The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

imposed on traditional literary materials and the mechanism by
which that bias has affected contemporary American Indian life,
thought, and culture.
The oral tradition is more than a record of a people’s culture.
It is the creative source of their collective and individual selves.
When that wellspring of identity is tampered with, the sense of
self is also tampered with; and when that tampering includes the
sexist and classist assumptions of the white world within the
body of an Indian tradition, serious consequences necessarily
ensue.
The oral tradition is a living body. It is in continuous flux,
which enables it to accommodate itself to the real circumstances
of a people’s lives. That is its strength, but it is also its
weakness, for when a people finds itself living within a racist,
classist, and sexist reality, the oral tradition will reflect those
values and will thus shape the people’s consciousness to include
and accept racism, classism and sexism, and they will
incorporate that change, hardly noticing the shift. If the oral
tradition is altered in certain subtle, fundamental ways, if
elements alien to it are introduced so that its internal coherence
is disturbed, it becomes the major instrument of colonization and
oppression.
Such alterations have occurred and are still occurring. Those
who translate or “render” narratives make certain crucial
changes, many unconscious. The cultural bias of the translator
inevitably shapes his or her perception of the materials being
translated, often in ways that he or she is unaware of. Culture is
fundamentally a shaper of perception, after all, and perception is
shaped by culture in many subtle ways. In short, it’s hard to see
the forest when you’re a tree. To a great extent, changes in
materials translated from a tribal to a western language are a
result of the vast difference in languages; certain ideas and
concepts that are implicit in the structure of an Indian language