healing death is the difference between
stopped movement and balanced motion with what moves. “He
was alone and running on. All of his being was concentrated in
the sheer motion of running on, and he was past caring about the
pain” (p. 191).
The achronological time sense of tribal people results from
tribal beliefs about the nature of reality, beliefs based on
ceremonial understandings rather than on industrial, theological,
or agricultural orderings.
Chronological time structuring is useful in promoting and
supporting an industrial time sense. The idea that everything has
a starting point and an ending point reflects accurately the
process by which industry produces goods. Western
industrialists engage in time-motion studies hoping to enhance
profits. Chronological organization also supports allied western
beliefs that the individual is separate from the environment, that
man is separate from God, that life is an isolated business, and
that the person who controls the events around him is a hero.
(Woman seldom—indeed virtually never—is addressed or
referred to in western theological or philosophical
speculations.) That understanding, which includes a strong belief
in individualism as well as the belief that time operates external
to the internal workings of human and other beings, contrasts
sharply with a ceremonial time sense that assumes the individual
as a moving event shaped by and shaping human and nonhuman
surroundings. The difference in the two concepts of time gave
rise to my poem, “Hoop Dancer”: