The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

certain women as individuals results from certain inclinations
that the women are born with and that they demonstrate through
temperament, interest, competence, spirit-direction, and
guidance. Women are by the nature of feminine “vibration”
graced with certain inclinations that make them powerful and
capable in certain ways (all who have this temperament,
ambience, or “vibration” are designated women and all who do
not are not so designated). Their power includes bearing and
rearing children (but in tribal life everyone is in some sense
“raising” the children); cooking and similar forms of “woman’s
work”; decision making; dreaming and visioning; prophesying;
divining, healing, locating people or things; harvesting,
preserving, preparing, storing, or transporting food and healing
stuffs; producing finished articles of clothing; making houses and
laying them out in the proper village arrangement; making and
using all sorts of technological equipment such as needles,
scrapers, grinders, blenders, harvesters, diggers, fire makers,
lathes, spindles, looms, knives, spoons, and ladles; locating
and/or allocating virtually every resource used by the people.
Guiding young women through the complex duties of
womanhood must have taxed the creative, physical, psychic, and
spiritual powers of all the women. In addition, they bore
responsibility for preserving and using the oral tradition; making
important tribal decisions about the life or death of captives and
other outsiders; and overseeing ritual occasions, including
making spiritual and physical provisions for ceremonies in
cultures that devoted as much as two-thirds of their time to
ritual/ ceremonial pursuits. In short, the women did—and
wherever possible still do—everything that maintains the life
and stability of their tribal people. It is no wonder that Indian
people in general insist that among them women are considered
sacred. Nor, as perhaps you can see, is this an empty compliment
in a society that depends for its life upon the sacred.