The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

It’s hard to enter
circling clockwise and counter
clockwise moving no
regard for time, metrics
irrelevant to this place
where pain is the prime number
and soft stepping feet
praise water from the skies:
I have seen the face of triumph
the winding line stare down all moves
to desecration: guts not cut from arms,
fingers joined to minds,
together Sky and Water
one dancing one
circle of a thousand turning lines
beyond the march of gears—
out of time out of
time, out
of time. 2
“Hoop Dancer” came at least in part out of the conversations I
had with Fred Young, the Navajo theoretical physicist and
mathematician I spoke of earlier, several years before I wrote it.
It concerns itself with the psychic fragmentation of factory time
compared with the psychic integration of ceremonial time. It
seemed to me then, as it does now, that the basis of Indian time
is ceremonial, while the basis of time in the industrialized west
is mechanical. I also implied that motion that is in balance is
integrating and empowering, while the other kind is fragmenting
and disempowering.
The difference between these concepts of time is embodied in
the function of the dances: the green corn dances, the deer
dances, and the Feast Day dances are all symbolized, held, in the