The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

convinced that those wars were and continue to be about the
imposition of patriarchal civilization over the holistic, pacifist,
and spirit-based gynarchies they supplant. To that end the wars
of imperial conquest have not been solely or even mostly waged
over the land and its resources, but they have been fought within
the bodies, minds, and hearts of the people of the earth for
dominion over them. I think this is the reason traditionals say we
must remember our origins, our cultures, our histories, our
mothers and grandmothers, for without that memory, which
implies continuance rather than nostalgia, we are doomed to
engulfment by a paradigm that is fundamentally inimical to the
vitality, autonomy, and self-empowerment essential for
satisfying, high-quality life.
The vision that impels feminists to action was the vision of the
Grandmothers’ society, the society that was captured in the
words of the sixteenth-century explorer Peter Martyr nearly five
hundred years ago. It is the same vision repeated over and over
by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from François Villon
to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson,
from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, from Benito Juarez to
Martin Luther King, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Judy Grahn,
from Harriet Tubman to Audre Lorde, from Emma Goldman to
Bella Abzug, from Malinalli to Cherrie Moraga, and from
Iyatiku to me. That vision as Martyr told it is of a country where
there are “no soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings,
regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits … All are
equal and free,” or so Friedrich Engels recounts Martyr’s
words. 3
Columbus wrote:
Nor have I been able to learn whether they [the
inhabitants of the islands he visited on his first journey to
the New World] held personal property, for it seemed to