The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

also very likely to be misogynist. Indeed, the latter often
masquerade as the former. The colonizers’ treatment of gays is
analogous to their treatment of healers, holy people, dreamers,
and other traditional leaders, foremost among whom have
traditionally been the women—the matrons, clan mothers,
dreamers, and makers of ritual and tribal life in the western
hemisphere.
Before the coming of the white man, or long ago, so far, as the
people say, the Grandmother(s) created the firmament, the earth,
and all the spirit beings in it. She (or they) created, by thinking
into being, the Women, or the Woman, from whom the people
sprang. The Women thus thought into being also gave thought,
and the people and all the orders of being in this world came
into being, including the laws, the sciences, agriculture,
householding, social institutions—everything. Long ago the
peoples of this hemisphere knew that their power to live came to
them from the Grandmother or Grandmothers (depending on the
tribe) not only originally but continuously, even to the present.
Many old mythologies and most ceremonial cycles (if taken
within their entire cultural framework) reiterate and celebrate
this central fact of tribal Native American existence. Many of the
tribes retain this old knowledge—a knowledge that they have
kept hidden from the whites and often from their own
tribespeople but that they have preserved. Only recently have the
women begun to raise our voices again, at the behest of the
Grandmother(s), to tell the story as it is told and to lay claim to
the ancient power that is vested in Woman since before time.
In a recent interview published in the West German feminist
monthly Emma, three Native American representatives of a
movement called Concerned Aboriginal Women discussed the
present crisis among American Indians in Canada and the part
the women are taking in their struggle to retain title to their