The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

extinction which for several hundred tribal groups has already
become fact in the past five hundred years.
In this nation of more than 200 million, the Indian people
constitute less than one-half of one percent of the population. In a
nation that offers refuge, sympathy, and billions of dollars in aid
from federal and private sources in the form of food to the
hungry, medicine to the sick, and comfort to the dying, the
indigenous subject population goes hungry, homeless,
impoverished, cut out of the American deal, new, old, and in
between. Americans are daily made aware of the worldwide
slaughter of native peoples such as the Cambodians, the
Palestinians, the Armenians, the Jews—who constitute only a
few groups faced with genocide in this century. We are horrified
by South African apartheid and the removal of millions of
indigenous African black natives to what is there called
“homelands”—but this is simply a replay of nineteenth-century
U.S. government removal of American Indians to reservations.
Nor do many even notice the parallel or fight South African
apartheid by demanding an end to its counterpart within the
borders of the United States. The American Indian people are in
a situation comparable to the imminent genocide in many parts of
the world today. The plight of our people north and south of us is
no better; to the south it is considerably worse. Consciously or
unconsciously, deliberately, as a matter of national policy, or
accidentally as a matter of “fate,” every single government,
right, left, or centrist in the western hemisphere is consciously or
subsconsciously dedicated to the extinction of those tribal
people who live within its borders.
Within this geopolitical charnel house, American Indian
women struggle on every front for the survival of our children,
our people, our self-respect, our value systems, and our way of
life. The past five hundred years testify to our skill at waging
this struggle: for all the varied weapons of extinction pointed at