The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

world of creatures, human and nonhuman, within which she also
dwells.
In an entry dated January 4, 1979, she writes:
Sunday morning. More snow. This has been the coldest
hardest winter I remember and the snow scares me when I
think of the radiation plumes coming out of the plant in
Pennsylvania. We will never be told the results of this
accident but maybe now people will begin to think about
the consequences of their actions and inactions.
There are so many things going on in the world, I feel
guilty when I write about myself or my family. We are all
small. A million people are nothing on this earth, not even
as important as the plants, the water, the animals. Maybe it
is this knowledge that gives us our need to destroy them all.
There must be something like fear behind the minds of so
many men, something that directs them toward a detached
destruction. 8
And two years later, while in Chicago on a Tribal Historian
Fellowship, she wrote in an entry dated April 17, 1981:
I don’t know why I grieve and mourn so much when other
people don’t. The story of Oppenheimer and the bomb was
just on television here in Chicago and I wept through the
entire show. I do not know how those men could smile,
could say they did what was best. That they got used to the
suffering after a few days in Hiroshima when they went to
see what they had done.
A man in Alamogordo [New Mexico] smiled when he
said the sides of cattle turned white and that a black cat
turned white and its owner sold it to a tourist for five
dollars. The men also told of machine-gunning the antelope
to pass the time. 9