The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

unified than that of other American writers because it is always
based on a group-shared understanding of private and public
events.
The American Indian women who wait, watch, and write are
keenly aware of the inner truth of the spiritness of the tribal
universe. Their conviction in the spiritness of all-that-is prevents
the development of self-cannibalizing neurotic musings,
emotionally biased, raging polemic, or purely aesthetic selfindulgence.
The best Indian writers can and do engage in any and
all of these stances in their work, but they seldom maintain these
purely self-aggrandizing postures for more than a few lines or
paragraphs.
The Arms of Another Sky: Joy Harjo
(Creek)
Joy Harjo, a poet whose work is concerned with metaphysical
as well as with social connections, comments that the spirit
people are all around her, crowded around, when she writes.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I can almost see them. And my work is
powerful when I’m able to see them. Sometimes I get kind of
scared. And sometimes I think, ‘Well, all of these things are
going on, how come I can’t see them?’ Sometimes I get all
obsessed with not seeing. Maybe that’s why I write. I keep
wanting to see. And I keep wanting to see more, but I know that I
can only see what I’m able to see. And I won’t see anything else
until I’m ready. So I get really frustrated. There’s so much I want
to see, but I have to take that responsibility too. I feel like my
poetry is a way to see, because I have a sense of how I keep
going deeper and deeper. It’s not like into a hole, maybe like the
center of the earth like a star, which is really the outside but it’s
the inside. It has that duality, the polarity, which drives me