The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

informing the lifestyles, attitudes, and values of their
descendents. Somewhere along the line—and often quite
recently—an Indian woman was giving birth to and raising the
children of a family both officially and informally designated as
white or Black—not Indian. In view of this, it should be evident
that one of the major enterprises of Indian women in America
has been the transfer of Indian values and culture to as large and
influential a segment of American immigrant populations as
possible. Their success in this endeavor is amply demonstrated
in the Indian values and social styles that increasingly
characterize American life. Among these must be included
“permissive” childrearing practices, for as noted in an earlier
chapter (“When Women Throw Down Bundles”), imprisoning,
torturing, caning, strapping, starving, or verbally abusing
children was considered outrageous behavior. Native Americans
did not believe that physical or psychological abuse of children
would result in their edification. They did not believe that
children are born in sin, are congenitally predisposed to evil, or
that a good parent who wishes the child to gain salvation,
achieve success, or earn the respect of her or his fellows can be
helped to those ends by physical or emotional torture.
The early Americans saw the strongly protective attitude of
the Indian people as a mark of their “savagery”—as they saw the
Indian’s habit of bathing frequently, their sexual openness, their
liking for scant clothing, their raucous laughter at most things,
their suspicion and derision of authoritarian structures, their
quick pride, their genuine courtesy, their willingness to share
what they had with others less fortunate than they, their
egalitarianism, their ability to act as if various lifestyles were a
normal part of living, and their granting that women were of
equal or, in individual cases, of greater value than men.
Yet the very qualities that marked Indian life in the sixteenth
century have, over the centuries since contact between the two