The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

have been forced to attend, renaming of the traditional ritual
days as Christian feast days, missionization (incarceration) of
tribal people, deprivation of language, severe disruption of
cultures and economic and resource bases of those cultures, and
the degradation of the status of women as central to the spiritual
and ritual life of the tribes.
Along with the devaluation of women comes the devaluation
of traditional spiritual leaders, female and male, and, largely
because of their ritual power and status, the devaluation of
lesbian and gay tribal members as leaders, shamans, healers, or
ritual participants. Virtually all customary sexual customs among
the tribes were changed—including marital, premarital,
homosexual, and ritual sexual practices, along with childhood
and adult indulgence in open sexuality, common in many tribes.
Colonization means the loss not only of language and the
power of self-government but also of ritual status of all women
and those males labeled “deviant” by the white Christian
colonizers. The usual divisions of labor—generally genderbased
(if you count homosexual men as women and dikes as
men)—were altered, prohibited, or forced underground, from
whence they have only recently begun to reemerge as the tribes
find themselves engaged in a return to more traditional ways of
life.
In considering gender-based roles, we must remember that
while the roles themselves were fixed in most archaic American
cultures, with divisions of “women’s work” and “men’s work,”
the individuals fit into these roles on the basis of proclivity,
inclination, and temperament. Thus men who in contemporary
European and American societies are designated gay or
homosexual were gender-designated among many tribes as
“women” in terms of their roles; women who in contemporary
societies are designated as lesbians (actually, “dikes” is more
accurate) were designated as men in tribal cultures. As an