The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

me that whatever one had, they all took shares of … They
are so ingenuous and free with all they have, that no one
would believe it who has not seen it; of anything that they
possess, if it be asked of them, they never say no; on the
contrary, they invite you to share it and show as much love
as if their hearts went with it. 4
At least that’s how the Native Caribbean people acted when the
whites first came among them; American Indians are the despair
of social workers, bosses, and missionaries even now because
of their deeply ingrained tendency to spend all they have, mostly
on others. In any case, as the historian William Brandon notes,
the Indian seemed free, to European eyes, gloriously free,
to the European soul shaped by centuries of toil and
tyranny, and this impression operated profoundly on the
process of history and the development of America.
Something in the peculiar character of the Indian world
gave an impression of classlessness, of propertylessness,
and that in turn led to an impression, as H. H. Bancroft put
it, of “humanity unrestrained … in the exercise of liberty
absolute.” 5
A Feminist Heroine
Early in the women’s suffrage movement, Eva Emery Dye, an
Oregon suffragette, went looking for a heroine to embody her
vision of feminism. She wanted a historical figure whose life
would symbolize the strengthened power of women. She found
Sacagawea (or Sacajawea) buried in the journals of Lewis and
Clark. The Shoshoni teenager had traveled with the Lewis and
Clark expedition, carrying her infant son, and on a small number
of occasions acted as translator. 6