The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

How the West Was Really Won
In the beginning were the people, the spirits, the gods; the fourleggeds,
the two-leggeds, the wingeds, the crawlers, the
burrowers, the plants, the trees, the rocks. There were the moon,
the sun, the earth, the waters of earth and sky. There were the
stars, the thunders, the mountains, the plains, the mesas and the
hills. There was the Mystery. There were the Grandmothers, the
Mothers, the clans, the people. At the end of the fifteenth century,
Anglo-European time, the old world that the tribes, Nations, and
Confederacies lived in began to be torn apart. At first the tear
seemed small enough, and for various reasons we did not grasp
the enormity of the threat; indeed, many tribes did not know there
was a threat for another two to three hundred years.
The wars of conquest that began with the landing of
Christopher Columbus on an isolated little island on the edge of
the southeastern sea gained momentum until every tribe and
every aspect of traditional life was swept up in it; during the
centuries of those wars everything in our lives was affected and
much was changed, even the earth, the waters, and the sky. We
went down under wave after wave of settlement, each preceded,
accompanied by, and followed by military engagements that
were more often massacres of our people than declared wars.
These wars, taken together, constitute the longest undeclared war
neo-Americans have fought, and no end is in sight.
It is still being fought on reservations, in urban communities,
along Indian-white frontiers (which occur wherever Indian and
non-Indian interface); in Mexico and in Central America—
Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica;