The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

are like that. They have circuits.” 3
And the circuits are evident in their connections in her poem
“Moonlight”:
I know when the sun is in China
because the night shining other-light
crawls into my bed. She is moon.
Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last
one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque—
Fourth Street, or from similar avenues
in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also
awakened, the night thrown back and asked,
Where is the moon, my lover?
And from here I always answer in my dreaming,
The last time I saw her was in the arms
of another sky. 4
The sense of the connectedness of all things, of the spiritness
of all things, of the intelligent consciousness of all things, is the
identifying characteristic of American Indian tribal poetry.
These features link American Indian literary work to that of
tribally inspired poetry around the world.
Let Us Hold Fierce: Linda Hogan
Like Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) directly integrates
a spirit-based vision in her work. She is conscious of its vibrant
spherical power to unify divergent events and conflicting views.
Like all the American Indian women writing poetry and fiction,
Hogan is conscious of the real nature of spirit presence in the
world and so includes it as a basic assumption about reality in
all of her work.