The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Angry Women Are Building: Issues
and Struggles Facing American
Indian Women Today
The central issue that confronts American Indian women
throughout the hemisphere is survival, literal survival, both on a
cultural and biological level. According to the 1980 census,
population of American Indians is just over one million. This
figure, which is disputed by some American Indians, is probably
a fair estimate, and it carries certain implications.
Some researchers put our pre-contact population at more than
45 million, while others put it at around 20 million. The U.S.
government long put it at 450,000–a comforting if imaginary
figure, though at one point it was put at around 270,000. If our
current population is around one million; if, as some researchers
estimate, around 25 percent of Indian women and 10 percent of
Indian men in the United States have been sterilized without
informed consent; if our average life expectancy is, as the bestinformed
research presently says, 55 years; if our infant
mortality rate continues at well above national standards; if our
average unemployment for all segments of our population—
male, female, young, adult, and middle-aged is between 60 and
90 percent; if the U.S. government continues its policy of
termination, relocation, removal, and assimilation along with the
destruction of wilderness, reservation land, and its resources,
and severe curtailment of hunting, fishing, timber harvesting and
water-use rights—then existing tribes are facing the threat of