The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Myself repeated
Out of dark and different time. 12
There Has to Be Someone to Name
You: Wendy Rose
Conflict such as that articulated by Harjo, Hogan, and
TallMountain is a feature of the work of virtually every Indian
woman writer. Each experiences it differently, and each has her
particular way of addressing it and, within her work, of
resolving it. Wendy Rose, a Hopi-Miwok woman, speaks
poignantly of the conflict as it works itself out in her life. Born
and raised in Richmond, California, completely estranged from
any tribal traditions from birth, Rose exhibits the greatest
polemical tendencies of contemporary Indian women writers.
Yet she is also one of the clearest about the exact nature and
degree of the conflict she must live with. She is aware of the
spiritual and mystical nature of her Hopi people and of her
enforced distance from them. Because she has been educated as
an anthropologist, much of the material in her poetry comes from
her ethnographic knowledge. Because she was raised a Roman
Catholic, much of the spiritual content of her work is phrased
within Catholic structures. And because she was a dropout into
the mad, hippy world of Berkeley in the 1960s, much of her
work is informed with a militant, radical polemic.
Nevertheless, Rose’s work exhibits the peculiar unitariness of
consciousness, despite surface contradictions, that marks
American Indian poetry in the late 1970s and 1980s. The oral
tradition, based on a mystical understanding of unity that is not
as material as it is psychic, provides an axis for the work of
contemporary American Indian writers, and this axis is as