The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

North America since white contact, a period that extends from
1492 in the Caribbean to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth
century for some tribes. That history is seldom mentioned in
popular or scholarly books but is essential to an accurate
understanding both of American Indian life and history and of
American patriarchy in the past few hundred years. Modern
feminists sometimes theorize about the shift from matriarchies to
patriarchy in the Old World, but a more complete and accurate
retelling of history and of the contemporary manifestations of
that shift among American Indian peoples would make such
theorizing unnecessary. This essay is one of a few that concerns
itself with the subject. I trust that it will soon be one of a
multitude.
The last essay in this section, “Where I Come from Is Like
This,” is a personal chronicle of an Indian woman’s life during
and after colonization. It is about me and mine. About our
resistance, and our survival, and our meaning to each other and
to ourselves. It is a testimony, a pictograph, of a contemporary
woman’s life which says that while we change as Indian women,
as Indian women we endure.