The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Hogan speaks of a phase she went through when she was first
conscious, in an adult’s way, of having visions. Because she had
not been raised by traditional Indian people within a traditional
tribal framework, she did not know that her experience was
quite normal.
“It took years before I realized that there wasn’t anything
wrong with me,” she says. “It was just that I was set up my
whole life to be that way. An Indian friend of mine made this
clear to me. She was telling me about how she finally realised
the same thing was true of her. She had been having visions of
spirit people, or events that had taken place in the past, and one
night she talked to her mother about it. Her mother was a fullblood,
and understood these things. Later, when she was just
lying in bed, she said she realized that she wasn’t crazy, just an
Indian. Anyway, she told me about it and said I should have
known it years ago; that I was different from others around me
because I am an Indian, and that was why I didn’t fit into the
white-dominated world I was living in. I try to turn that into
strength now.” 5
Hogan has used her spirit-centered consciousness to develop
a growing feminist consciousness and activist orientation. Her
recent work is consciously directed toward the politics of Indian
survival, which she, like many Indian activists, believes
includes the survival of the natural world. She is involved in
these movements, she says, “because of the destruction I have
feared all my life—the animals and all life, not because I love
politics. I don’t want that devastation. I’ve been this way all my
life. People used to think I was a very strange person, because
when I was a child, I was speaking out for the animals, and I
always will. I was in a workshop once, and they said, oh, is this
another animal poem that you’re bringing in today?
“But I also grew up with these visions of destruction. I feel
that what people are doing from the very beginning of the mining