The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

ought here as slaves.
Ethnographer Lewis Henry Morgan wrote an account of
Iroquoian matriarchal culture, published in 1877, 9 that heavily
influenced Marx and the development of communism,
particularly lending it the idea of the liberation of women from
patriarchal dominance. The early socialists in Europe,
especially in Russia, saw women’s liberation as a central aspect
of the socialist revolution. Indeed, the basic ideas of socialism,
the egalitarian distribution of goods and power, the peaceful
ordering of society, and the right of every member of society to
participate in the work and benefits of that society, are ideas that
pervade American Indian political thought and action. And it is
through various channels—the informal but deeply effective
Indianization of Europeans, and christianizing Africans, the
social and political theory of the confederacies feuding and then
intertwining with European dreams of liberty and justice, and,
more recently, the work of Morgan and the writings of Marx and
Engels—that the age-old gynarchical systems of egalitarian
government found their way into contemporary feminist theory.
When Eva Emery Dye discovered Sacagawea and honored
her as the guiding spirit of American womanhood, she may have
been wrong in bare historical fact, but she was quite accurate in
terms of deeper truth. The statues that have been erected
depicting Sacagawea as a Matron in her prime signify an
understanding in the American mind, however unconscious, that
the source of just government, of right ordering of social
relationships, the dream of “liberty and justice for all” can be
gained only by following the Indian Matrons’ guidance. For, as
Dr. Anna Howard Shaw said of Sacagawea at the National
American Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1905:
Forerunner of civilization, great leader of men, patient and
motherly woman, we bow our hearts to do you honor! … May
we the daughters of an alien race … learn the lessons of calm