The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

context. However, I know from experience that the American
Indian way of being is both highly idiosyncratic and deeply
persistent, so I trust that the fact that you can take the Indian out
of Indian country but you can’t take the Indian out of the Indian
will inform these essays and their reading as it informs
contemporary American Indian life.
Whatever I read about Indians I check out with my inner self.
Most of what I have read—and some things I have said based on
that reading—is upside-down and backward. But my inner self,
the self who knows what is true of American Indians because it
is one, always warns me when something deceptive is going on.
And with that warning, I am moved to do a great deal of
reflecting, some more reading, and a lot of questioning and
observing of real live human beings who are Indian in order to
discover the source of my unease. Sometimes that confirmation
comes about in miraculous ways; that’s when I know guidance
from the nonphysicals and the supernaturals, and that the
Grandmothers have taken pity on me in my dilemma.
So you see, my method is somewhat western and somewhat
Indian. I draw from each, and in the end I often wind up with a
reasonably accurate picture of truth. And in that context I would
caution readers and students of American Indian life and culture
to remember that Indian America does not in any sense function
in the same ways or from the same assumptions that western
systems do. Unless and until that fact is clearly acknowledged, it
is virtually impossible to make much sense out of the voluminous
materials available concerning American Indians.
I am fortunate in that I have had excellent training for the work
I do, training I received primarily at home, but also gained in a
more formal sense. I am especially fortunate because the wind
and the sky, the trees and the rocks, and the sticks and the stars
are usually in a teaching mood; so when I need an answer to
some dilemma, I can generally get one. For which I must say