The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

she is thought itself, from which all else is born. She is the
necessary precondition for material creation, and she, like all of
her creation, is fundamentally female—potential and primary.
She is also the spirit that informs right balance, right harmony,
and these in turn order all relationships in conformity with her
law.
To assign to this great being the position of “fertility goddess”
is exceedingly demeaning: it trivializes the tribes and it
trivializes the power of woman. Woman bears, that is true. She
also destroys. That is true. She also wars and hexes and mends
and breaks. She creates the power of the seeds, and she plants
them. As Anthony Purley, a Laguna writer, has translated a
Keres ceremonial prayer, “She is mother of us all, after Her,
mother earth follows, in fertility, in holding, and taking again us
back to her breast.” 2
The Hopi account of their genatrix, Hard Beings Woman,
gives the most articulate rendering of the difference between
simple fertility cultism and the creative prowess of the Creatrix.
Hard Beings Woman (Huruing Wuhti) is of the earth. But she
lives in the worlds above where she “owns” (empowers) the
moon and stars. Hard Beings Woman has solidity and hardness
as her major aspects. She, like Thought Woman, does not give
birth to creation or to human beings but breathes life into male
and female effigies that become the parents of the Hopi—in this
way she “creates” them. The male is Muingwu, the god of crops,
and his sister-consort is Sand Altar Woman who is also known
as Childbirth Water Woman. In Sand Altar Woman the mystical
relationship between water, worship, and woman is established;
she is also said to be the mother of the katsinas, those powerful
messengers who relate the spirit world to the world of
humankind and vice versa. 3
Like Thought Woman, Hard Beings Woman lived in the
beginning on an island which was the only land there was. In this