The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

differences is a distortion based on sexual politics. When the
patriarchal paradigm that characterizes western thinking is
applied to gynecentric tribal modes, it transforms the ideas,
significances, and raw data into something that is not only
unrecognizable to the tribes but entirely incongruent with their
philosophies and theories. We know that materials and
interpretations amassed by the white intellectual establishment
are in error, but we have not pinpointed the major sources of that
error. I believe that a fundamental source has been male bias and
that feminist theory, when judiciously applied to the field, makes
the error correctible, freeing the data for reinterpretation that is
at least congruent with a tribal perceptual mode.
To demonstrate the interconnections between tribal and
feminist approaches as I use them in my work, I have developed
an analysis of a traditional Kochinnenako, or Yellow Woman
story of the Laguna-Acoma Keres, as recast by my mother’s
uncle John M. Gunn in his book Schat Chen. 1 My analysis
utilizes three approaches and demonstrates the relationship of
context to meaning, illuminating three consciousness styles and
providing students with a traditionally tribal, nonracist, feminist
understanding of traditional and contemporary American Indian
life.
Some Theoretical Considerations
Analyzing tribal cultural systems from a mainstream feminist
point of view allows an otherwise overlooked insight into the
complex interplay of factors that have led to the systematic
loosening of tribal ties, the disruption of tribal cohesion and
complexity, and the growing disequilibrium of cultures that were
anciently based on a belief in balance, relationship, and the
centrality of women, particularly elder women. A feminist