The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

to a nearly chronological narrative line, but both his narratives
are full of flashbacks and rely heavily on surrealistic methods of
solving the problem posed by differing Indian and white
understandings of the relationship and nature of time and event.
Welch uses dream or quasidream sequences as well as
flashbacks to further the plot in ways that make an Indian’s
experience comprehensible to white readers. But because he
relies heavily on chronological, cause-and-effect ordering, his
protagonists do not experience a reintegration of self within their
surroundings. The ways by which the nameless hero of Winter in
the Blood and Jim Loney locate themselves in their lives are
alienating. At the end of Winter in the Blood, the protagonist
still has no name, and Jim Loney dies hoping Amos After
Buffalo will remember him in ways he never was.
Silko’s Ceremony 3 is organized mainly around motion and
ritual. She makes several references to industrial notions of time,
notably in the collection of calendars amassed by the maverick
healer Betonie. One time referent she takes is galactic: the
placement of stars is the basis of what time it is. The other is
ceremonial: it is time for the witchery to be undone. The role of
the protagonist Tayo is to behave in a proper ritual manner, and
to this end he loses his mechanical time sense in the void, his
mechanical space sense in the Philippines, and his sense of his
identity as isolated in his movement within the mountain and
within the ceremony he must enact. That his proper ritual role is
primarily one of motion is suggested by the amount of walking,
riding, searching, and learning to be a Pueblo man that he
engages in. The traditional medicine man Ku’oosh explains to
him, “But you know, grandson, this world is fragile” (p. 36).
With my own novel, I had difficulty with at least two
publishers because I chose Indian time over industrial time as a
structuring device. Their comments on The Woman Who Owned
the Shadows 4 sounded very much like those of my students