The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

some of the tribespeople compelled to suffer the outrages of
patriarchal industrial conquest and genocide.
The wide diversity of tribal systems on the North American
continent notwithstanding—and they are as diverse as Paris and
Peking on the Asian continent (yes, they’re both on the Asian
continent despite the European delusion that Europe occupies a
separate landmass), tribal world-views are more similar to one
another than any of them are to the patriarchal world-view, and
they have a better record of survival.
The methods used in American Indian Studies are various
because it is an interdisciplinary field. So while I employ
variously the methodologies of anthropology, literary studies,
folklore, psychology, sociology, historiography, philosophy,
culture studies, and women’s studies in these essays, my method
of choice is my own understanding of American Indian life and
thought. For although I am a somewhat nontraditional Indian, I
grew up in the homes of Indians and have spent my adult life in
the company of traditionals, urbanites, and all the shades of
Indian in between.
Because I am thus personally involved in my discipline,
because I study and write out of a Laguna Indian woman’s
perspective, these essays present a picture of American Indian
life and literature unfiltered through the minds of western
patriarchal colonizers. The essays in this volume are framed by
neither the anthropological nor the missionary mind, and they do
not particularly reflect a white mind-set. As a consequence,
much of what they contain might feel strange to readers who are
well versed in books about Indians, even to those who have had
occasion to visit Indian country. In a way, I am “Kochinnenako
in Academe,” and my essays are subject to the same vicissitudes
of interpretation as are her stories when they appear in a western