The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

attempting to read and understand House Made of Dawn and
Ceremony. Their distress stemmed from their inability to locate
the particle (protagonist) on a background grid (setting). They
wanted the hero to be foregrounded and the events,
understandings, and other characters to be clearly delineated
backdrops. While they wanted the protagonist to have a heritage,
replete with lore, she or he must have a “personal story” that
places these other elements in their proper background
relationship to the main action.
Indian tales, however, don’t really work that way. The
structure of the stories out of the oral tradition, when left to
themselves and not recast by Indian or white collector, tend to
meander gracefully from event to event; the major unifying
device, besides the presence of certain characters in a series of
tales, is the relationship of the tale to the ritual life of the tribe.
In my novel, I told a number of stories, some from the Keres
oral tradition, some from Keres and Navajo history, some from
contemporary happenings around Indian country, some from the
life of the protagonist, Ephanie Atencio, and some from her
grandmother’s life. I selected the “heritage and lore” sections for
their direct bearing on the events Ephanie herself experiences,
so that each kind of story relates to and illuminates the rest. The
plotting is as near to a conversation with Indians as I could make
it, and the style is “legendary” (as one reader phrased it) to
further the reader’s sense of the underlying structure. Time is a
central theme of the book, and understanding temporality and
chronology is an obsession that moves Ephanie through every
experience she has. The problem of understanding clock time
comes up early in the story:
Four o’clock. The brass handle was cold in her hand.
They’ll be here pretty soon. The others. She thought. She
crossed the room, smoothing her disorderly black hair as
she again walked toward the door. No, they just left. I