The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

crazy. But I also know, in another sense, there are worlds in
which polarity isn’t the law. You don’t have good/evil,
sun/moon, light/dark. And I have a sense of that other place,
sometimes. When I really feel that other place, this place seems
insane. That’s why I wrote ‘She Had Some Horses.’ I wrote to
name those horses. And then I said, ‘she had some horses she
loved, she had some horses she hated,’ which is a polarity. And
these are the same horses.” 1
Interestingly, Harjo believes that the view she describes of the
inside being the outside has come to her from American
feminists. However accurate that belief may be, it is an
understanding inherent to certain of the tribes, her people the
Creek among them. In traditional times they even
institutionalized that understanding, designating certain officials
as inside chiefs and others as outside chiefs. Harjo is obviously
angered at the apparent polarity of life in the modern world, and
her thrust, in her work as well as in her discussion of it, is
toward reconciliation of the polarities into an order that is
harmonious, balanced, and whole. One way she articulates her
understanding of this wholeness is in terms of the physiology of
the female body. “Look at it in terms of physiology,” she says. “I
always see it as very spiritual. A woman contains herself inside
herself, and others, too. But the men—it’s like their sex roles are
all external. But a woman has to push outward from herself, so
she has to go constantly outside of herself to find herself.” 2
Another way she articulates her certain understanding of the
spherical unity of the universe, its essential “spiritness,” is in
her poetry. Of particular interest are her poems that use the moon
as their central conceit (if such a term is appropriate within the
context of uses she selects). She says, “I have this image. It’s not
a generator, it’s not a power plant. But it’s like they have these
different points in between. So it’s a place, it’s a poem, like a
globular, like a circle with center points all over. And poems