The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

hoop dance I was watching in my imagination when I wrote the
poem. The sky and water joining into rain clouds are
characteristic of the time at home when the green corn dances
are danced. “Hoop Dancer” is a rendering of my understanding
of the process by which one enters into timelessness—that place
where one is whole.
Achronicity is the kind of time in which the individual and the
universe are “tight.” The sense of time that the term refers to is
not ignorant of the future any more than it is unconscious of the
past. It is a sense of time that connects pain and praise through
timely movement, knitting person and surroundings into one.
Dancing in the midst of turning, whirling hoops is a means of
transcending the limits of chronological time and its
traumatizing, disease-causing effects. Chronological time denies
that an individual is one with the surroundings. The hoop dancer
dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people
live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They
are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance
time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain.
While the time structuring used in novels by American Indian
writers is a technical problem, it is also a factor in the ultimate
significance of the book. It determines which kind of
consciousness will be reflected in the novel—western industrial
consciousness or Indian consciousness. Momaday and Silko opt
for Indian consciousness, but earlier novelists like D’Arcy
McNickle and Mourning Dove chose western consciousness.
One result of the earlier novelists’ choice is that they wrote
easily readable books. But the other consequence is that they
furthered the stereotyping tendencies of American readers and
made their version of Indians conform to the version of those
who see Indians as dying victims of the white man’s world.
I am suggesting that there is some sort of connection between
colonization and chronological time. There is a connection