The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

This Wilderness in My Blood:
Spiritual Foundations of the Poetry
of Five American Indian Women
In contradistinction to other American poets and writers,
American Indian women writers have as our first and most
significant perceptual characteristic a solid, impregnable, and
ineradicable orientation toward a spirit-informed view of the
universe, which provides an internal structure to both our
consciousness and our art. This view is not merely private, for it
is shared by all the members of tribal psychic reality. It is not
exactly personal, for it reaches far beyond the simple confines of
mortal flesh and individual nervous system. It is, however,
subjective, for it seems apparent that all matters concerning the
non-material realms of being must be experienced within the
subjective mind of each individual at least as much as within the
particular part of the tribal gestalt that is activated by ceremony,
ritual, and vision. It should be noted, however, that the
subjectivity of this process derives from internalization of tribal
oral traditions rather than from a purely private, emotionally
subjective bias. This distinction is important, for it distinguishes
the poetry of American Indian women from that of our non-
Indian colleagues and is, I think, the difference that makes our
work less accessible to non-Indian readers, editors, and
audiences. Certainly, this mode of objective/internal perception
of spiritual forces and entities leads American Indian women to
write a poetry and fiction that is internally more coherent and