The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

As shamans, the women in many tribes function in all ways
that male shamans are known to. They perform healings, hunting
ceremonies, vision quests and the guidance for them, acts of
psychokinesis, teleportation, weather direction, and more. In the
various tribes according to each one’s customs, the shaman also
creates certain artifacts—clothing, baskets, ornaments, objects to
be worn in pouches or under skirts or sewed into belts. She
officiates at burials, births, child naming and welcoming into this
world, menstrual and pregnancy rituals and rites, psychic
manipulation of animals, metamorphoses or transformations. She
does much of this through dancing and chanting, and a large part
of the method, symbols, significances, and effects of her
shamanic efforts are recorded in the stories she tells, the songs
she sings, and the knowledge she possesses. Much of this
knowledge she transmits to others in ways that will be of use to
them, and much of it she keeps to herself, teaches in formal
settings to her apprentices, or shares with other shamans.
One of the primary functions of the shaman is her effect on
tribal understandings of “women’s roles,” which in large part
are traditional in Mrs. McCabe’s sense of the word. It is the
shaman’s connection to the spirit world that Indian women
writers reflect most strongly in our poetry and fiction. If there is
any Indian woman’s tradition that informs our work, it is the
spiritual understanding of womanhood as an expression of spirit.
That understanding is formed on the recognition that everything
is alive, that the spirit people are part of our daily world, that all
life lives in harmony and kinship with and to all other life, and
that sickness of all kinds and of all orders comes about because
of our resistance to surrendering to the complexity and multidimensionality
of existence.
So we acknowledge that the violation of the Mothers’ and
Grandmothers’ laws of kinship, respect, balance, and harmony
brings about social, planetary, and personal illness and that