The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

wilderness.
The view of Indians as hostile savages who capture white
ladies and torture them, obstruct the westward movement of
peaceable white settlers, and engage in bloodthirsty uprisings in
which they glory in the massacre of innocent colonists and
pioneers is dear to the hearts of producers of bad films and even
worse television. However, it is this view that is most deeply
embedded in the American unconscious, where it forms the basis
for much of the social oppression of other people of color and of
women.
In contemporary times those who view Indians as hostile
savages paint modern Indian people as worthless, alcoholic, and
lazy, unwilling to join in the general progressiveness and
prosperity that is the final index of the righteousness of the
American dream. Allied with the view of the Indian as hostile
savage is the common practice (I should say obsession) of
proving that Indians mistreat their women brutally, at every level
and in every way—the implication being that civilized people
revere women, and savages, who don’t revere them, deserve
extermination. This unstated but compelling rationale for
genocide is at the bottom of the academic, political, and popular
attempts to paint Native American cultures as patriarchal when
they are not.
7. The sacred, ritual ways of the American Indian peoples are
similar in many respects to other sacred cultures on the planet,
such as the Tibetan and trans-Caucasus cultures (including those
of the Mediterranean and their descendents in the western lands
of Brittany, Normandy, England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland).
Tribal societies of Native America incorporate many of the
same features characteristic of tribal people in Southeast Asia,
Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Africa. That is, we share
in a worldwide culture that predates western systems derived
from the “civilization” model, and, as such, Indians are only