The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

eturned to the Alaskan Koyukon village of her birth after an
absence of fifty years. She was talking to a nun with whom she
was staying during her visit, and they began to talk about spirits
that have been spotted recently around the village. The nun
mentioned a beaver who had come up out of Mukluk Slough that
spring and had clearly said “Do in tsa” (“hello” in Koyukon) to
some children. Then she told TallMountain about the appearance
of a Christmas tree in the ice seen by one of the men that winter
when he was getting water. A pilot who flies a bushplane to
Nulato also spotted the tree, “shining out there in the middle of
the river,” the nun said. In response to these tales, TallMountain
recounted a dream she had had around that time, about a Raven
flying upside down. “It’s a message,” she observes.
And certainly her awareness of spirit runs through her work
like a bright thread, or sometimes like a note fraught with dread
and fear. Her journals are full of notes about nonphysicals
around her, and they are often directed toward her mother, who
died years ago but whose presence is often very close to
TallMountain. But side by side with these pagan awarenesses,
she reveals a great deal of conflict within her own mind. She has
a personal spirit who has often spoken to her. His name is
Naagudzaah, or Owl. She speaks of him often in her
conversation and in her journal, but she quietly writes that he is
“really the Lord Jesus” and that she is aware of that fact. And
most of her journal entries, which date from 1973 to the present,
are filled with impassioned meditations on the meaning of
Catholicism, on the teachings of the Church, and on what the
Lord Jesus Christ wants of her. For first and foremost,
TallMountain is a devout Roman Catholic, like her Koyukon
mother before her; but unlike her mother, TallMountain is a
Catholic deeply steeped in the mystical literature and liturgy of
her faith.
Her poetry is an odd assortment of poems that dart