The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

The pottery designed by women, as well as the belts, baskets,
blankets, and beadwork, all exhibit a marked sense of
abstraction. Sanchez, a daughter of one of the most adamantly
matriarchal of the tribes, adheres to this sensibility. Her work is
abstract in the extreme, demanding careful thought and a welltrained
ear. And while her cadences are not lyric in the western
Romantic sense, they are closely attuned to the rhythms of
Pueblo dance. To understand her rhythms one must carefully
study Pueblo music, especially the green-corn dances.
Sanchez never questions her own identity; she knows that she
is one of the people and that as such her obligation is to maintain
a sense of traditional propriety. In an interview I had with her,
she specified this clearly, describing the organization of one of
her manuscripts: “I want to unify [the book], to give it the sense
of proper ritual. That’s what I am really concerned about doing
with these poems, that there is that proper order. That proper
event taking place. That’s what Indians have held on to. Even
though they’ve gotten urbanized and acculturated, and even
assimilated, they have held to those particular titles, or names of
things that become ceremony, that become ritual; that those
directions, or whatever little fragment they’ve got to hang on to,
it orders. It gives proper order. It also gives a connecting point
to the spirit world. It is our bridge, our little rope bridge back
into tradition. And that I think will be handed on. And the idea, I
think, is for us in a transition period to place that tradition in the
literary format so that it is comprehensible enough for Indians to
grab it. Because genetically we respond to it.” 14 She continues
this thought in reference to her artwork, which she says is also
about “redefining, reinterpreting. As we become westernized, as
we go into that form of acculturation where we have been for a
long time to probably total assimilation, then again there are
those visual reference points that ‘click.’ That kick you up. That
startle your soul. That make you remember. Not the artifacts of a