The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

Dye declared that Sacagawea, whose name is thought to mean
Bird Woman, had been the guide to the historic expedition, and
through Dye’s work Sacagawea became enshrined in American
memory as a moving force and friend of the whites, leading them
in the settlement of western North America. 7
But Native American roots of white feminism reach back
beyond Sacagawea. The earliest white women on this continent
were well acquainted with tribal women. They were neighbors
to a number of tribes and often shared food, information, child
care, and health care. Of course little is made of these
encounters in official histories of colonial America, the period
from the Revolution to the Civil War, or on the ever-moving
frontier. Nor, to my knowledge, has either the significance or
incidence of intermarriage between Indian and white or between
Indian and Black been explored. By and large, the study of
Indian-white relations has been focused on government and
treaty relations, warfare, missionization, and education. It has
been almost entirely documented in terms of formal white
Christian patriarchal impacts and assaults on Native Americans,
though they are not often characterized as assaults but as
“civilizing the savages.” Particularly in organs of popular
culture and miseducation, the focus has been on what whites
imagine to be degradation of Indian women (“squaws”), their
equally imagined love of white government and white conquest
(“princesses”), and the horrifyingly misleading, fanciful tales of
“bloodthirsty, backward primitives” assaulting white Christian
settlers who were looking for life, liberty, and happiness in their
chosen land.
But, regardless of official versions of relations between
Indians and whites or other segments of the American
population, the fact remains that great numbers of apparently
“white” or “Black” Americans carry notable degrees of Indian
blood. With that blood has come the culture of the Indian,