The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of
White Feminism
At Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, “Who is your mother?” is an
important question. At Laguna, one of several of the ancient
Keres gynocratic societies of the region, your mother’s identity
is the key to your own identity. Among the Keres, every
individual has a place within the universe—human and
nonhuman—and that place is defined by clan membership. In
turn, clan membership is dependent on matrilineal descent. Of
course, your mother is not only that woman whose womb formed
and released you—the term refers in every individual case to an
entire generation of women whose psychic, and consequently
physical, “shape” made the psychic existence of the following
generation possible. But naming your own mother (or her
equivalent) enables people to place you precisely within the
universal web of your life, in each of its dimensions: cultural,
spiritual, personal, and historical.
Among the Keres, “context” and “matrix” are equivalent
terms, and both refer to approximately the same thing as knowing
your derivation and place. Failure to know your mother, that is,
your position and its attendant traditions, history, and place in
the scheme of things, is failure to remember your significance,
your reality, your right relationship to earth and society. It is the
same as being lost—isolated, abandoned, self-estranged, and
alienated from your own life. This importance of tradition in the
life of every member of the community is not confined to Keres
Indians; all American Indian Nations place great value on