The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

childbearer, and nurturer, they no longer enjoy the unquestioned
positions of power, respect, and decision making on local and
international levels that were not so long ago their accustomed
functions. Only in some tribes do they still enjoy the medicine or
shamanistic power they earlier possessed. No longer, except in
backwoods pockets of resistance, do they speak with the power
and authority of inviolable law.
It is true that colonization destroyed roles that had given men
their sense of self-esteem and identity, but the significant roles
lost were not those of hunter and warrior. Rather, colonization
took away the security of office men once derived from their
ritual and political relationship to women. Men’s status in all
tribes that use clan systems, and perhaps in others, came to them
through the agency of women, who got their own status from the
spirit people, particularly the Grandmother powers that uphold
and energize the universe. But with the coming of the white man
and his patriarchal system, the powers of the women were
systematically undermined in countless ways, and this
undermining was and is reinforced willingly by many of the men.
The history of the subjugation of women under the dominant
patriarchal control of males is a long and largely ugly one, and it
affects every tribe and Nation now as much as ever. It is
synchronistic rather than coincidental that most of the Indian
women known to the general non-Indian public have been
convicted of playing into the white man’s game and betraying the
Indian; all have been accused of doing so because of sexual or
romantic connections with white men, and all have been blamed
by many Indians for white conquest. Patriarchy requires that
powerful women be discredited so that its own system will seem
to be the only one that reasonable or intelligent people can
subscribe to.
The nature of the change in the images of women and gays
among American Indians caused by patriarchal propaganda is